Mils, I agree with you that managers can often get too much blame or too much credit. However, you mentioned assembling a team on a fixed budget. The Mets hardly have a fixed budget. Their payroll this year is $140 mil, one of the highest in baseball. We all know that my Braves won division championships with $80 million dollar payrolls. While the Braves have been in the doldrums the last three years, the likes of Maddux, Glavine, Millwood, JD Drew, Sheffield, et al, left town, and the Braves won division titles from 2003 to 2005 with a changing cast of characters.
I would say that the Mets problems are hardly all Willie's fault, because he cant pitch, hit, or field for them. However, his penchant for not displaying emotion during games, may well have contributed to his firing. Granted, Joe Torre doesnt often display a lot of emotion either, and has mellowed over time. Torre had the luxury of going to the playoffs twelve straight years with the Yankees, to offset this.
A good friend of mine in r/l who is very knowledgable about baseball says that he wouldnt have fired Wille, because of the fact that Willie can't hit, pitch or field for them. I feel a bit differently. I think this has probably been coming since the end of last season, and what happened then. If the Mets had been, say, close to first place, and playing well, or only a couple of games out, and run off some hot streaks, then his firing would have been not justifed. The combination of the end of last season, and how the Mets have played this year, and their position in the standings, contributed to this move, and I think, was justified.
Do I think this move will help the Mets win the division or the wild card? I dont know. We all know that the Mets fired Davey Johnson a bit earlier in the season than this in 1990, and the team took off under Bud Harrleson, playing twenty two games over 500 the rest of the year, to nearly win the NL East title. The current Mets team has a lot of talent. They have the potential to win the NL East, or, if not that, then certainly the wild card.
It will be interesting to see if this change helps the Mets. I think they will probably run off some kind of a hot streak in the near future. Teams often do that after a managerial change. Whether that will be enough to carry them to a wild card or division title in the remaining 100 games remains to be seen.
Mitch
One other note: I do think that the timing of this firing was in poor taste by the Mets. The team had Willie travel 3,000 miles from New York to L.A. He wins that night's game, and then gets fired at three in the morning, NY time, and the team sends notice of the firing in an e-mail to the media. That, I think, was very poorly handled. Were I the Mets, I would have either fired him on Sunday while the team was still in New York, or waited until this road trip had either progressed, or was over, and if the Mets didnt play better, let him go then. Why make a guy take a cross country trip, win a ballgame, and then fire him after a win? Tnat to me makes no sense.
On the message boards of several New York papers, there are callings for the firing of Mets GM Omar Minaya. He is the guy who put this team together. I suppose the Mets had to start with on field changes first, but, it seems to me that if they dont turn this around, Minaya should be shown the door as well.
