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It's time for Mets to give Manuel an extension

Wallace Matthews

September 12, 2008

For the past three months, Jerry Manuel has done right by the Mets.

Now it's time for the Mets to do right by him.

Asked to unite a divided clubhouse, energize a dispirited roster and somehow coax a season of accomplishment from a roomful of chronic underachievers, Manuel somehow has gotten the job done. Well, almost done. The rest is up to them.

He lost his starting rightfielder for a good chunk of the season, lost his No. 2 starter last month and now has lost his closer not only for this year but for next.

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Still, he has not allowed the Mets to wallow in the self-pity that seemed about to swallow them up early in the season. He has not made excuses for them, nor has he permitted them to make any for themselves. He has treated them like men and they have behaved like men for him.

The Mets have a three-game lead in the standings, 17 games left on the calendar and a more-than-fair shake from the schedule-makers.

If the Mets stumble and fall again in these last 17 games, blow the lead and go home fat-walleted but empty-handed once more, it will not be Manuel's fault. It will be theirs.

It will remind you that last year's collapse wasn't the manager's fault, either, because when the same group of workers does the same thing under two different bosses, it's obvious where the blame lies.

But Jose Reyes, David Wright, Carlos Beltran and Carlos Delgado all will be back next year, win or lose. Manuel is assured of coming back only if they win. And that is one of the great injustices of this or any baseball season.

Manuel has taken the Mets a long way back. He has delivered them to the doorstep of the playoffs on his baseball smarts and his street smarts, on the force of his personality and on the strength of his authority.

You play well for Jerry Manuel, you play for Jerry Manuel. It's as simple as that. It doesn't seem to matter how much money a guy makes or how much experience he has or who his godfather in the front office happens to be.

If any of that did matter, Luis Castillo would be playing every day and Aaron Heilman would be closing every night. But Manuel runs the Mets as a true meritocracy, and if anybody doesn't like it, then too damned bad.

Even if you continue to hate the way the Mets canned his predecessor, Willie Randolph - and I do - you must admit, as I now do, that replacing him with Manuel was the true turning point of their season.

Even if you recognize - and I do - that it says terrible things about the character of some of the Mets who rolled over on Willie, you can't deny that they have stood up for Jerry.

Whether it's fair or not, the same Mets who tuned out Randolph seem to listen to Manuel. The same ones who belittled Randolph behind his back seem to respect Manuel. Most importantly, the same ones who laid down for Randolph seem to play for Manuel.

And even if you continue to suspect - as I do - that Manuel got hired for all the wrong reasons, he clearly has proved himself the right man for the job.

So what is taking the Mets so long to do right by Jerry? At what point do they remove the word "interim" from his job description?

The Mets have their reasons, I suppose. In-season contract negotiations are a distraction, they say. Everyone's job status is on hold until the end of the season. At this point in the season, team goals have to take precedence over individual accomplishment. There are more important things to get done this year before we start looking ahead to next year.

That is all well and good. But what the Mets don't say is that they are waiting to see what happens in these last 17 games before committing to Manuel. They don't want to repeat the mistake they made last year, when they brought back a manager who had just presided over a collapse of historic proportions.

In a way, the manager is paying for the sins of his players, sins that were committed when he still was a bench coach. The Mets' reluctance to extend Manuel's contract betrays a lack of faith in the players, but it translates to a lack of justice for the manager.