The way I’ve always figured things, if it was a good idea for major league managers to start screaming and playing the fool every time things went south for their team, major league baseball teams would start hiring really far-gone crackheads, who in my experience are always willing to hoot and holler at the least provocation. Since no general manager has ever been seen soliciting résumés on the Q train, it seems that they have accepted what should be obvious to everyone: Yelling at grown men is stupid and counterproductive.

Some of the most successful managers in history have, of course, been lunatics. Leo Durocher managed to nearly get into a fistfight with Ron Santo. Billy Martin had to be restrained from throttling Reggie Jackson during a nationally televised game. John McGraw incited riots, etc. The relevant point here, though, is not that acting like a sociopath is a good idea, but that if you’re going to act like a sociopath, it helps to be a baseball genius. If you’re as good at managing baseball games as John McGraw, by all means feel free to sock your catcher in the face, call him names in the papers, or goad enemy fans into throwing bricks at you. If not, you probably ought to behave like the vast majority of successful managers have, and treat your players like men.

Because all of this is self-evident, the mass outcry for Willie Randolph to do something, anything to light a fire under his Mets makes no sense. In the abstract, the complaints are reasonable. The Mets entered last night’s game with a 49–48 record since June 1, and seemed to be trying their darndest to choke away their division lead and complete one of the worst collapses in baseball history. Idiotic base-running plays, ill-advised arguments with umpires, errors a Little Leaguer wouldn’t make; you name it, the Mets have done it, and Randolph’s seemingly complete dispassion about all of it is raising a furor. Even the anonymice are coming out: One Met told MLB.comthat “I know Willie cares a lot, but he’s not showing it much.”

Move into the realm of specifics, though, and it’s not clear exactly what Randolph should do to prove that he cares that his team is playing like a bunch of whipped dogs. Should he throw a telephone at a reporter? Berate his players in private locker-room meetings? Call out individual players? Challenge one of them to a fistfight? He could, I suppose, but none of these things ever work. If a team isn’t playing with passion, some old man yelling at them isn’t going to change that deeply-rooted problem, and if a team is just playing poorly, it’s hard to tell what the point of the old man letting them know he’s noticed might be. Are we to suppose that various Mets would, in the middle of being hollered at, realize that it would be better for them to play well than to not play well, and then go out and play winning ball?

At best, a manager throwing a hissy fit gets retroactive credit for a turnaround that would have happened anyway; at worst, he throws a tantrum, nothing changes, and he’s exposed as a powerless clod. Even a less extreme measure, such as saying, “I don’t like the fact that our team is doing its best impression of the 1964 Phillies,” would be ridiculous. Does anyone actually think that Randolph enjoys watching his team play badly and lose ball games?

The problem with Randolph isn’t that he isn’t acting like some idiotic football coach and publicly degrading his players or kicking dirt on umpires for the benefit of a justifiably angry public and to show that he cares about winning, it’s that he’s doing specific things badly. Even a far-gone crackhead wouldn’t keep turning to Guillermo Mota and Scott Schoeneweis in tight spots, to cite just the most egregious example. But more to the point, the problem with the Mets has little to do with the manager. When a team competing for the best record in the league commits 10 errors in two games, that’s either exhaustion, ineptitude, or outright unprofessionalism. Nothing a manager can do in late September can fix any of those problems.

I understand why sensible fans would love to see Randolph break something or do anything to show he cares as much as they do. But the best way for a manager to show he cares is to help fix the problem. Sit tired players for a game or two; stop using bad pitchers, and don’t panic and put more pressure on players who are already feeling more than enough. Randolph at least has the last part of this equation right. Criticism of the man ought to focus on the other, more important parts.

tmarchman@nysun.com