INCREDIBLY, we have reached September and the New York manager on the hottest seat is not Joe Torre.
Obviously, Torre is managing for his job this month, needing at minimum the playoffs and maybe a championship to be retained. But Torre’s Yankees have revived in the second half and – even under the worst scenario – he will have thrived and survived in his job far beyond the grandest expectations when he was hired in November 1995.
Willie Randolph, however, has piloted a Mets team that has played apathetically this season. He has no great legacy. He had a first year that was going to be positive simply because he was not Art Howe and he had a magical second year – at least until the NLCS – in which the Mets ran away with the division. But Year 3 is proving problematic.
There have been rumblings of dissatisfaction for Randolph both in the front office and in the clubhouse. Four different major-league sources said Mets upper management has expressed concerns about Randolph both tactically and in failing to get his team to play with consistent passion this year. Two agents with players on the Mets both said their clients have conveyed the sense of a clubhouse that is more consistently second-guessing managerial strategy.
In addition, Randolph has the very modern problem now of being caught in the critical crosshairs on both talk radio and the Internet while also having a prickly relationship with the media that covers the team daily. And he has an ownership that has always been ultra-sensitive to the public/media cacophony.
Nevertheless, while voicing displeasure about the inconsistency of both the play and emotion of his team, Jeff Wilpon said, “Not at all,” when asked if his manager was in trouble. “There have been no conversations at all about Willie Randolph.”
Omar Minaya said, “With all the injuries we have had, Willie has done a very good job. We are very happy to have Willie Randolph as our manager. That (his removal) has not even been a topic of discussion.”
When asked if failing to finish first or failing to make the playoffs could alter Randolph’s status, Minaya said, “I am telling you as the GM I decide these things, and to me Willie has done a good job under difficult situations. I don’t see any reason why we should change the manager.”
Wilpon was not as definitive. Initially he said, “I don’t want to play the guessing game.” But he added later, “Last year we didn’t beat the Cardinals (in the NLCS); did we reassess everything? Yes, we did. We will do the same this year. There will be no difference in how we do things. We will have more to talk about if we lose than if we win, but, regardless, we will re-evaluate. It doesn’t mean wholesale changes or people lose jobs.”
During their history, the Wilpons have tried hard to avoid paying contracts for people who are not working. Randolph is still due $2 million next year and $2.25 million the following season on the three-year, $5.65 million deal he signed last winter. However, upper management was annoyed in the offseason when negotiations were drawn out because Randolph scoffed at the original offer.
But being owed more than $4 million still is a level of protection that Randolph has that Torre does not with his expiring contract. And while a late-season failure almost certainly ends Torre’s Yankee tenure, Randolph is more likely to endure. He has a September in which Pedro Martinez is due back and a season-closing schedule in which 13 of 14 games are against the atrocious Marlins and Nationals, including the last seven at Shea.
However, if he does not clean up the mess in September, Randolph would enter next season on the clock and having suffered the kind of wounds that managers and coaches do not often recover from, especially in New York.
“I’m not going to change now, no matter what people think of me or whatever about me,” Randolph told The Post’s Mike Vaccaro in Atlanta. “If I did that, I’d have no shot at being successful. People will talk because people always talk. But it has nothing to do with me.”
Ultimately, you must understand how precious this season is to the Mets and their ownership. The organization has never won consecutive division titles. The team’s network is just in its second year and the Mets are moving into a new stadium in 2009. There is a financial and emotional mandate to remain elite. Even in the aftermath of being swept four games by the Phillies, in fact, Wilpon had not lowered his 2007 goal of at least getting to the World Series.
“We have had enough down years, we want to keep the progression of doing well and moving forward going,” Wilpon said. “When Omar came in [at the conclusion of the 2004 season], I said we wanted to look back in 10 years and other teams would be saying, ‘We want to be like the Mets.’ You can’t be like that if you win one year, lose the next, win again, and then lose. We need to be consistent.”
Joel Sherman’s e-mail address is joel.sherman@ nypost.com. “Birth of a Dynasty,” his 10-year retrospective examining how the Yankees soared to the 1996 championship, is available in paperback at bookstores and at amazon.com.