The people who run the team to which we give an unhealthy portion of our lives are stupid, brutal cowards.

That's the only explanation for what happened to Willie Randolph, Rick Peterson and Tom Nieto about 15 hours ago. Nothing Omar Minaya said this afternoon did a thing to convince me otherwise.

Take out your pocket schedule and look at last week and this week. Now, pick the single date and time that you'd pick if you wanted to make the New York Mets look as dumb and mean as possible. If you picked Tuesday morning at 3:14 a.m., well, perhaps a job awaits you at Citi Field.

I've thought for a while that Willie Randolph's tenure as manager of the Mets should be over. But I've thought so reluctantly, mindful of a good man who's seemed every bit as tormented by the last 10 months as we are. And it never occurred to me that the Mets would handle his dismissal in a way that a kind person would call jaw-droppingly incompetent and a less-kind person might call deliberately low and vicious. The just-hired entry-level guy at a downsizing firm -- the one who gets the news from the HR harpies instead of from the boss -- got more consideration and kindness than the Brooklyn native who managed the Mets to within one gapper of the 2006 World Series.

It's embarrassing to be a Met fan today. Embarrassing, humiliating and infuriating. That's not a unfamiliar feeling as a Met fan -- I've seen Tom Seaver exiled to the Midwest, de Roulet era crowds that barely broke four figures, Vince Coleman throwing explosives at children, Steve Phillips chasing secretaries around desks, Jeff Wilpon tormenting Jim Duquette until his cell battery died, Robbie Alomar tiptoeing away from the pivot, pothead Mets having freakouts in airport-hotel parking lots, "Our Team Our Time," and Tom Glavine lecturing us on disappointment and devastation. (To name just a few low moments.) But I thought things had changed. I really did.

Sure, there might be poorly executed front-office plans, clubs that tuned out the manager, maybe even a historic collapse every generation or so. Plans don't work out and misfortune can lay anyone low. But I thought the Mets were past the era of habitual bungling, of routine backstabbing, of their apparent inability to do anything without screwing it up as embarrassingly as possible. Whatever nostalgia we may have for Shea, Citi Field looks like a beautiful park, a deft merger of Ebbets Field and the modern HOK baseball palaces. We can quarrel with the seating capacity and worry about encountering the same old sleeping vendors and snarling concessions staff, but the Wilpons look like they got the stadium part right, and I'm excited to see it. And not so long ago it looked like we'd have a team to match -- a young, homegrown core bolstered by savvy role players and top-flight free agents, assembled through smart scouting and by spending money like the big-market team we are. A new park and a team built to contend year-in and year-out before adoring fans.

Well, that dream is gone.

The team itself is lifeless and mediocre, poorly assembled and badly run. The Mets give absurd contracts to punchless, hobbled middle infielders and then can't find outfielders worthy of starting in New Orleans. The Mets park players who should be on the DL on the active roster for long stretches and fly players who should be in the neurologist's office around the country. The Mets carry three catchers, then act like they only have two. The clubhouse is leaderless and rudderless. The front office is a Shakespearean drama of whispers and feuds -- watching Gotham's journalists open fire today (with Tony Bernazard and Jeff Wilpon the principal targets) was briefly exhilarating but quickly made me wonder why such critiques have been kept largely under wraps. For ownership we've got Steinbrenner Lite -- less bluster, but by too many accounts every bit as much paranoia and micromanagement.

Omar played the good soldier today. He said, over and over again, that the firing was his decision, and I'm sure from a narrow, carefully calibrated perspective that's true. But taking off the blinders, it's all spin -- asked why it happened at 3 a.m., Omar argued that it wasn't 3 a.m. on the West Coast, that firing after a game was the norm, and finally resorted to the false comparison that firing Willie in uniform would have been much more disrespectful. (True -- it also would have been worse to have him dragged out of his room, stripped naked and fired in the parking lot. Presumably that, at least, wasn't on the table.) What felt wholly and honestly true was Omar explaining that he had to move immediately because the news would have leaked through some third party -- in other words, there are people in his own front office and/or owner's box pursuing their own agendas, and they couldn't be trusted not to undermine the GM on this, too.

