As soon as the Mets stop being so ridiculous I’ll write about something else.

You’re Omar Minaya. Since the initial Tony Bernazard story, follow-ups have been appearing in the papers everyday about other incidents involving Ferocious B. It’s clear his position has become untenable. Your only option is to sack him. Fine. It’s not exactly hard, you call a press conference, tell the gathered reporters what everyone knows already, we all write it off as a ridiculous incident, move on.
What you probably shouldn’t do is to tell the press that Bernazard has gone and then accuse one of the gentlemen of press (who is there in the room) of writing these stories to get Fightin’ Tone fired and take his job.
The journalist in question is the Daily News’ Adam Rubin and what resulted from today’s press conference is the biggest Mets PR disaster since the 3am firing of Willie Randolph last year.
Rubin called a press conference after Minaya’s and told journalists it was “unbelieveable” the accusations made against him by the Mets general manager. Rubin’s line is that he had asked Mets owners Jeff and Fred Wilpon questions about getting into baseball but had never approached them directly asking for a job.
Whilst it may be that Rubin is not exactly whiter than white in this incident the only person who this is going to really reflect badly on is Omar Minaya. If you go to www.wfan.com and listen to the press conference the whole thing reeks of sheer unprofessionalism. I’ve honestly never seen anything like this, the only comparable I can think of comes from English football (soccer) and the legendary calling out of a local journalist by Newcastle United manager Joe Kinnear.
Whilst not being as x-rated Minaya’s accusations are equally as astonishing and, possibly, ultimately more detrimental. Did Minaya really think that by blaming a reporter the whole issue would be put to bed? Does the guy get no PR advice? Not to mention the possible slander case he may now have landed himself, should Rubin challenge Minaya to prove his accusations.
Perhaps Omar was just so angry that the press had effectively pushed Bernazard from his job (something I suspected in my previous blog post) that he was overcome with bitterness and resentment for Rubin and just went for him in the press conference. The fact he seemingly didn’t consider the consequences of any of this just seems utterly unbelieveable to me.
What will be interesting now is what happens to Minaya. It seems to me he could have just made himself a lot of enemies in the New York press, particularly at the Daily News. Those calling for Minaya to go have just been handed another gift-wrapped set of reasons by the man himself.