There is Crying in Baseball: New York Mets edition

Well, folks, I’m stunned.

I really thought we’d win (yeah, even trailing 7-0 after the top of the 1st) and at least force a play-off for the NL East.

Over the past few weeks as the Mets’ slide continued I thought about a passage from It’s a Wonderful Life where Joseph says that Clarence has “the IQ of a rabbit” and God replies “but he’s got the faith of a child.” While I think that I am smarter than a rabbit, I do have the faith of a child. One thing good about being involved in sports and/or being a sports fan is that it keeps you in touch with your inner child. And right now my inner child is hurting.

Thanks for your kind words, Scoop and hawaii, which I think I’ll address tomorrow. For now I’m just going to sit around and listen to depressing Pearl Jam songs for the rest of the night.

All I can do now is stare out the window and wait for spring ….

Mets Fuego

Bill wrote in The Worst Buddhist in the World:

How about your zen man Peterson leading the charge in yesterday’s fight? Not a Mets fan, but I HATE the Phillies—-GO METS!!!!!!!!

Let go of anger.
Let go of pride.
But not when the opposing pitcher is throwing at one of our guys.

I heard the fight (or rather “fight,” since nothing really happened except for shouting and shoving). The Mets game was at 1pm ET but it was blacked out on MLB.TV even though the Fox game-of-the-week broadcast did not start until 4pm ET. (Why do we let Rupert Murdoch ration baseball in America?) I listened to the game live on WFAN and watched about half of it last night after MLB.TV put it in their video archive. I was surprised to see Rick Peterson, our mild-mannered pitching coach, right out there. I’m not sure if he was “leading the charge,” but he did get out on the field pretty dang fast.

I’d read on some Mets’ fans blogs a while back that what the team needed was a brawl to get it going. I thought that was pretty ridiculous. Other blogs and forums have complained about Willie Randolph, the Mets manager, and his quiet demeanor. With the teams’ underachieving season and especially during the late-season slide (perhaps into the abyss — we’ll know in a few hours) certain fans have said that Randolph needed to show emotion and light a fire under the team to get them going.

I’ve always liked Randolph, since his Yankee days. And I like a quiet leader. I don’t need someone — a boss or a coach — to get me fired up. I come with a lot of internal motivation (at least for tasks that mean something to me), so I don’t need a lot of outside help.

But in considering how uneven the season has gone and especially during the past few weeks when the team has played some really bad ball, I thought about some successful coaches I have known. What stands out is how they knew how to approach each individual athlete. Some people need to be cajoled, some need to be yelled at, some need a pat on the back, some need a kick in the pants. It’s like being a parent: each kid is different and has to be approached differently.

So while I like the style of the quiet leader, a good leader knows how to motivate in many different ways. It would be phony for Randolph to adopt a fiery persona. He’s no Piniella. There’s no quicker way to lose someone’s confidence than to be a phony. But I think he needs to learn how to better manage each of his players individually, as well as managing the group of them.

I don’t know if yesterday’s brouhaha will motivate the team to win today. I just hope they play well. If they play well the chances of winning are high. When I turn on The New Dan Patrick Show tomorrow morning I want to hear DP talking about the Mets being in the post-season. And I want to hear Lou:

“Bow wow wow!”

(“Let’s go Mets!”)