In an act that can only be described as cowardly, the Mets fired manager Willie Randolph at about 3:11 am (EST) early Tuesday morning. He flew 3,000 miles across the country to Anaheim Monday morning for the start of a six-game road trip, and the Mets won the opener, 9-6. According to Newsday, Randolph returned to the hotel, where GM Omar Minaya was waiting to whack him and his coaching staff.

We’re on record as saying this is the wrong move, and we’re still not sure how Billy Wagner’s ineptitude (five blown saves) or Carlos Beltran’s stats not matching his salary (.273 average for $18 million) or Carlos Delgado’s disaster at the plate (.242 average, 60 hits, 57 K’s) are Randolph’s fault. If you think the players – specifically pouters like Beltran and Delgado, who “seemed indifferent” about the firing – have quit on Randolph, we hear this is due to VP of player relations Tony Bernazard, also known as Omar’s assistant. The Star-Ledger noted Bernazard was the only executive who accompanied the team to Anaheim.

Bernazard is a liaison from Minaya to the players, and all season long, we hear, he’s been running to the players and telling them that Randolph is trashing their crummy play behind closed doors. This began as a rumor in early May and will probably be written about in the coming days. The only hint we’ve seen of this in print was in Buster Olney’s blog Saturday, where he wrote, “For example, it’s an open secret that assistant GM Tony Bernazard and Randolph have serious problems with each other. But rather than settling this tension months ago — either by firing Randolph, reigning in Bernazard and keeping him clear of the work with the major league team, or insisting on a peace between the two men — the Mets have let this fester.” Here is an incredibly dubious piece of foreshadowing, from a 2005 profile on Bernazard: “When Tony goes after something,” says close friend Lou Melendez, Major League Baseball’s VP of international baseball operations, “you might as well put it down as done.”

Now the Omar and the Wilpons have given their clueless fans what they wanted – a scapegoat for last season’s collapse and this season’s early doldrums. Problem is, they botched this firing so badly that everyone’s going to destroy them for giving such a nice guy such an awful send-off. Mike Vaccaro of the New York Post unleashes some vengeance on the pitiful Mets front office:

… the men who run the Mets are quite obviously simple men, and sinister men, cowards cloaked in “no comments,” who have seen the way their baseball team has performed this year obviously decided: people don’t just need to be fired.

They need to be humiliated.

What a crowd these bums are, all of them, from the Wilpons at the top to Omar Minaya down below, all of them who conspired to botch this firing worse than any firing has ever been botched. Ever. You wouldn’t trust these guys to run a 7-11, let alone a National League baseball team. What a joke. What a cowardly, dastardly joke.

A midnight massacre.

A three-a.m. thrashing.

Disgraceful. Utterly, completely, disgraceful.

Bill Rhoden of the NY Times gets in a few digs as well, calling the Mets the “saddest show in town,” but he could certainly have extended that to the saddest show in baseball, and nobody would have disagreed with him. Today, we officially begin to actively root for the Mets to miss the postseason and GM Omar Minaya to lose his job on Sept. 29.