Non-Mets teams had better watch the FUCK out:

‘cause the Mets just hired Ricky third-person-talkin', base-swipn’ Henderson as a hitting coach. You are completely screwed.

It’s funny. I feel weird about people who become convinced that the management of the teams they root for posses god-like intelligence, since the how well managerial moves come out in the end almost always boils down to luck. But this… this one is really something.

I’ve been trying to put my finger on what this team needs to be the dynamic, unstoppable team that it was last year, to give it that championship edge that it seems to have been lacking all season. Looking around at other Mets blogers, I found that this feeling was pretty universal. There had to be something out there, a solution to a problem that no one could really put their finger on. It wasn’t a personnel move, unless it could be possible to trade Delgado ’07 for Delgado ‘06. Perhaps Willie Randolph should have had some clubhouse fit or something to fire up the troops… but that seems more embarrassing than motivating when you think about it. You keep thinking about it, realizing why different solutions would be ineffective or meaningless (it seems unlikely that Baltimore actually would get into a Rain Delay for Franco-stein trade), and then settle with the not-to-comfortable realization that the team is in first place after all, so things can’t be that bad.

What I’m saying is that, although I had been thinking about it for weeks, I had no conception of what the Perfect Move that the Mets needed was, until I saw what they had actually done, and what I saw was beautiful.

The Mets lack of walks has hurt them; Henderson is the Master of Walks. The Mets aren’t playing with the enough ‘fire;’ who, in the history of the game, has been more fiery than Ricky? If there are any serious doubts about Reyes’ hustle (and I don’t really think there are), but if there were, who better to have around him than Ricky? If you could pick one player, out of the history of all of baseball to try and impart, not only their prodigious skills, but also their passion, intensity, and desire to win; if you could try and endow the team with the spirit of any one baseball player, is there any sane doubt that it would be Ricky Henderson?

Oh, who the hell am I kidding… this might or might not work, but at the worst, the Mets fans get a half a season of Ricky quotes and stories. And, you know what? no matter how we finish, that means we win.

There is also a pretty funny little irony: when Ricky was with the Mets in 2000, the Mets fired their hitting coach. When a reporter asked Ricky how he felt about the firing, he had never even rheard of the guy.