May 07 2008 08:13 PM
[url=http://www2.nysun.com/article/75815]Randolph's Style Doesn't Fit the Mets[/url]
Excerpt:
"Think about the lineups Randolph has had since 2005. They've been built around great young players who take the field more or less every day, such as Jose Reyes, David Wright, and Carlos Beltran, and older, injury-prone players who can't field and often have platoon issues, such as Carlos Delgado, Moises Alou, Mike Piazza, and Luis Castillo. These teams have also featured useful, often athletic reserves such as Lastings Milledge, Endy Chavez, Ramon Castro, and Ruben Gotay. Given this, the Mets should logically rank near the top of the league in pinch hitting, pinch running, and defensive substitutions, as the manager shuffles caddies onto the field and into the lineup to take advantage of his speed and depth, especially in critical game situations, and keep the more brittle regulars fresh. Instead, they're right at the bottom in these areas.
Randolph is sometimes painted as a man out of his depth, which I've always found absurd and patronizing. What is clear, though, and what the numbers back up, is that he really does have a classic American League style. This makes sense; he played nearly his whole career in the junior circuit, and spent nearly a decade on the bench with Joe Torre. The Mets, though, aren't the Joe Torre Yankees — full of iron men and first-rate role players. They're a team with a lot of older players who need to be kept fresh and swapped out tactically, and a lot of players with narrow talents who need to be used just right to be effective.
It's one thing for a manager's style not to fit the needs of his team; it's another for it to run directly counter to them. There are other reasons the Mets should seriously consider getting rid of Randolph, from the curious lack of development of some very talented younger players to the team's real lapses of concentration to his dubious abilities as a judge of talent. But the most important is that to expect Randolph to bring this specific team to their full potential is to expect him to become something other than what he's showed he is. It's not fair to the team, it's not fair to the fans, and, in the end, it might not even be fair to him."