See You Around, Willie

So the Mets finally got around to firing Willie Randolph. On the West Coast. In the middle of the night. I guess they wanted it to be a secret. Could Omar Minaya and the Wilpons have butchered this anymore than they did? Why not fire Randolph after the initial meeting with the team's braintrust (and I use that word loosely) a few weeks ago? Why not last Friday before the Texas series? Jerry Manuel was named interim manager, so it's not like they had to wait for him to arrive. He was sitting right next to Willie the whole time. I wanted to root for Willie. I really did. Sure, he was a Yankee, but he seemed like one of the "good" Yankees. He's classy, nice and treats people with respect. He was the first African-American baseball manager in New York. You can root for that. He even briefly played for the Mets. And most importantly, when I attended the Rob Blomberg Baseball Camp as a kid (no, we didn't just learn how to DH), Willie showed up as a guest one day. And he came to work. He brought his glove and bat and spent the day teaching us the fundamentals. He was down to earth and didn't big league us kids. And at the end of the day, he graciously signed autographs for everybody, only charging a small shipping and handling fee (ok, not really). But right from the beginning of Randolph's tenure with the Mets things didn't seem right. He issued his antiquated no-facial-hair rule, with the exception being mustaches (because he had a mustache). And he bungled his first double switch?maybe he should have went down to the minors and gotten a few years of managing experience after all. On the strategy side, he wasn't exactly Bobby Valentine. His bullpen maneuvering was questionable, and he barely even seemed to have any actual strategy. He was American League all the way. When comparing him to Valentine, how many times did Randolph squeeze over the last three-and-a-half years? Maybe once or twice? Valentine did it about once a week. Did Randolph hit-and-run? Put on any defensive plays? How about the wheel play? The Mets used the double steal often under Randolph but that's about it. Valentine once had a pickoff play designed for when a runner was on second at Shea. If a plane flew overhead when the pitcher was in his set position, the shortstop would break for second and the pitcher would turn and throw. Why wait for a plane? Because the runner can't hear the third-base coach yelling for him to get back. Could you imagine Willie coming up with that? The players never seemed to rally around him either. They just seemed to tolerate him. He wasn't the type of manager a player would run through a wall for. Though most of the current Mets probably wouldn't do that for anybody. Even if Randolph should have been fired, he deserved a better ending than this. They make him get on a plane to California, win a game and then give him the ax at the hotel? They couldn't have fired him in New York? Once again the Mets do everything the wrong way. At least it's over, though, and the team can move on. But hey, Omar, watch your back. You could be next. And you never know when or where it may happen.