Fighting With Your Family

I lied, I'm not going to write about Joe Torre. The one-week window for writing about current events has come and gone, and I've been far too lazy on my off-season, pre-hot stove blogging schedule to put something up about a story I really don't care about all that much.

I will say this: imagine you have this job, right, where even though you've been given all the tools to be good at it, you've still had nothing but success. Even while you've had such unchecked success, your boss won't stop looking over your shoulder, criticizing you at nearly everything that resembles a wrong turn. Even though your boss is a jerk, you still continue to be successful. When it comes time to renew your contract, though, you're offered less money.

If the Yankees wanted to fire Joe Torre, they should have just come out and done it. On the classiness meter, what the Yankees did do was kind of like the old "it's not you, it's me" excuse for breaking up with someone. You're too afraid to be straightforward, so you employ some backhanded method that still achieves your ultimate goal. Brilliant!


But like I said, I don't really care about Torre. As long as he stays away from the Mets, and as long as Mets fans stop suggesting that the Mets bring him to Queens along with Jorge Posada to catch, Andy Pettite for the starting rotation, and Mariano Rivera to turn 37, 38, 39, and 40 while blowing more and more saves over the length of the 4 yrs. and 40 million it would take to get him.

From Marty Noble's weekly mailbag on mets.com:

Just so happens that a general manager candidate has become available. He's a winner and is well respected; he knows the Mets manager, works well under pressure and he probably would be able to add a left-handed starting pitcher, a switch-hitting catcher and a closer. Is Joe Torre's future with the Mets? Would adding him and at least three players with 12 rings help the Mets?
-- Frank S., Queens Villge, N.Y.

I used to feel like Marty Noble was disrespectful to the people who submitted questions to his mailbag. To be honest, he's always come off as a smug jackass who, while admittedly a very good and engaging writer, can't stop shoving his knowledge of the Mets down your throat. It's in this case, though, that I wish he would be more like the smug jackass and less like whatever kind of writer gives stupid questions anything more than stupid answers.


Margaret from Jackson, NJ, sent in this query:

What's your opinion -- Torre for the Mets' general manager? Maybe with him there Willie Randolph will be allowed to manage the team.

Whaho, that's clever Margaret! Throw in a jab about how Omar is overbearing because he feels like he should have a say in choosing coaches, while also proposing the brilliant idea of bringing in over-the-hill Yankees and their old ex-managers to solve our problems and reinforce our already deep New York inferiority complex.

I say "Fighting With Your Family" because it's so disappointing to read this crap coming out of the mouths (off the fingers?) of fellow Mets fans. Maybe the internet is ultimately a bad thing, at least for sports fans, because by reading stuff like this we're torn apart by each other's unpleasantly surprising stupidity, where in the good old days we'd just go to the ballpark, cheer, and be blissfully ignorant of how dumb significant chunks of each of our team's fanbases can be. Last week Juan G sent this in...

Don't you think that Omar Minaya is the person primarily responsible for the Mets collapse? He was told last year that he needed to improve the pitching. Instead of going after some big-name pitchers, he said that he was not going to do that. Then, he still did nothing when the July trade deadline came and went. What was the result of his not doing anything about the pitching? One of the most disastrous collapses in Major League history. Don't you believe that he is primarily responsible?

...which isn't stupid, so much as just completely ignorant. Big-name pitchers like Barry Zito, right? Who Minaya went after, hard, but didn't offer $127 million over 7 years to because he's really not that good. Maybe Barry's 11-13, 4.53 line this year could have stopped the collapse. Or maybe we should have gotten Gagne at the deadline? Because Eric Gagne, the Canadian version of Guillermo Mota, wouldn't have sucked as much as everyone else in the bullpen - curious that for the most part he's been conspicuously absent from Boston's postseason bullpen mix - and wouldn't have cost us two or more of our four prospects/young players who are worth anything right now (Milledge, Pelfrey, Humber, Gomez).

Criticize Omar for trading Heath Bell, or Matt Lindstrom, or whatever. Not without their appropriate reasoning at the time, but still moves that didn't pan out. But dammit I'm sick of this "didn't get a big name" crap. The pitching market last Winter said Jeff Suppan was a big name, but Omar stayed away because he's not an idiot. And questionable bullpen moves last offseason aside, the team that Omar Minaya put on the field this year should have won 92-95 games and gone back to the playoffs as two-time NL East champs. The majority of the screwing up was done in the dugout, on the field, but certainly not in the front office.

I'm not the first Mets blogger to write about the mailbag. And there's probably someone out there who thinks I'm dumb, along with "the Sip." (Big shouts to Yankees2000, my favorite Mets blog out there) But it's just so infuriating when members of your family say stupid things.

Are the winter meetings here yet?

(Photos courtesy newsday.com, sny.tv)