Mike Celizic

Willie Randolph and the New York Mets stand on the brink of history, and all they have to do to write a new chapter in the annals of baseball is to keep right on losing.

Just over a week ago, with 17 games left in the season, the Mets held a seven-game lead over the Philadelphia Phillies.

They ended their five-game skein on Wednesday with an 8-4 win over the Nationals, but it's hard not to wonder when the next losing streak is going to rear its ugly head.

The Mets have done a lot of amazing things in their history, but none would be more incredible than blowing a seven-game lead with 17 to play. No team has ever done it in the history of the game. No team wants to.

And if that happens, Randolph can not come back next year to try to make it better. He’s got to go. He may not be making the errors, giving up the hits and failing to drive in runners, but he’s the man responsible to steer the team safely through the season. Crashing and sinking on a reef within hailing distance of shore doesn’t count.

There’s a lot of pressure on Randolph as the losses continue to mount and a lead the Mets have held for almost the entire season continues to melt away. And everybody in New York — including, according to reports, his own players — has an opinion about what he should be doing differently. Most think he should be turning over tables, kicking trash cans and hurling invective at his players until the paint is blistering off the locker room walls.

But the debate over what he should do is beside the point, because none of the commentators and talk-show callers giving him advice know his team as intimately as he should. I could say he’s got to show more fire, get in the players’ faces, kick some butt, and I’d get a lot of mail congratulating me on my keen powers of analysis. But that wouldn’t make it the right thing to do.

I don’t know what he should do, and I don’t have to. He’s the one who’s paid to know the team. He’s had three years to do that, three years to figure out what makes each player tick and the group dynamic of the team. If he’s been doing his homework, he should know how to reach them. He should know what works on which players, which ones to scream at, which ones to coddle, which ones to ignore. He should know when team meetings will work and when they won’t. He should know when a display of anger will light a fire under the team and when it will send the players into an even deeper funk.

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He hasn’t done that, hasn’t shown he knows his team well enough to help it rediscover its swagger. I can say that much with certainty because the evidence is in front of us. After waltzing to the NL East crown last year, the Mets sailed through most of this season with a comfortable lead. Whatever Randolph was doing, including nothing at all, was working. That made him a great manager.

Now he’s losing and if it continues, he’ll be a lousy manager. The reason for that will be that he could only run the team when everything was going well. When things got bad, he turned into Homer Simpson during an emergency at the nuclear power plant, blindly pressing buttons and hoping to hit the right one.

Back toward the end of August, something happened to this team. It started when they got swept by the Phillies and saw their comfortable lead get a little tight. They righted themselves to win 10 of 12 and rebuild their lead, but then they got swept by the Phillies again. Philadelphia showed a lot of guts in winning, but the Mets did everything they could to help.

The Mets gagged on leads – many of them. Their bullpen failed to get outs it had been getting all year. In two straight games, the team committed 10 total errors – a number that good Little League teams have a hard time reaching.

Randolph has been criticized for some of his game decisions, and rightly so. There have been questions about his use of his pitchers, and there have been times when he’s failed to try to manufacture or even steal a run.

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But it’s hard to quantify a manager’s decisions. Baseball keeps track of nearly everything players do. There are stats for pitching wins, holds, saves, blown saves, inherited runners scoring; stats for RBIs, late-game RBIs, late-game RBIs with two out. Once upon a time, there was even a stat for game-winning hits.

But there is no stat for game-winning decisions by managers, nor has there ever been. We can say that a manager’s decision won or lost a game, but only after it’s over. And we can’t say that a different decision would not have had the same result.

Then there’s the “book” that managers are judged against. If he doesn’t make a move called for in the book and wins anyway, he’s an instinctive genius. If he does make the moves the book dictates and loses, then he’s not imaginative.

So if you’re going to judge Randolph or any manager, you have to do it on overall performance, not on a game-by-game basis. Forget about the hit-and-run he didn’t call and look at the how his team performed when the heat was on.

Right now, we don’t know how it’s going to end. We just know that the Mets are on the verge of the most amazing accomplishment in their amazing history; they’re on the verge of blowing a seven-game lead with 17 to play.

If they can pull it off, you can beat the players up for their individual failings, but you’ve got to give the bulk of the discredit on the person who most deserves it, the person who set the tone and steered the ship onto the reef.

That would be Willie Randolph.

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