But we knew that -- just as we've seen how far we've fallen from the pinch-me dream of 2006 to the mess we have today. The callous treatment of Randolph, however it came to pass, is the final indicator of just how thorough a disaster things are. And for me, it's proof that that Met renaissance was a figment of my imagination. This team began its life as a showcase of incompetence, but that hasn't been cute for 40 years -- far too often, it's been numbing and discouraging. Today isn't the worst day in Mets history, but it's definitely on the short list.

The office chatter today (channeling Mike and the Mad Dog) wondered if the Mets, seeking the back pages for 2009, might bring back Bobby Valentine. I laughed -- not so much at the idea that the Wilpons might risk once again employing someone who occasionally has an actual opinion, but at the thought of Bobby V. coming anywhere near this horror show. Why on earth would he? If you had a choice, would you?

2008 signees Reese Havens and Brad Holt begin their professional careers with the Brooklyn Cyclones tonight. If I were either of those two young men, I'd talk to my agent. Maybe the paperwork isn't quite done, or they forgot to include their middle initials in their signatures, or something. It's too late for any of us to escape the thuggish dolts who run things around here -- they've got us for life, occasionally for better, mostly for worse.

Anyone not so ensnared, though, ought to run like hell.

A blue and orange clown car pulled into Anaheim last night. One by one, the clowns spilled out as a calliope played madly in the background. Rollicking, it was.

Then one of the clowns went mad and fired Willie Randolph.

That's what it feels like as Jerry Manuel takes over the Good Ship Mediocrity. That's what it feels like to be a Mets fan this morning waking up from having fallen asleep to an incidental Mets victory and seeing on the crawl across the bottom of the screen that Willie Randolph is no longer manager of the New York Mets.

Wait, you groggily ask yourself, didn't the Mets win last night? More to the point, didn't the Mets fly across the country with their manager in tow and let him manage on a Monday night? Didn't he manage all nine innings?

You mean they fired him after that? After a win? On the West Coast, after midnight on the East Coast?

That they did. Those are the New York Mets. Clown college is, as ever, in session.

It never ends. It truly never ends. For two decades this organization has run with that calliope blaring at full blast. How many managers and general managers have been shot out of cannons now?

Everything that has been prelude to Willie Randolph's tenure comes rushing back in your mind. Everything since the Mets were kings of baseball. Every bizarre backstabbing, every oil & water disaster of front office intrigue. Every painful press conference. Every firing.

Davey Johnson wins the World Series but Cashen angles endlessly to replace him. Buddy Harrelson's a hometown hero but they can't wait one lousy week to show him the door. Somebody believes Al Harazin and Jeff Torborg are answers. Somebody sets Dallas Green and Joe McIlvaine against each other in a chess game of disastrous creative tension. Somebody dismisses McIlvaine in the midst of the first successful season in seven because of nebulous skill-set concerns. Bobby Valentine's coaches are used for skeet shooting. Steve Phillips' horrible team shrivels and Bobby V, the only manager to actually win anything around here in more than a decade, takes the fall. Art Howe lights up a room. Jim Duquette preaches youth and athleticism and lowballs Vladimir Guerrero. Howe, nice man, can't manage a meat market and is dismissed without actually being dismissed. No one takes responsibility for the worst trade of a prospect in a generation. Duquette told to take a hike because his team, with an ownership-approved right field platoon of Karim Garcia and Shane Spencer, without Scott Kazmir, with Kaz Matsui elbowing aside Jose Reyes, with Jose Reyes practically kicked in the hamstrings by his own team trainers, with David Wright in only his first season, wasn't ready to contend even though the public position of his employers was let's get some youth and athleticism in here and see what happens. Let's replace Duquette with the guy we wouldn't give the job to in the first place, Omar Minaya.

