At the end of the 2009 season, most media outlets hinted that Omar Minaya's responsibilities would be scaled back in an apparent effort to further muddle the Mets chain-of-command and prepare for his probable 2010 firing. John Ricco was to assume media-handling responsibilities post-Rubingate, which seemed fine until it actually happened, four days ago. Listening to Ricco talk vaguely in the plural first-person, just left me wondering "who is 'we'?" and "who is John Ricco?" It seemed like the mis-management of one man had been replaced by the mis-management of "we," until it turned out to be the fault of that one man:
"We spoke on Tuesday and he told me about the diagnosis," Minaya said of his initial conversation with Beltran about the pending surgery. "I said, ‘O.K., as long as it follows the protocol,' and I wished him well with everything in general. I told him it has to follow the protocol."
So the whole confusion began with typically vague and confusing directions from the supposedly powerless figurehead? That made this snippet in John Perrotto's latest BPro column pretty unsurprising:
One Mets source insists that the past week's whole knee surgery saga with center fielder Carlos Beltran might be the "final straw" for GM Omar Minaya's job security.
Well, if you remove the GM from one of his primary duties, handling the media, and he still causes a PR disaster...what more is it going to take?