Mike Celizic

Firing the manager and half the coaching staff isn’t going to help the New York Mess. This isn’t a team that’s running at just a little bit less than peak efficiency and lacks only a tweak here and a jiggle there and a new driver to make everything right.

It’s a disaster from the owners’ suite right down to the last guy in the bullpen. Firing the manager isn’t a bad move, if only because Willie Randolph is too good a guy to have to endure the backstabbing and abuse he was getting from the front office. But it’s not the solution.

General manager Omar Minaya put the Mess together, and he’s the one who has got to take the fall at some point. The Wilpons are the owners who keep writing him blank checks, and somewhere along the line, they’re going to oust Knicks’ owner James Dolan from his perch as New York's worst owner.

The way they let Randolph twist in the wind is shameful. To that, they added duplicity by planting rumors last week that the manager’s job was safe, but his coaches were going to be fired. The crowning act of cowardice was firing Randolph in the middle of the night — after the New York papers’ final deadlines — in the apparent hope that they’d avoid the back-page tabloid headlines for which New York is so famous. It seems nobody told these bozos about the Internet and SportsCenter and talk radio.

Given the way they’ve behaved, it’s little wonder that the team they’ve assembled is so dysfunctional. Minaya was a very good general manager when he was running the ownerless Expos for Major League Baseball on a shoestring budget. But when he got to the Mess and was handed the biggest budget in the National League, he turned into a minimum-wage guy who’d just won the lottery, buying all sorts of expensive and flashy gewgaws without ever thinking of whether they had lasting value or whether the parts formed a coordinated whole.

Good luck to Jerry Manuel, the interim manager, promoted there from Randolph’s right side, where he served as bench coach. He can chew out some of the team’s underachievers and kick over a buffet table, but he'll find that Billy Wagner is going to blow saves and Jose Reyes is going to continue to be a knucklehead and Carlos Delgado is an aging superstar whose best years are well behind him.

Managers can’t make Moises Alou stay healthy for more than a week at a time. They can’t turn the clock back on Pedro Martinez, a real gamer when he’s healthy — and unfortunately, he’s never healthy. They can’t teach Reyes plate discipline. They can’t convince Carlos Beltran to treat every at bat and every out as if it’s the most important in his life.

And a lot of these problems are Minaya’s creations. He went after Pedro, and Martinez helped the Mets get to within one win of the World Series two years ago, but he wasn’t there to help get that win. He signed Wagner, who was a knucklehead and a loudmouth before he arrived and hasn’t changed. He signed Delgado, who was all injuries and excuses. He signed Beltran, who’s maddeningly inconsistent and suspiciously soft. He coddled Reyes, who has more talent than just about any shortstop and has yet to truly deliver on it. He keeps handing his managers pitching staffs that are two starters short of an effective rotation.