Questions About How Willie Was Fired
Many questions are surfacing in Mets-land now that Willie Randolph has been fired as manager. Here are a few.
- Was it fair to fire Willie? Randolph had little to do with player acquisition. He had no control over injuries. He was simply trying to do his best with the roster that was assembled for him. So shouldn’t the person who assembled the roster have gone first? – No, it’s not fair for Willie to be the fall guy. But it’s rarely fair when the manager gets fired. The way the business works is first you change the players, then you change the manager, then you change the general manager. The first part (changing players) was skipped in this case because the Mets are an older, overpaid team and quality players are hard to come by when that’s what you’re selling. So the organization went straight to step 2 (changing managers). Managers know this when they take the job. Willie knew it too. He knew that there was significant heat on him. He may not have seen it coming last night but he knew that it would come soon.
- Was it cowardly of the Mets to fire him overnight? – This one cracks me up. This question is coming mostly from newspaper reporters. The timing of the firing meant that these guys didn’t get to have their headlines and Willie postmortems in this morning’s edition. They accuse the Mets of purposely timing the firing for a time when the team could minimize the press. What both sides overlooked is that news is now a 24/7 medium. With 24 hour sports and news networks and bloggers all over the world who are not tied into any specific schedule for publishing you have to fight to get your word in and have it sound original. These newspaper beat writers and columnists are upset that amateurs like me will get first crack at this story. So rather than just continue with their lives writing proper stories for their papers websites they chose instead to complain about it and throw accusations at the team. I’m not saying that the move wasn’t timed to cut some writer’s out of the immediate fallout of the firing. But these writers need to behave as professionally as they expect the team to and stop calling this “cowardly” or a “massacre”. If a player complains publicly that a writer wronged him the writers would be all over the guy. Grow up and cut it out. Do what you’re paid to do and stop complaining.
- Was it disrespectful to fire Willie the way they did? – Absolutely. Regardless of what I just said about the writers needing to grow up the fact is that the team handles this poorly. They obviously had planned this firing and didn’t need to wait until the team was on the west coast to do it. They could have fired him after the previous night’s game at Shea. This way Willie would not have had to fly out to the west coast to lose his job, the organization could have faced the music on the move in a more timely manner and the writers would have had their stories in yesterday’s paper. Everybody would have been happy, at least as far as getting it all over with is concerned.
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The mets are the worst franchise in the history of baseball and for the horrific actions against Willie Randolph hopefully they’ll be buried and stay being the classless team that they have shown to be.
THE MUTTS SUCK!