Mets Finally Take Worthwhile Chance

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The New York Sun

For the past 10 years, Willie Randolph has been stuck in a classic Catch-22. He had never been a major league manager because no one would hire him. And no one would hire him because, well, he had never been a major league manager.


Until now. The Mets hired Willie Randolph on Wednesday night, introduced him yesterday to a town that had known him for 30 years already, and will put him to work as the eighteenth manager in their history starting this morning.


Soon, we will know if Willie Randolph can manage, and if a half dozen other major league teams, the post-Bobby Valentine Mets included, made a terrible mistake by passing him over the last time he was given a look.


“In my heart, I know I’m going to be a good manager,” Randolph said yesterday. I have confidence in myself. I’ve always had confidence in my ability to lead men. I can’t wait to roll up my sleeves and go to work.”


It may turn out that Willie Randolph is not up to the job, that he reached his peak as Joe Torre’s bench coach this past season, that his decision to remain in the major leagues as a coach rather than to learn the craft of managing at a lower level was a self-inflicted setback he could not overcome, or that his perceived sensitivity to criticism turns out to be his very real downfall in the pressure-cooker that is New York City baseball.


But he deserved the chance to try, even the chance to fail. Randolph’s first managerial job is long overdue, the delay nearly impossible to justify.


At one time, the same lack of experience rap could have been applied to Tony LaRussa and Lou Piniella and Jim Leyland and Buck Showalter and even Torre, who for the last nine seasons has been Randolph’s immediate supervisor as manager of the Yankees.


All of them got jobs a lot quicker than did Willie Randolph, who gets his first chance to run a major league baseball team at age 50; he will turn 51 on July 6. By that point in his first season as Mets manager, the notoriously fickle and quick-to-react New York fan base might very well either have embraced Randolph as a savior, or rejected him as an Embedded Yankee, sent down from the Bronx to sabotage the hapless Mets.


Why did it take so long for Willie Randolph, Brownsville born and bred, to finally get his shot? In the 12 years since Randolph retired as a player – for the Mets, coincidentally-the team he will now manage has employed Jeff Torborg, Dallas Green, Bobby Valentine and the recently departed, but not missed, Art Howe, who will be paid $2.4 million not to manage this year, or more than Randolph will be paid for the next three years.


The first two and the last one were unmitigated failures. Valentine, who took the Mets to the 2000 World Series against Torre’s Yankees, was a mitigated failure. The argument can be made that when the Mets hired Torborg and Green, Randolph was not yet ready, and when they hired Valentine, they got the better man.


But why they passed over Randolph two years ago in favor of the moribund Howe remains a baseball mystery along the lines of whether or not the Babe really called his shot.


In the memorable words of owner Fred Wilpon, Howe “lit up the room” during his interview, leading most of the reporters who got to see Howe on a daily basis to wonder if the candidate had, in fact, set fire to Wilpon’s office.


Word was that Randolph “didn’t interview well,” whatever that means, and Randolph has told intimates that at the time, he considered his Mets interview a “token” affair – a sop to the baseball requirement that any team seeking a manager interview at least two minority candidates – and thus did not fully prepare as he would for the real thing.


But Randolph’s failure to land the Mets job just added to a string of jobs he didn’t get, a list that was growing at a pace comparable to the growth of Barry Bonds’s cranium. Every time it happened, people – even those who respected Randolph highly as a player and an individual – had to wonder, “What is it about Willie?”


Why couldn’t he land jobs that in recent years had been handed to guys straight out of the broadcast booth, straight off the farm, straight out of the starting lineup? Willie had paid his dues. Why wasn’t he getting anything back?


Plenty of theories were floated. Too thin-skinned, some said. Too hot-headed. Too black? Incredible as it may seem, Randolph is the first man of color ever to manage a baseball team in the Big Apple. Was the problem not with Randolph, but with the men who would – or more correctly, would not – hire him?


Thankfully, those questions have finally been laid to rest.


Other, tougher questions lay ahead, such as: can anyone lead this motley collection of the young, the old, the overpaid, and the under motivated to success?


Said Randolph, “All I can tell you is if you have the horses, then obviously the manager will look like a genius.


We don’t know yet if Willie Randolph is a genius, or even a major-league manager. But then, we didn’t know for sure whether Joe Torre could manage until 1996, after 15 seasons of managing three other teams with little success.


Torre kept getting chance after chance until he finally got it right.


Now, at long last, Willie Randolph gets his first chance. Maybe this time, it’s the Mets who have finally gotten it right.



Wallace Matthews is the host of the “Wally and the Keeg” sports talk show heard Monday-Friday from 4-7 p.m. on 1050 ESPN radio.


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