cleaning house

Omar Minaya and Jerry Manuel have been fired by the Mets. It didn't take long for the Wilpons to make the move, just a day after the conclusion of the regular season, but it's been expected for a long time. The writing was on the wall when the team began to falter at the All-Star break back in July. I don't blame Manuel much for the failures of the last three years. A manager is not a magician, and you can't win if there's not enough talent on the roster or if the talent you have is constantly on the DL. Manuel was an OK strategist. Nothing great. Pretty vanilla, really. I get the impression that he's an ok guy and that most of the players liked him, but these are not necessarily traits that qualify somebody to be a big-league manager. Not that Manuel's not qualified. He had some success managing the White Sox in the past. In any case, Omar Minaya is much more responsible for the team's losing ways than Jerry Mnauel. He gave too many hefty contracts to too many guys who didn't perform. He seems to have a hardon for over-the-hill Latin players who break down at the end of their backloaded contracts. I'm thinking in particular of Luis Castillo and Carlos Delgado. I don't fault Minaya for the Carlos Beltran contract. When Beltran has been healthy he's been a five-tool player. It remains to be seen whether he can come back next year and still be productive. Minaya's spendthrift ways will hamstring the Mets next year with Johan Santana, Carlos Beltran, Luis Castillo and Oliver Perez still on the books. One of Minaya's biggest failures, in my opinion, is his notion that New York fans will not tolerate a rebuilding phase. It seems he thinks that all New York fans have the Yankee mentality, which is not true. Met fans are a different breed. We'll accept rebuilding as a natural and cyclical part of the game if there appears to be a long-term game plan for winning. I would love to see the Mets go young next year and begin to rebuild for 2012 and beyond. By then, a lot of the bad Minaya contracts will be gone, and the new guy can make some strategic free agent signings that would help them be a pennant contender by the middle of the decade. A Yankee GM can't do this type of rebuilding thing, true enough, but we're Met fans in large part because we don't wanna be the Yankees. Here's hoping that the Wilpons will hire good people with some vision. I won't hold my breath because I don't think those guys are very smart. But as the players like to say when they're interviewed, "let's just see what happens..."