Some random thoughts watching the Mets game last night:

Tick tock... tick tock... the clock is ticking on Steve Phillips career as Mets GM. Another bad year and Mets fans will be free of this buffoon. As bad as the start has been, Art Howe isn't on the line the way Phillips is.

I actually feel sorry for Roger Cedeno. They had close ups of his face as he came to bat in the eighth inning of last nights game. A players face can tell you things and Roger’s expression spoke volumes. He looked so unhappy (never mind he was being booed by the home crowd) and so uncomfortable (overmatched) at the plate. Give this man a trade or send him to the minors!

Roger hasn’t really been too happy since he was traded to Houston. Phil Garner benched him for the remainder of the season in Detroit after he and the manager had words. Last year was a wash for him. I can’t blame Cedeno for signing a big contract if Steve Phillips was dumb enough to overpay. His stats have never matched up to his first go round with the Mets. Small wonder, the thing I don’t understand (and how it could have escaped all those people in baseball is beyond me) is how people can’t recognize how much Roger benefited from having Ricky Henderson as a teammate for a season. All year long the season they were teammates you would see shots of them sitting next to each other on the bench as Rickey tutored Roger on the nuances of each pitcher. The tutoring lead to a team record 66 steals which Roger never matched again once he and Rickey were no longer teammates.

How many players won’t be in Mets uniforms by the end of the season? Benitez, Alomar, Burnitz, Cedeno, Vaughn, Weathers? I guess it’s just wishful thinking on my part that Mo Vaughn could wind up with the Red Sox as part of a package with Benitez, of course the question would be what they would bring back. I was talking to the guys in the post office the other day about Vaughn being a walking advertisement for slim fast - he’s looking too much like the Jimmy Dean poster boy and this is after he supposedly lost weight! Here’s a guy who makes Steve Balboni look svelte! The only hope I have for him is that Don Baylor can tutor him in how to get hit by a pitch.

Art Howe does seem like a nice man but, I don’t see him lasting in New York.

Will Phillips managed to get fired before the trade deadline?

I stopped being a Yankee fan because I was a big fan of Don Mattingly, Buck Showalter and Mike Stanley. They all got were shown the door in one off season of Steinbrenner’s tantrums. Tino Martinez and Joe Torre arrived and the Yankees just won and won and won.

I didn’t think it was a testament to the ability of Torre as much as it was the result of work done by Gene Michael (when Steinbrenner was banned from the day to day operations of the team) and Showwalter bringing the team back from the morass it had fallen into under Bucky Dent and Stump Merrill. It probably wasn’t a coincidence either that the Diamondbacks won the year after Showalter left (like the Yankees) and I was surprised Boston didn’t do a better job trying to lure Billy Beane and Showalter there.

The point I was getting to, is that I’m really liking Matsui. The Mets have gotten rid of their Mattingly type players (see Olerud, Ventura and Alfonzo). Even though I am liking Wigginton and still like Timo Perez and Shinjo, the high turnover the team has had over the last few years makes it hard to root for them. It just looks like it will be a very long season.