Fredi Finishes the Fish!

What a deal! It helps if your opponent’s manager is a grandstanding fool and Florida’s Fredi Gonzalez filled that role admirably yesterday. He conceded the winning run to our Metsies in the bottom of the 8th by not playing his infield in with the winning run on third base. Florida then got the double play but the winning run came trotting in. Thanks very much, Fredi!

Now I know his thinking was that he had the heart of his batting order coming up in the 9th and the Mets Ike Davis was likely to hit the ball hard, but c’mon Fredi, that heart of your batting order would be facing one of the top closers in the National League in the person of K-Rod.

And that 8th inning masterpiece of thinking was actually the second totally inane move Fredi made on the day. Fredi took out his best pitcher, Ricky Nolasco, in the 6th inning and replaced him with virtual nobody Tim Wood, who promptly gave up the hit the Mets needed to score two of those runners.

Nolasco was understandably beside himself. He had given up nothing but cheap singles and a bunt. If anybody on that field was capable of getting the Fish out of that inning, it was that guy standing on the mound, Ricky Nolasco.

But Fredi hadn’t seen enough of Wood in the 6th. So he sent Wood out in the 7th as well. Fredi still hadn’t seen enough of Wood after he walked Davis and gave Barajas a double. So Jeff Francoeur was only too happy to bang one over the fence for a 3-run homer.

Although Wood was only charged with the 3 runs he allowed in the 7th, to me he was responsible for the damage done in the 6th too. Of course it wasn’t all his fault. Fredi bears the responsibility for all of them.

This is the same Fredi Gonzalez who made such a big deal out of Hanley Ramirez’s failure to run hard after a Texas Leaguer popup he missed and then accidentally kicked, this after hurting himself in the previous inning. I know I watched the whole sequence of events and, given the circumstances, Hanley Ramirez deserved a break there. Only a grandstanding manager would have elected to take him out of the game.

Ordinarily, I would never excuse a player who didn’t hustle. But Ramirez had just finished hurting himself, then not only couldn’t catch up with the Texas Leaguer but kicked it as well. You could have made the argument that the whole muffed play was as a result of Ramirez hurting his foot in the inning before.

The brilliant Gonzalez then made Ramirez apologize to the team, thus furthering his embarrassment and deepening his bitterness over the whole affair. Mr. Ramirez doesn’t seem to play hard anymore and I don’t blame him. He’s close to free agency and it’s about 99-1 in my mind that he’ll re-sign with the Marlins. And, for those of you who may not be aware, Hanley Ramirez is one of the five best players in the game today.

Fredi seems to quite enjoy embarrassing his best players. What a management ploy! It’s a good thing Fredi is insulated by the relatively quiet media in the Florida market. If Jerry Manuel or even Girardi had done what Fredi did yesterday, there’d be all kinds of hell to pay.

Gonzalez is a grandstanding manager, much as Joe West was a grandstanding umpire before his official chastisement from the league. If I were a Marlins fan, I’d be screaming for his firing. Instead, he gets kudos for pulling a player who didn’t hustle, no matter the killer circumstances.

Now, maybe the Mets would have won in extra innings anyway, especially the way they’re playing. But Fredi Gonzalez gave them the game. It almost takes all the fun out of the win. Any other manager in the game would have won that game for the Marlins, first by leaving his best pitcher in the game, and second, by playing his infield in.

I congratulate the fine Mets broadcast team, Ron Darling and Gary Cohen, for pointing out the absurdity of both errors. They continue to call them the way they see them.

In my last column, I had pointed out that the “core” Mets were not performing well and provided some revealing statistics to accentuate my point. I was of course referring to Jason Bay, David Wright and Jose Reyes. After Sunday afternoon though, you have to wonder whether this Mets team really has anything you could call a core.

And that could be a good thing. I’d much prefer an even, strong performance from the whole team, which is closer to what we are actually seeing from this Mets team. It’s very often other combinations of players doing it for the Mets these days, either Barajas and Francoeur, or Pagan and Ike Davis, or even Castillo or Cora.

It helps them too, not having a fool for a manager. Although I’ve slammed Manuel for seeing things “far off” while not accepting the obvious, I surely appreciated his presence Sunday afternoon. His call for a “hit and run” with Bay at the plate and Pagan on first base was a master stroke.

Bay sometimes totally mis-manages his at-bats, but when forced to swing at a ball, there’s no better risk to at least make contact with the ball than Jason Bay. Bay did make contact, of course, and stroked a six-hopper through the left side of the infield, moving Pagan, who was running with the pitch, all the way over to third base.

Pagan scored the winning run, of course, on Davis’s double play after Fredi’s decision to play his infielders deep and let the winning run score without a challenge, with just one inning to play and facing arguably the best reliever in the game today.

K-Rod finished the Marlins, of course, but Fredi had actually lost it for them a little earlier.