How gracious of the New York Mets to give the Orioles faithful a present for the one-year anniversary of their team's regime change: crystal-clear proof of how lucky they are.
Lucky to have Peter Angelos making those decisions. That's right, I said it.
Lucky because your team, downtrodden as it has been for the past decade, could be owned and operated by the frauds in charge of the Mets. By the way, notice how the words "gracious" and "Mets" clash up there, as if they don't belong in the same sentence.
That could have been your team that is a national punch line, a pinata not just for baseball fans, but for anybody who still believes class, dignity and human decency still have a place in this business. Even with overpaid, underachieving teams and their lame-duck coaches involved.
Maybe it's naive to believe that. Maybe the crass manner in which the Mets kneecapped Willie Randolph two days ago is business as usual. Maybe no one should expect an organization to treat its employees with any more respect and courtesy than that. Or to exhibit even a hint of accountability or responsibility. Or to handle an unpleasant task without inflicting gratuitous pain and humiliation.
Maybe that's how it's supposed to work.
Except that it's not. Because that's not how the Orioles handled almost the identical situation one year and one day ago.
Some insane, inexplicable instinct -- Character? Common sense? Humanity? -- fluttering up to the brains of Angelos and then-general manager Mike Flanagan told them that the morning of June 18 last year -- before the Orioles headed west, as the skidding Mets were doing this week -- would be the best time, relatively speaking, to deliver the bad news to Sam Perlozzo.
They even managed to deliver it in broad daylight, then name Dave Trembley as his interim replacement, then invite the media to their announcement at the Warehouse that morning, then answer the very tough questions -- even if they didn't have all the answers yet and even though they couldn't confirm the reports that Andy MacPhail would take over baseball operations.
If you didn't know any better, you would think the Orioles had had a plan in place, including a professional, aboveboard way of unveiling it. You would think that even as you remember that this is the Orioles and Angelos, whose reputation for smooth managerial transitions is -- well, he had none.
