Those Mets

TO FIRE OR NOT TO FIRE

It was in this city nestled, appropriately enough, in the Rocky Mountains, that Bobby Valentine, then the manager of the Mets, had an epic, emotional outburst in his office at the end of a 12-game losing streak in a deteriorating 2002 season. Reacting to widespread speculation that he was trying to get himself fired, Valentine gave an unsolicited, impassioned defense of his actions during a postgame news conference and nearly broke down doing so. The outburst came on the night of Aug. 23, and the Mets had a 58-69 record at the time. Valentine kept his job, but only for six more weeks. When the season ended, with the Mets in last place, Valentine was gone, just two years after he took the team to the World Series. Eight years later, Mets Manager Jerry Manuel will be back in that same office Tuesday, perhaps facing questions about his own future, particularly after providing an unsolicited, and revealing, mea culpa on Sunday afternoon after his team was shut down and embarrassed by the aging and unimposing Livan Hernandez of the Washington Nationals. Critical baseball games do not usually exist in early April, but Sunday’s 5-2 loss seems to have taken on an afterlife that speaks to Manuel’s lack of job security as he tries to turn around a Mets team that had a miserable 2009 season filled with injuries and poor play. After Sunday’s game, Manuel took aim at the final pitching line against the soft-tossing Hernandez, who, after all, pitched for the Mets in 2009 and was not good enough to stick with the team the whole season. On Sunday, Hernandez’s line read seven innings, five hits, three walks, no runs. “We appeared unprepared,” Manuel said. “I take responsibility.” Manuel may have been trying to protect his players, who did little to help his cause over the first six games. Or perhaps he was being cagey, letting it be known that the players had not followed the game plan the coaching staff had laid out against Hernandez. Still, a manager rarely, if ever, uses the word “unprepared,” even someone like Manuel, who is generally uninhibited in his remarks to reporters. In this instance, he was either being startlingly honest or perhaps revealing some of the pressure he feels as a manager operating on a one-year contract and a lukewarm endorsement from the team’s chief operating officer, Jeff Wilpon. It was Wilpon, in remarks at the end of last season, who said that Manuel and General Manager Omar Minaya were under orders to show improvement in 2010, or face dismissal. One week, and six games, into the 2010 season, that improvement has yet to show itself. John Maine and Oliver Perez have each pitched once, and each looked no more effective than they did in spring training or last season. They make up two-fifths of the starting rotation. The team has no left-handed power except for Mike Jacobs, who batted cleanup for part of the first week, even though he is a backup player who was fortunate to make the roster. After six games, he is batting all of .133 and is already being booed. He will be presumably be pushed aside when Daniel Murphy returns from rehabilitating his twisted knee and reclaims the first-base job, but Murphy, although also left-handed, does not hit with much power. Carlos Beltran does, but he is still rehabilitating his surgically repaired knee, and no one on the Mets, including Manuel, knows when he is coming back. All Manuel does know is that his team had Jose Reyes back leading off on Sunday and that Washington was playing without its best player, third baseman Ryan Zimmerman, and that the Nationals won easily, anyway. And that his right fielder, Jeff Francouer, spoke of the team going through the motions against Hernandez. Manuel is usually poised in defeat and unlikely to ever have an outburst the way the more emotional Valentine did. Still, if the losses mount, he may quickly become a former Mets manager, the way Valentine did eight years ago. (NY Times)