Wednesday, June 18, 2008

In the Wake of the Randolph Firing:

-In the 1960s the FBI spent over a year trying to determine if the lyrics to the garage band classic “Louie Louie” were obscene—at the end of which period they concluded that they were unintelligible. These actions were not less logical than the decision to fire Willie Randolph.

-Perhaps the weirdest development was when the younger guy who works at my local pizza place said, unequivocally, that Rick Peterson was the best pitching coach in baseball. The guys at John’s pizza are pretty blue color and I had not figured them as fans of the Jacket. But the possibly exists that the pizza guy, or one of his friends, had recently “discovered” a truck full of Tuscan tiles which he hoped to move at a greater price due to Peterson’s plug.

-The pizza guy also went on to say that he was so mad over the betrayal of Peterson and Randolph that he wanted them to loose last night’s game. I said that that was a little extreme and that I could never make myself root against the Mets.

-I have listened to so much damn WFAN over the last two mornings that I have started to kind of like Boomer Eiseson’s co-host (Craig Carton?). Is there a support group for that?

-Over the next few weeks the Mets will face some pretty bad teams, thus putting them in a good position to go on a little winning streak, and make the decision to fire Willie look smart. In a rare moment of lucidity, my sources (the WFAN guys) said that this was probably taken into account when determining the timing of Randolph’s release.

-At the end of the day, the decision to fire the manager has a tasteless feel to it, simply because it strikes one a misguided effort to try and control the uncontrollable. According to Baseball Prospectus, the Phillies are leading the division because their relief corps is giving up home runs far less frequently than they ever have before: there is no reason for this, and no reason to think that they won’t return to giving up home runs at their usual frequency. Rather than accept that they are ultimately powerless in the face of the chaotic nature of the universe, the Mets chose to fire Willie Randolph.

1 comment:

nigel fowler said...

The maintenance guys and the doormen of my building are all seemingly in agreement with your pizza guys---that the firing of Randolph and Petersen was both tasteless and irrelevant to the nature of the problems at hand.

Meanwhile one can only hope, over time, that interest in hardwood flooring will triumph over Tuscan bloody tiles.