Mets Gaining Reputation As Not-So- Lovable Losers
Murphy's Law: Anything than can go wrong, will.
When I search "New York Mets" these days on the internet, I see a whopping increase in stories outlining the inexplicable ineptitude of New York's second best baseball club.
I also see a glut of blogs and websites dedicated to lamenting on the travels and travails of this comically dysfunctional organization. It's unreal the amount of effort that is going into these things.
I thought I was the king of Met negativity, but these sites make me look like Cow Bell Man.
Check these out:
MetsFail, MetsPolice, OhMurph, Metstradamus, Archie Bunker's Army, Faith and Fear in Flushing, Real Dirty Mets Blog, it goes on and on.
I must say, the Mets' actions are the culprit in spawning this cottage industry. They can't seem to get many things right, and when they do, they muck it up with a press conference that resembles a reluctant '70's rock band making a Grammy speech.
Met fans are not Yankee fans. The ownership and management fail to realize this. Yankee fans disappear if the Yankees start to lose. Met fans stick around.
Met fans just want a chance, a glimmer of hope. They want to have confidence in their owner and their general manager and believe they have the best manager, pitching coach, and players the club could hire.
Right now, they have very little of any of those things, and whatever positives they do have, they manage to turn into mud.
Their medical issues seem endless and pointless. They sign C and D-level players that can only help them maintain their downward spiral.
The chasm between the ownership and the fans is growing despite the efforts on both sides to close the gap.
The owner, Fred Wilpon, is a Barrie-esque figure who cannot shake his childhood affection for his first love—the Brooklyn Dodgers. His son is as good as any son of inherited wealth and privilege—meaning he's not very good at all.
The baseball end is run by Queens native Omar Minaya, who won the job several years ago based on his ability to woo Latin players. That ability has waned of late. In fact, Minaya hasn't been able to woo quality players of any ethnic background to Flushing.
The only players that sign with the Mets are the ones that either price themselves out of the market or that other teams simply don't want.
Jerry Manuel, the manager who rose to his position as a result of the embarrassing Willie Randolph firing, is not anyone's first choice to manage this team. He is aloof and not a very strong strategist. The Mets have brought Wally Backman into the organization as a backup plan.
Whether they will have the guts or the smarts to elevate Backman remains to be seen.
These Mets cannot spin themselves out of this cycle of negativity, even when their PR team is run by Jay Horwitz, who was once a PR genius. But, that was when Ronald Reagan was in the White House.
Horwitz is great at coordinating and managing the team in times of boom, but has no clue how to fend off the wolves in today's instantaneous electronic media. He's a fossil they need to either relegate to the rubber gun squad or send out to pasture.
When the smelly stuff hits the fan, the Mets wheel out the slick-talking Dave Howard to euphemize and avoid issues with corporate double speak. I'm positive, there are cab drivers and plumbers who know oodles more about baseball than he does.
The bloggers and other web-savvy fans pick up everything. They have stats and facts at the ready and can reach millions within minutes after a bombshell hits.
The Mets, to one's surprise, have missed the ferry on the electronic news revolution; they are constantly in reactionary mode.
The other day, Metsblog.com ran a video of Keith Hernandez tutoring Daniel Murphy and two other young players on the finer points of playing first base. He covered his points slowly and definitively, but the three young players weren't really absorbing them.
By the look on his face and the inflection of his voice, you tell there was a lot of work to do. It was like Eric Clapton teaching a kid with no arms to play guitar.
Murphy's Law is in full effect in Flushing these days, with no one or no thing stepping up to stop it.
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