Fire Gardy

Around here we tend to give Ron Gardenhire a hard time about his “old school” methods and beliefs, and the two-faced way in which he, for example, teaches the players both to “take pitches and make the pitchers work” and to “stay aggressive and put the ball in play,” and that the fact that the Twins don’t draw any walks and swing at more first pitches and pitches out of the zone don’t seem to matter to him.

But it could be worse. Last night, Jerry Manuel was given a two year extension by the Mets. His first duty as manager is to find out why the Mets collapsed in September again, this time on his watch.

“We have to grow from every time that we get as close as we get and don’t make it, and we have to review and kind of marinate on why we don’t make it,” Manuel said during a conference call.

That makes sense. There’s nothing wrong with that, really. I don’t know how valuable it is to really dwell on past failures, but if it takes a little time to learn from them it’s probably fine. So after marinating for a while, what did Manuel come up with?

“You get so many statistical people together, they put so many stats on paper, and they say, well, if you do this and you score this many runs, you do that many times, you’ll be in the playoffs,” he said.

“That’s not really how it works, and that’s what we have to get away from. And that’s going to have to be a different mind-set of the team in going forward. We must win and we must know how to win rather than win because we have statistical people. We have to win because we have baseball players that know and can understand the game.”

Yes. It’s so obvious! The reason the Mets collapsed was because of statistics. Not only that, but because there are too many “statistical people.” I can only hope that Manuel can replace those statistical people with baseball players who can understand the game. I’m going to go ahead and make the assumption, though, that the “statistical people” who work for the Mets, if there are any, work in the front office. Not on the actual baseball team, where you’d actually want actual baseball players.

My guess is that some young punk crossed Manuel once, and mentioned something about analysis saying that you want to avoid giving up outs — because there are only so many of them. Manuel obviously didn’t take too well to that, instead preferring to teach his players to be more clutch … by giving away outs.

“We have to put a value on say, moving a runner over. [...] We have to put a value on infield back, ground ball that’s sufficient to score a run,” he said. “Those types of things have to be accented in order for us, in my opinion, to kind of get to the next level.”

Awesome. The main problem the Mets have had this year is they scored too many runs without recording an out on the play. So at this point it’s clear that Manuel is an old school type of guy who prefers effort over talent, who wants clutchy grinders on his team, the kind of guy who thinks Carlos Beltran is no good because things look (and are) easy for him. Given that Manuel’s team has a core of Beltran, David Wright, Jose Reyes, and Carlos Delgado, he must feel pretty good about his team. Right? I mean, those are pretty good players who consistently put up pretty good numbers. You could do a lot worse than having those guys on your team.

“You don’t see a lot of guys that have statistical numbers play well in these championship series,” Manuel said. “What you see is usually the little second baseman or somebody like that carries off the MVP trophy that nobody expected him to do. That’s because he’s comfortable in playing that form of baseball, so therefore when the stage comes, it’s not a struggle for him.”

Blink. I find it difficult to understand exactly what he means by this. Does he mean that he’d prefer Wright and Delgado don’t do as well during the season? Should Reyes and Beltran steal fewer bases until after the Mets are in the playoffs? Isn’t this solving the exact opposite of the problem?

First, let’s look back and see who the World Series MVPs were over the past few years:

2007: Mike Lowell 2006: David Eckstein 2005: Jermaine Dye 2004: Manny Ramirez 2003: Josh Beckett 2002: Troy Glaus 2001: Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling

That’s pretty much a list of good players, who tend to have good statistical regular seasons, and also happened to do well in the last handful of games they played in that particular year. Jerry Manuel might be the only person in the world who would pass on the chance to have Lowell, Dye, Manny, Beckett, Glaus, Randy Johnson and Schilling on his team — after all, their numbers are too good. That means they’re bad.

And David Eckstein? I presume he’s exactly the player Manuel was talking about when he said a little second baseman who carried off the MVP when nobody expected him to. (The other MVPs don’t even come close to meeting that criterion.) Well, there are a few reasons nobody “expected” Eckstein to win the WS MVP in 2006.

1) Nobody expected the Cardinals to be in the World Series in 2006 2) Certainly nobody expected them to win 3) David Eckstein is not a good player 4) While Eckstein hit .364/.391/.500 in the Series, his teammate Scott Rolen hit .421/.476/.737 (which is quite obviously a lot better)

But Jerry Manuel doesn’t care about these things. Jerry Manuel only cares about the fact that Eckstein performed better in the World Series than he did during the regular season, and that if the Mets had a bunch more players like that, then, um, they’d do better during the regular season. No, wait, I don’t know what Manuel was getting at.

The odd thing is that he didn’t say anything about the team’s actual problem, the bullpen. It’s tough to win games when the bullpen blows every lead you ever manage to take. The Mets lost like 10 games when leading after 8 innings. The Phillies lost 0 such games. That is where your team needs to improve.

But don’t tell Jerry Manuel that. He might think you’re a “statistical person” and replace you with a baseball player.

So every time Gardy does something that doesn’t seem to make any sense, know this: it could be a whole lot worse.

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