WILLIE Randolph, distrustful of Tony Bernazard, didn’t trust anyone talking to Bernazard within the deposed Mets manager’s eyesight, either. Therefore, Randolph grew leery of Jerry Manuel, who, as the walls closed in last Friday night, was on the field simply having a conversation with the Mets Vice President of Development (of Suspicions).
Now that’s paranoia. And it summed up Randolph’s reign, not that the for-me-or-against-me checklist that Willie meticulously kept was without some justification. This was a manager who had Rick Down, the only member on his staff who was truly Randolph’s guy, taken from him at mid-season a year ago. He was mindlessly replaced by Ricky Henderson, who was not of a mind to do the job of hitting coach or any job at all.
Such change, made strictly for change’s sake, can alter a man’s thinking as to his friends in high places. And Randolph correctly concluded he didn’t really have any.
How was Randolph supposed to feel except defensive, which was his nature even before he joined an organization paranoid of criticism just like he is. A fish almost always stinks from the head, and when the Mets were left flopping on the wharf last September, it became time for Jeff Wilpon to do what Jeff Wilpon always does under the guise of letting baseball persons run the baseball operation: Defer and divide.
Wilpon turned over the task of deciding Randolph’s fate to general manager Omar Minaya, while making clear his creeping negative feelings about Randolph. When the Mets didn’t get the good start Randolph needed to blow away the smell, Minaya knew exactly what he had to do or else put his own job in jeopardy.
Of course knowing what to do didn’t mean Minaya knew how to do it, waiting clumsily until after midnight and a third win in four games to swing an ax that had collateral victims. Wilpon, like Bernazard, believes pitching coach Rick Peterson, who saved Oliver Perez’s career and helped make trade throw-in John Maine a significant middle-of-the-rotation success, is a self-promoter.
So what? As long as Peterson maintained a rapport with his pitchers, the problem with self-promotion would be what, besides his superiors’ own insecurities over who deserved credit?
Randolph, endangered by the collapse, of course, ultimately nailed himself with insane allegations of racism in SNY’s coverage. You don’t rip the network partly owned by the team owner and earn any benefit of the doubt.
In one spectacular act of self-immolation, Randolph unflatteringly and incontestably demonstrated the paranoia he had demonstrated with the media going back to his third-base coaching decisions with the Yankees.
Then again, the insecure man’s first managing job was with an insecure organization, not a good mix from Day One. It also won’t be opportune for his interim successor (how secure should anyone feel with that title?) and it will not be a good thing for Manuel’s successor, either. Or, for that matter Omar Minaya’s.
Generally for an organization to succeed, key decision-makers have to be on the same page. The only same page the Mets have been on is ripped from the pages of Machiavelli’s “The Prince.”