Jerry Manuel needs to go.
Let me preface this by saying I will miss him dearly. His post-game sound bites are tremendously amusing. I feel this way because I am a Yankees fan who has to listen to Joe Girardi be his vague self everyday.
Manuel will be missed in that regard, but from a baseball standpoint he will not.
At around 8:30 last night I decided to move on to something else, as the Mets were heading into the 13th inning. I returned to that channel at around 10 PM and found the Mets were still playing in the 18th.
I also found it hilarious that Tony La Russa, the micro-manager he is, used his entire pitching staff and was now putting everyday players on the mound to face major league hitters. But it took me a few batters to realize this because the Mets were swinging at pitches as though they were coming from actual hurlers.
How did Jerry allow this to happen?
When I was a 12-year-old, my Little League had a rule that a kid could not pitch more than one game a week. So, in one of our biggest games we faced a team who had used their best pitcher the game before, and we faced their worst pitcher.
Our coach, who did this for no pay and usually came from his accounting firm, noticed this particular pitcher could not throw a strike. So, in his infinite wisdom, he told us to let him pitch. The kid walked in three runs in one inning.
The point is, if my 12-year-old Little League coach could figure out his opponent couldn't pitch, why couldn't Jerry?
Felipe Lopez and Joe Mather combined for three innings pitched, and they should have thrown less. "Take pitches" should have been Jerry's mantra as soon as Lopez took the mound. You can blame hitting coach Howard Johnson, but he is simply making a suggestion on how to approach each pitcher. In this instance, Manuel has to let everyone know to go up and be patient.
To be fair to Jerry, the Mets did score. But Jerry giveth and Jerry taketh away. After the Mets scratched out the first run of the entire ball game on a bases-loaded sacrifice fly by Jeff Francoeur, K-Rod entered the game after throwing an entire game in the bullpen and surrendered the tying run to Yadier Molina. Him again.
But the Mets again CLAWED back against an outfielder to eke out a run to go up 2-1. Mike Pelfrey came in for the bottom of the 20th and did what he often does: got two easy outs, allowed the next two to reach base, but finally wiggled out of it.
Jerry's reaction: joy. Joy that he snuck out of St. Louis with at least one win (I'm writing this an hour after their 5-3 loss on Sunday night).
But Jerry's joy may have come because he knows he got lucky. He knows that had Luis Castillo not made an oddly perfect tag at second base in the 19th, he might have lost the game. Soon after Castillo's tag, Albert Pujols hit a double, and Ryan Ludwick, who was tagged out, didn't score the tying run. Instead Pujols was the tying run a couple batters later.
How would New York fans and the media react had the Mets lost because they could only get one run off a center fielder? Jerry has to go.
Driving home today from a weekend trip to UConn, I listened to New York sports talk, and the calls the hosts were getting would have made you think the Mets lost last night and Jerry was to blame. Mets fans weren't celebrating a 20th-inning road win against a good team; they breathed a sigh of relief they made it out alive.
Thank you Jerry.
Jerry seems to be the ultimate player's manager. He's cool, funny, and obviously lets his players talk him out of decisions; wasn't he going to bat Jose Reyes third this weekend? Maybe Jerry is just what the Mets players need. After all, they seemed to have had a tough relationship with Willie Randolph.
However, sometimes that doesn't work. I imagine the Willie Randolph Mets circa 2008 were like a company with two bosses—one you find irritating but listen to because you don't want to be unemployed, and the one you go out with after work and make fun of the other boss. Take a guess as to who's who.
Maybe Willie didn't mesh with the team after a while, but he did get them to within one swing of the World Series. Him again. But maybe they needed a change, something different.
Since that change, what has Jerry done? A repeat collapse in 2008? An abysmal, albeit injury riddled, 2009? A 4-8 start in 2010?
I'm not nitpicking about how they don't approach non-pitchers the right way, but it's simply another hole in this team's coaching—and it needs to change.
If Willie had to go, then Jerry has to go.
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