I would like to congratulate New Yorkers, Mets fans, and fans of baseball in general for our reward today, Oct. 4th.
The sport of baseball will forever be better off without Omar Minaya running the Mets.
It is going to be difficult to hire a general manager who will want to deal with Fred and Jeff Wilpon and the mess that is the New York Mets.
The organization needs a complete overhaul, the farm system is almost non-existent, and there is a lot of money on the books for poor, injury-prone players.
2011 will once again be a lost year.
The new general manager will have a lot of work to do. The Mets need to find somebody that is willing to put in a lot of work and may want to go with someone younger to inject life into this dying franchise.
J.P. Ricciardi, the former Blue Jays GM, is someone the Mets should look into.
Ricciardi has experience taking slumping teams and helping turn them around. In Toronto, he assembled one of the better pitching staffs in the league, a staff the Mets could only dream of.
The Toronto staff repeatedly finds success despite playing in a division with three of the best hitting teams in the Majors. Ricciardi has an eye for talent. He would be able to fill out the Mets farm system better than most.
If Kevin Towers is fired in Arizona he would be another top candidate. Although I don’t condone the Dan Haren trade, as he is still one of the best pitchers in baseball, Towers at least made moves to try to jump-start the organization.
This is exactly what the Mets need; somebody who is willing to come in and put in the time and effort to make moves to better the organization. For a team with no direction, Towers could at least put them on the right path.
The Mets could attempt to lure Bobby Valentine in the role. Valentine is a widely respected baseball mind. Although there have been rumors in the past few months that teams were trying to get him to manage, perhaps he would be willing to come in and turn the organization around in a bigger way.
If they could get Joe Torre on board, this duo would make a lot of positive noise for New York. Any combination of the duo working together to better the organization would be a plus. With success as a manager, Torre could put his knowledge to work behind the scenes.
The Wilpons have displayed poor decision-making over the past few years. The biggest was obviously keeping Minaya on board for too long. I wouldn’t even put it past them to give Jeff a shot at the job since they already have so much input. Thankfully, this is not likely at all, though it would be interestingly funny.
There have been rumors recently that former Indians and Rangers GM John Hart is a leading candidate to take the job.
Hart had a great deal of success with the Indians, so at least he would provide fans with an optimistic outlook. It’s always a positive when a team can bring in a general manager who assembled a World Series team. Hart may very well be the best candidate for the job.
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