Inside Randolph's firing

Omar Minaya blundered by not firing Willie Randolph in New York. Jeff Gross/Getty Images

NEW YORK -- Unlike a lot of folks here, the Mets' midnight managerial firing isn't continuing to give me the Willies. But suffice it to say, it could have been handled better.

Heck, most people inside the Mets' organization believed Willie Randolph was close to being fired for weeks, so in those weeks they should have been able to devise the best possible firing scenario, not the worst. At the very least, the Mets certainly have found a way to turn an unpopular manager into New York's most sympathetic figure.

Here is a look at four key players in a firing that's been described as the worst-executed execution since another New York icon, Yogi Berra, was beheaded after 16 games in 1985, George Steinbrenner's heyday. (Incidentally, I disagree that Randolph's firing was all-time bad, or anywhere in the realm of the Berra firing; I just think that it could have been done quicker and easier.):

Omar Minaya, general manager. Minaya seemed to be reading from talking points at the press conference to announce the managerial change, as the New York Post's Joel Sherman pointed out. But if Minaya wasn't, at the very least, he came off as less than certain of himself. It didn't help that he had that Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim backdrop to spin his firing story.

Minaya seemed especially excited when a writer asked him about "leaks'' that Randolph was in trouble, and he welcomed the suggestion that that was the big problem. The reality is that Minaya delayed the ultimate decision on Randolph for weeks after just about every other decisionmaker in the organization felt a change needed to be made. Under those conditions, with Randolph hanging by a thread for weeks, something was bound to surface. Minaya, not exactly new to the New York rodeo, shouldn't have expected anything else.

When two stories painting Randolph's situation as dire appeared on the Internet on June 13, rather than disappear or offer a lukewarm message, as he should have done, Minaya sat in the dugout in Shea Stadium to tell us all that Randolph "has the support of ownership and myself.'' Four days later, after three victories and a defeat, that supposed support was somehow gone, and so was Randolph.

There's no way to look at Minaya's statement of blanket support now as anything remotely close to the truth. Then a few days later at the press conference, Minaya was asking us to accept as "facts'' that he was telling us at that podium in Anaheim. But his previous false proclamation of support made that difficult.

I do believe Minaya when he claimed to have had the ultimate call, although I might suggest that he was merely the last holdout. By the time he finally did the deed, he understood that Randolph's support had collapsed everywhere else in the organization, and Minaya would have been drawing a target on his own back to stick with Randolph for the remainder of this season. Minaya is no fool, and he understood as much.

Randolph sensed that he was in big trouble even after beating the Rangers two out of three on his last weekend as Mets manager, and asked Minaya to level with him and not make him ride the plane to California if he was about to be fired. While Minaya's press-conference version is that he told Randolph some things he didn't like in that weekend series, whatever else he said obviously reassured Randolph enough to get on the plane and caused him to be shocked to be fired back at the Westin South Coast Plaza.

I do believe Minaya's delay was related to his deep desire to make it work, and as he said, to further the story of the kid from Queens and the kid from Brooklyn doing it together. But the other part of the delay was caused by Minaya's and the organization's obsession that the absolute final decision not leak out a minute before Minaya got to Randolph. It's fine that he wanted to tell him "face to face,'' as he said, even preferable. But it would have been better to tell him face to face back in New York. The organization was apparently working out a secretive way to transport the coaches who were to be promoted from Triple A while Randolph boarded the plane to his demise. Next time, maybe they'll understand that secretive isn't always better.