MLB

WILLIE GO?

THREE of the most critical questions facing the men who run the Mets, beginning today, are these:

Do you want Willie Randolph to manage this team? Do you think he’s capable of managing this team? Do you believe the players who so clearly quit on him for staggering spasms of this season – players the Mets intend to bring back – can find it in their hearts to play hard for him again?

These are issues that must be dealt with seriously, and completely. They cannot be answered solely through the prism of the $4 million the Mets owe him across the next two years. They cannot be answered with fingers crossed and breath held deep. Either you think he is the man for the job or you must go find who that person is. You cannot let him audition for his job over the first 30 games of next season.

The stakes are too high now. There is a new ballpark rising on the other side of the Shea Stadium outfield. There is a roster that will surely be tweaked, but whose core still features a lot of aging, must-win-now players whose window of opportunity will be ever narrower next year.

I don’t believe Randolph should pay for this baseball calamity with his job. But the men who run the Mets are the ones who need to come to that conclusion or the opposite one, the one that ends with a press conference and a pink slip.

There can be no wait-and-see. The Mets have gained ground in New York’s competitive baseball market, but that battleground is ever-tenuous. They need confidence in their manager. Whoever that manager is going to be.

Randolph likes to remind you constantly that he’s been around the block a couple of times, that he didn’t fall off a turnip truck. He has seen a thing or three in baseball, been through everything you can go through, grew up in Brooklyn, played baseball in New York, coached here, managed here.

“I’m a big boy,” Randolph said yesterday, the words echoing from the rock-bottom canyon of his professional life, maybe 25 minutes after the humiliating 8-1 loss that extinguished the Mets’ season. “I know how things work. I know that I’m accountable for my job.”

There are a few other things Randolph must also know, starting right now. He is not bulletproof, not after only three years on the job. If he is not the sole culprit for the two-week free-fall that sabotaged the Mets’ season, he is the most visible one, the alleged “player’s manager” who could never negotiate a way through the woods for these players he’s entrusted to manage.

Most of all, he should know this: Despite repeated attempts yesterday to get a vote of confidence out of Omar Minaya, the Mets’ GM never gave him one. Minaya never once said, “Willie will manage this baseball team in 2008. End of discussion.” He never once dismissed the notion this epic collapse would claim Randolph as its highest-profile victim.

Instead, he spoke about Willie’s credentials: “You have to judge him on three years, not on one.” He spoke about how he will evaluate Willie’s future: “I will sit down with ownership and discuss everything about this team.”

He spoke highly of the men who comprise the roster – “We have very good nucleus,” he said – and seemed reluctant to wrap it in TNT, which automatically indicts the man who has run it and calls into immediate question his ability to do so again.

“We just weren’t able to close this out,” Minaya said.

He didn’t lay the blame at Randolph’s feet. Nobody has. Nobody likely will. David Wright said, “Putting this on Willie is unfair. I have his back. I’ll go to war with Willie any day.”

Generals lose battles. Managers lose critical ballgames. Joe Torre didn’t get fired in 2004 because the Yankees lost their 3-0 lead to the Red Sox, and Don Zimmer didn’t get fired in 1978 after blowing a 14-game lead, and Gene Mauch didn’t get fired in 1964 after blowing that 6 1/2-game lead with 12 to play, and Chuck Dressen didn’t get fired in 1951 after the Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff.

But it may be worth pointing this out, too: None of those men won a championship with those clubs afterward, either. Torre may reverse that trend; Willie, too, if given the chance. Will he? The Mets have to make that call now, and they have to make it quick, and they have to make it firm.

And they’d better be right.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com