Then let's usher in the hundredth new era in Mets history by giving Minaya the GM job and hiring Randolph as manager and breaking out the checkbook and signing Martinez and signing Beltran and resisting the temptation to trade Reyes and Wright and let's improve by leaps one year and let's break out the checkbook some more and let's sign or trade for more big-money guys and let's watch a great start, a phenomenal start, a fabulous start and let's all congratulate each other for the renaissance in Queens. This is improving by bounds as well as leaps: a new day, a new era, a new dawning. The Mets now, after twenty years of thumbs finding the deep ends of asses, know what they're doing.

And that lasts for not quite one season. And its remnants dissipate the next season. And before that season is out, it becomes mightily apparent that the checks cleared but the players bounced. That the mighty accomplishments of Carlos Delgado and Billy Wagner and Paul Lo Duca came with an expiration date. That Pedro Martinez and Orlando Hernandez and Moises Alou were marked fragile. That nobody much liked each other, which wouldn't matter, except nobody fired each other up with their dislike either. That Beltran was both worth the money and is ridiculously overpaid. That Reyes will never quite grow up. That Wright has been shoehorned into a faux-leadership position by an organization that realized it had nowhere to turn except to a 25-year-old who's broken out everywhere except at the plate. That it would have been nice to have had some youth and athleticism in place for when all the senior citizens did what senior citizens will do and slowed down with age. That the big-market New York Mets would sign the best pitcher in the game but rely more on the Pagans, the Figueroas, the Evanses, the Tatises and the Cancels for their biggest moments. That Ryan Church's head was to be treated like carry-on luggage.

Remember Captain Red-Ass and the Marauding Mets or whatever it was we allegedly were on the cover of Sports Illustrated? Remember the feelgood story of 2006? Remember how everything Minaya touched turned to gold? That Julio Franco was a godsend? That Willie Randolph's calm and soothing patience were just the lubricants for this finely tuned machine?

Did it really all go to hell in a cab in Miami? Was Duaner Sanchez really the linchpin of this operation? Did one dopey trade after another have to be made to get to October only to have October crumble while the bats went cold and unswung? Couldn't anybody get anybody to run to first? To give a damn?

Did Willie Randolph, who was never anything but Willie Randolph when he was hired, when he was maintained and when he was fired, really have to be kept hanging on after the worst September performance anybody'd seen since Poland's in 1939? Was it necessary to parade Willie to a microphone in early October 2007 to confirm that a man with a contract was still employed? Did it have to be top priority for the New York Mets to look like they knew what they were doing instead of actually knowing what they were doing?

It's all a blur of incompetence now, and I don't mean Willie's. I don't want to martyr him. He wasn't the best manager they ever had, he wasn't the worst. He was, in the vernacular of hopelessness, what he was. But they knew this last year. They knew this last September. They knew it after September and they knew it in May when they didn't like an interview he gave. So they gave the man who had a contract one, no two, no three more games...or series to prove himself worthy of their confidence. And it worked. Then it didn't. Then it was the same old team finding brilliant new ways to lose.

Then they packed him and Peterson and Nieto on a plane only to fire them after their fourth trip west in a matter of weeks, after they won a game, before anybody could get a night's sleep to think, hey, maybe this is no way to run an organization.

I light no candles for Willie Randolph. He'll get paid. He did, I'm sure, what he could. He led us to a division title and a division series victory. He led us to within one game of a league championship. In 2006, he could do no wrong. In 2006, Omar Minaya could do no wrong. In 2006, the Mets as an organization, for perhaps the only time since 1986, could do no wrong. I believed that. I'm a fan. I'm supposed to believe that. Those who own the team also believed the personnel they'd assembled could do no wrong, that all their drafting was spot on, that all their confusing intramural maneuvers were healthy, that whatever got them to this point was good for business. That they themselves could do no wrong.

They're supposed to know better. But when in the last twenty years has that ever been the case?