There's an old saying that goes, "Nothing good ever happens after midnight." For Willie Randolph, that line should be amended to "nothing good ever happens after 3 a.m." It was at 3:15 a.m., after a victory over the Angels and a long flight from New York to Los Angeles that the Mets' brass finally decided that Willie Randolph shouldn't be the manager any more.
No time like the present, I suppose. Why wait until the sun comes up when the job can be taken care of at 3:15 a.m. like a weirdo fraternity prank or Saddam's hanging. Why do it in New York when you can make the guy fly 3,000 miles across the country, make him manage a baseball game and then roust him out of bed at 3:15 a.m.
Yeah, I know the Mets are in California and it was shortly after midnight when the Mets' brain trust capped Willie, but it was 3:15 a.m. back in New York where, one can assume, the brass hoped they could sneak the news in well after the newspaper deadlines and the television programming had played the National Anthem to end its day of programming (do they still do that?).
But apparently the little thing that we like to call The Internets never goes off the air. That meant the Mets' big news spread through the east coast like a smoldering plastic bag filled with dog crap.
Think of all the things that get normal folks up at 3:15 a.m. like a dog barking, or a wrong number telephone call. Maybe one of the kids has a nightmare and wakes you up or maybe you get a 3:15 a.m. hankering for some organic granola and flax with a banana and soy milk... hey, it happens more than one could imagine.
But not Willie Randolph. Not with the Mets. At least he got a chartered flight to Los Angeles and was tucked beneath the down blanket in a four-star hotel when they shook him awake to tell him that the nightmare was finally over.
Willie doesn't have to manage the Mets anymore.
*** The best part of the whole Willie circus? According to reports, some of the players learned about the news not from team sources, but instead from text messages from writers.