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Matthews: Thank Wilpon's kid for another mess

Wallace Matthews

June 18, 2008

The Mets somehow managed to botch June 2008 even worse than they had fouled up September 2007, and now here was Omar Minaya, a good man and a bad liar, trying like hell to deflect the shots headed for his boss.

"I decided to hire Willie. My decision," he said. "And I decided to fire Willie. It was my decision. MY decision."

Every time he said the word "my," he said it in capital letters, boldface, underlined and in italics, just to make sure no one missed the point.

It was his decision. No one else's. Jeff Who?

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That is what constitutes being a good general manager around here, taking the bullets for the boss until the day the boss steps out of the shadows and puts one in you.

Minaya knows this, having seen Steve Phillips pull the same routine eight years ago, squirming uncomfortably while painting Alex Rodriguez as a "24-and-1 guy" to cover up the truth: that his boss, Fred Wilpon, didn't want to spend the money.

We know how well that worked out for Phillips and we know how it will eventually work out for Minaya. But like a good Wilpon GM, he rolled with the punches flying at his boss, who happens to be Fred's kid.

He described his farewell to Willie Randolph as "just a kid from Brooklyn communicating with a kid from Queens, just straight one-on-one," but you can bet the talk was anything but straight and the poor kid from Queens was being fed his lines by the rich kid from Connecticut, who was finally getting what he wanted.

After all, for Jeff Wilpon, the Mets' cuckoo COO, time was running out.

His team had just beaten the Angels, 9-6, their third win in four games. Mike Pelfrey had pitched well again. Plus, Pedro Martinez has shown signs of coming around, Carlos Beltran was finally hitting, Jose Reyes was creating havoc on the basepaths, and David Wright was pulling out of his slump.

If he didn't nip this in the bud now, the Mets might make a run and he'd never get to do what he has been aching to do since October 2006. Jeff Wilpon would never get to can the manager.

There really is no other explanation for the timing of Randolph's firing, since the only thing that changed from Sunday night, when the Mets allowed him to board the team flight to Anaheim, and Tuesday morning, when they sent him home, was that the Mets had won another game.

And wasn't that what it was supposed to be all about? Winning ballgames?

Randolph thought so, but obviously not. As a source closely connected to the heated infighting over Randolph's future told me on Monday, "Jeff has been remorseless in his desire to get rid of Willie."

That desire went back to the 2006 NLCS, after which Wilpon looked back at the series - Billy Wagner blowing a key save, Aaron Heilman giving up a game-winning home run in Game 7 and Beltran staring at a season-ending 3-2 curveball with the bases loaded - and determined that Willie Randolph was the problem.

"[Jeff] is a reactive young man," the source said. "He thinks he is the baseball expert, and he decided that Willie was not the guy to lead this club."

Hey, why not? Twenty-five years ago, he almost made it through a whole season of Class-A ball in the Expos organization. And, oh yeah, he's the owner's kid.

He's also the source of most of the leaks to the media recently that the manager was on thin ice, which rendered somewhat laughable Minaya's contention that questions about Randolph's job status were becoming too much of a distraction for his continued employment.

"It wasn't fair to the team, it wasn't fair to Willie, it wasn't fair to the organization to have this hanging over our heads," he said.

Realizing a GM can't fire the owner's kid, only vice versa, Minaya took the only possible action: He whacked the manager. He said he didn't want to, which may have been his only true statement of the day.

Because if he had really wanted to fire Randolph, Minaya could have done it last October, no questions asked. But he didn't want to, and since Randolph still had the support of Fred Wilpon, he didn't have to. But 18 months of constant nagging from Jeff finally wore down the old man's resolve. The kid won.

Consequently, the Mets turned an easy firing into the front-office equivalent of blowing a seven-game lead in September. Under Jeff Wilpon's expert guidance, the Mets made the Yankees' divorce from Joe Torre look like a family retirement party.

Now, they hand the whole mess over to Jerry Manuel, who seems like a nice enough guy but obviously the wrong choice. Still out there is Gary Carter, who seems like a perfect fit: a confirmed backstabber and schemer who campaigned publicly for Randolph's job last month while he was still the manager.

How Jeff Wilpon missed out on a soul mate like that is almost as baffling as the firing of Willie Randolph.