Results tagged ‘ Omar Minaya ’
Media men in being impartial shocker
A little extra on the Minaya/Rubin story. Before last night’s, frankly, brilliant game (in which Jerry Manuel sent his clean-up hitter up to bunt with 2 on and no outs and then sent in a man to pinch-hit who has hit into double plays 28% of the times he has been in that situation and came away with 4 runs. Jerry 1 – 0 Me.) SNY’s commentary team of Gary Cohen, Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez dissected the whole debacle. 
The Daily News ran a transcript of the conversation today that I can only describe as ‘irritating’. If you can put up with the capital letters and spelling mistakes that leave me to believe that the conversation was transcribed by some sort of rudimentary voice-recognition programme, it’s well worth reading. It’s also worth bearing in mind that SNY is owned by the Mets, in the same way YES Network is owned by the Yankess. You absolutely, positively would not hear this sort of discussion on YES. This is why Gary, Keith and Ron are simply brilliant.
The Daily News have, predictably, gone all out for Minaya today. The Gary, Keith and Ron story, you will notice, comes with a poll asking readers whether Omar Minaya should be “Fire[d], Omar’s cheap shot at Adam Rubin should cost him his job”, “Force[d] to apologize, his wishy-washy mea culpa afterward wasn’t enough” or, added perhaps as a bit of an afterthought, “ignored”. I’d venture the News don’t really want you to chose the last option.
It’s hard to be a saint in the city part 3: Ill Communication
“The stupid continued to be stupid” Steve Somers, WFAN
It’s been a pretty epic day for the Mets. I’ll try and put a cap on all the madness, if only for the sake of my own sanity. Here’s how I believe today’s events happened and the gulf between reality and what Omar Minaya intended to happen.
- All the reports about Bernazard have said that he is friends with Minaya and Mets owner Jeff Wilpon, we can pretty much take this as fact. David Lennon of Newsday said tonight that “a guy who’s best friends with the owner gets a lot of protection”. 
- Minaya and Wilpon were hacked off about the campaign in the media to get rid of Bernazard, especially after the bandwagon really took off and his position became untenable.
- Minaya became aware that, ultimately, the buck stops with him. The team are losing right now, Omar is drawing criticism from all quaters for his lack of a back-up plan and the ineffective players the team are having to field right now. If the media succeed in getting rid of Bernazard and the Mets continue losing, the attention could then turn to the Mets’ General Manager.
- Minaya accepts that Bernazard has to go but decides to use his sacking as a warning shot to the Daily News and the rest of the New York media by slandering Adam Rubin’s conduct and getting him sacked in retaliation for Bernazard. This, in Minaya’s mind, sends a clear “don’t mess with me” message to the rest of the press.
- It could even be Minaya meant to say that what Rubin wrote was true but he had to stop and consider it for a while because, incidentally, Adam Rubin has been asking us for years to give him a job in the organisation, just saying, y’know. This is where Minaya’s offensive fell down, his poor ability at public speaking and the fact that everyone jumped on the “Rubin wrote these stories cos he wanted Bernazard’s job” angle, rather than the “Rubin was right but we had to stop and question his motives” line that he was trying to pull dilluted his original point.
End result: Minaya appears to have made an unnecessary gamble and lost, quite badly. I don’t think he’ll be sacked tomorrow, because I believe Jeff Wilpon was just as annoyed at Rubin and the News for getting Bernazard sacked. What will happen though is that the pressure will continue to mount on the Mets’ GM.
Well, I hope that’s kind of done. Fernando Tatis put a far more pertinent full stop on the whole episode than I ever could by hitting a tie-breaking grand-slam in the 8th inning today to put the Mets on a 3-game winning streak. The first time they’ve won 3 straight since May. This offense that, before the weekend, I would have classified as ‘some AAA guys and David Wright’ has now scored 29 runs in 4 games. Omar Minaya has, unexpectedly, been bought some time by his team winning games
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