ATLANTA — The owner of the Mets was fresh off an airplane, choosing to catch up with his baseball team rather than tend to other business in New York. He was fresh out of a 90-minute, closed-door meeting with his manager, his GM, his assistant GM, and a handful of coaches, and had a simple message he wanted to deliver.
“I didn’t come here to fire anybody, guys,” Jeff Wilpon said.
Which begs a bigger question:
Why, exactly, was he here? Why, exactly, had he opted to have this very conspicuous sit-down in full view of his players, the media, and anyone else with a clubhouse badge for Turner Field? Such business could easily have been conducted back at the hotel, out of sightlines, in private — and surely Wilpon would be more comfortable with, given how little he enjoys to talk about baseball matters on the record.
So, again: Why was he here?
“Jerry and Omar know what’s expected of them,” Wilpon said, referring to his manager and his general manager as the single entity — “Jerryandomar” — that they’ve become and will remain,
“I wouldn’t be here if I felt good about the way we were going,” Wilpon said before settling in for the Mets’ white-knuckler of a 3-2 win over the Braves, snapping their losing streak at five and lifting them ever so carefully out of the NL East basement.
More likely, Wilpon enjoyed the imagery of the act, dropping everything and marching into Atlanta like William Tecumseh Sherman, leaving his steed in the parking lot to symbolically save the day. There is precedent for this. Eleven months ago, the Yankees were mired in mud, five full games behind the Red Sox, looking flat and beaten.
Then Brian Cashman showed up at this very same venue. He didn’t do anything rash. He did have a closed-door session with Joe Girardi but said bluntly that he wasn’t in town threatening to dynamite the foundation.
“The answers,” Cashman said that day, “are already here.”
And maybe it was a coincidence and maybe it wasn’t, but from that day forward the Yankees won seven in a row and 10 of 11, and on that 11th day they moved into first place for the first time in a month. As blueprints go, it isn’t a bad one to steal.
Assuming the answers really are already in place in this clubhouse.
It was splendid timing, of course, since Wilpon arrived just as the Mets were throwing their Mike Pelfrey and Johan Santana at the Braves. Maybe that was coincidence, too.
“We played very good baseball and we got some great pitching from Mike,” Manuel would say. “And that’s a great plan.”
But these 2010 Mets are not the 2009 Yankees. There are question marks all over the clubhouse, and if you can’t quite hear the calliope grinding out circus music, it’s never terribly far in the distance.
Manuel was his usually gregarious self before the game, joking as he walked toward the meeting that “I still have my uniform on,” a reference to something he said the day he was hired, that a man never gets fired as long as he keeps his dress grays on. Of course, then he had to knock on the door of his own office — he’d been accidentally locked out.
And all across the 90 minutes of the meeting, as players whispered and pointed at the door, there was a double feature playing on the clubhouse television: the last 20 or so minutes of “The Departed” followed by the first hour or so of “No Country for Old Men.”
By one unofficial count, the body count from both movies topped 20, in all manner of shootings, stabbings and bludgeonings.
It was some eerily appropriate, if thoroughly unsettling, programming.
“We talked baseball,” Wilpon said. “You’ll have to ask Jerry and Omar about that.”
Manuel seemed himself. “I haven’t been concerned about my status,” he said with a chuckle. “Maybe I should be.”
Minaya chose not to share his thoughts. Which was probably just as well. As good as this all turned out, Wilpon might soon be spending more time on the road than Jerry Garcia ever did.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com