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As of Thursday, Feb. 12, this little blog has relocated to a new home on AJC.com. It’s the same newspaper, the same Web site and the same writer (feel free to groan) — there’s just a new URL.
New features: Bigger type, more graphics, comments that load 10 times faster and a larger and more recent photo that makes me look pretty doggone old. I think you’ll like it (the blog, not the photo). But I am, as we know too well, often wrong.
Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > May > 22
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Mets are a major league mess
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Working with half a pitching staff, the Braves awoke Thursday two games ahead of the Mets. This tells us much about the Braves, and it tells us more about the Mets. It tells us the Mets are done.
For 2 1/4 seasons the Mets have acted as if they’re the National League’s best team, but the cold truth is that they haven’t been anything special since 2006. They fell to historic pieces last fall — 12 losses in their final 17 games — and this year, when they are supposed to prove that collapse was an epic fluke, they’ve proved only that they’re both overheated and undermanaged.
It takes a special sort of club to thrive in New York, and the Mets aren’t it. They have a fractious clubhouse — last week closer Billy Wagner railed at teammates for their lack of accountability — and a manager who once seemed nobly stoic but who has been revealed as serially maladroit.
Willie Randolph couldn’t arrest his team’s slide last September, and over the weekend he was quoted by The Record of Hackensack, N.J., as wondering whether the criticism of him was racially based. He has since sought to distance himself from those sentiments, telling reporters before Wednesday’s loss at Turner Field, “I shouldn’t have said what I said. It was a mistake.”
And here, not for the first or even the hundredth time, we see why the Braves remain the gold standard of communal harmony. They don’t throw 25 players together without consideration for compatibility. (Remember when Sports Illustrated hailed Mets GM Omar Minaya as a “Mixmaster”?) The manager never creates problems; he defuses them. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in 30 years of hanging around clubhouses, it’s that mood absolutely matters.
I don’t know if the Braves will win the NL East. They can’t possibly hold up over 162 games with such a short pitching staff. (Can they?) But there’s a chance the Braves will get healthy. There seems little chance that the Mets will get serene.
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