There’s one topic with the Mets that you can never bring up or you risk people avoiding eye contact with you and hanging up on your first time long time call.
It comes up today in an article in the Times. I shall excerpt and you can read and we’ll never discuss. By the way, Willie looks awfully happy in Yankee Stadium with Yankee logos nearby. It’s almost as if he’s a Yankee at heart. Maybe he just loves Mastercard.
On to the scary subject nobody is allowed to discuss:
That said, neither Randolph nor his boss, General Manager Omar Minaya, should dismiss rumblings that occasionally surface about divisions in their clubhouse between white and Latino players, even if it may be at times news media-enhanced. Around these parts, the dreaded perception can intrude on reality.
“Now these fans have the perception that I’m some racist bigot,†Wagner said, which, no question, happened to be a very good quotation.
The Mets should have confronted this vexing situation a long time ago, when the buzz began that Minaya was intent on assembling an all-Latino team after reeling in Pedro MartÃnez, Beltrán and Delgado. It was small-minded chatter then, but the notion dating back to last season that the Mets’ Latino players are indifferent to the team’s collective failures smacks of ugly stereotyping.
I will say that I disagree with the whole notion that indifference is related to the geographic origin of your ancestors. Omar did seem to be working on a specific marketing plan in 2005, but he also seems interested in getting good players…which is a vast improvement over Bobby V’s obsession with Shinjo and “The Japanese Greg Maddux.”
