Reese Kaplan -- You Can't Make This Stuff Up!

Start your jokes here…

On Twitter, “The Mets fired Dave Eiland because he was too ‘old school’ for their tastes.  So they replaced him with an octogenarian.”

Also on Twitter, “The Mets are seriously considering 91 year old Tommy Lasorda as a manager if they decide to move on from Mickey Callaway.”

From me, “Hey, now…it’s another outside the box idea like hiring a white-haired sexagenarian who held the distinction of flaming out of pro ball in three countries and five leagues, who could only scrape together a job shepherding a team in the independent Northwoods League of college players to be your next manager.”

As Jim Morrison once sang, “This is the end.  Beautiful friend.  This is the end.  My only friend, the end”  What else can it be in the Bizarro Mets world when they conclude the problem with the pitching is not the execution by the players, the sad state of keeping their arms healthy, but the coaching that’s responsible for the 20^th out of 30 teams in team pitching?

Oftentimes in sports and in politics you see the higher-ups wield their hammer down upon the head of those closest to the one they really want to fire as a signal that it’s time to shape up or ship out.  I’m not exactly sure how the logic behind that methodology works when you take someone who’s already overstressed and struggling to tread water, take away his support system and think he’s magically going to flourish.  Expect the official fire sale to begin during the All-Star Break.

I’m not here (today, anyway) to bury Mickey Callaway and more than I am here to praise him.  I simply go by results and any way you slice it they are not good.  I will applaud the attempt to inject a little more offense into the lineup when you saw both Carlos Gomez and Juan Lagares seated on the bench with more robust hitters taking their place, but then proceeding to fail to find the ball with a GPS. 

The fault, dear friends, lies not in ourselves but in our stars (or what passes for stars many moons ago).  I won’t one-by-one recite the litany of failures, but a great many fall into the category of the 2^nd and 3^rd tier talents whose best days were long behind them.  The problem is not recognizing and acknowledging the mistakes made.  When Coca Cola brought out New Coke they realized they had zigged when the market had zagged and took corrective action.  The guys with the authority to do that are the GM and the owners.  Thus far they’ve sat on their hands when premium talent was readily available elsewhere and continued looking at the scratch and dent section of the supermarket.  The result is another season of below average mediocrity and they continue to apply Band-Aids to hemorrhages. 

Tom suggested the answer to firing the owners is to start rooting for the successful New York team that plays across town.  A comedian once said that rooting for the Yankees is like going to a casino and rooting for the house to win.  I tend to agree with that.  Still, if the value of the franchise plummets low enough then perhaps the owners will either invest or bail.  Continuing to support their losing ways only enables them to perpetuate the mediocrity.