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Should Omar Have Put A Starter As Closer?

Authored by Louis Roxin - 17th September, 2008 - 10:56 am

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Congratulations to Omar Minaya, who apparently does not feel that desperate times call for desperate measures.

Congratulations to Omar Minaya, who runs the show from the skyboxes at Shea Stadium and who has managed to demoralize his team by leaving the closer job to nobody in particular.

This wonderful decision has apparently pushed the Mets into another late-season funk, and the club again seems destined to watch rather than participate in October baseball.

When Bill Wagner went down for the year, instead of stepping up and making a tough decision, Minaya essentially made no decision at all.

Until Sunday when Luis Ayala blew a crucial save against the Braves at Shea, the Mets' stretch hitting had been reasonably timely, and the starting pitching continued to hold its own. Now Minaya's hodgepodge of half-measures in response to a crisis has knocked the Mets from their decent rhythm while their 3-game division lead evaporated. Unconsciously or not, the Mets might see the writing on the wall and essentially be giving up the year after their record-setting collapse.

Maybe this team of Jose Reyes and Carlos Beltran is not packed with players who possess the hearts of champions (Beltran ranks as another of Minaya's bigger mistakes). But on the other hand, who could blame these guys, really? It's a gargantuan task to sustain your motivation and energy when in the back of the team's collective mind they know that no matter how many runs they put on the board, no lead is safe.

Recognize you need to try something bold and make a sacrifice in the only place you can: your starting pitching. Put Oliver Perez or even Johan Santana in the closer's role. It's not ideal; what move would be after Wagner's season ended? Certainly it is a better option than putting your team in serious jeopardy of blowing two or three out of every five games at the eleventh hour of the season.

As we're witnessing, these are the kinds of losses that take something more from a team than one game in the standings, especially when the specter of last year's September looms large for this club.

With only a dozen or two games left in the season, you can adequately cover for one start every five and may even get a good surprise performance or two, as Jonathan Niese showed. So do something radical instead of letting your club be sitting ducks waiting to be overtaken in the game and the divisional race by inserting the likes of Aaron Heilman to finish (read: fritter away) victories. As a footnote, we should have seen this entire fiasco coming. This is the same GM who has done great damage to Heilman's career and his own team's bullpen by sticking an arm with a variety of pitches (and something that is the opposite of a bulldog mentality) in the bullpen rather than the starting staff.

We're hearing John Maine may be ready to return and could do so as the new closer. Not a bad thought but perhaps a week or two too late for the Mets to recover and make the playoffs. If that's the case, there's one more task for the crew at Citifield: peel the Minaya door tag from the corner office and send his misguided managerial approach walking.

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