Sports Radio Interviews

Jerry Manuel: “In all honesty with what we had we just kind of ran out of gas for the most part.”

This post was written by Zach Krantz of WQAM in Miami. The New York Mets came into the 2009 season with very high expectations. They signed Francisco Rodriquez to be the closer and JJ Putz to be the setup man; they had Johan Santana as their ace, and a lineup that was very dangerous. Nothing but the postseason would be good enough for this team in 2009. Picked by plenty of insiders to finish at worst in 2nd place in the NL East and the wildcard team, they never thought with the season coming to a close they would be 25 games out of contention and never really in the mix. Normally the first person to take the fall for this would be the manager, please come forward Jerry Manuel.

Manuel has had some major issues with the team this year, the first and hardest one was injuries.  Collectively, the Mets had players spend more than 1,000 days on the disabled list this season, by far the most in the majors.  That monster lineup could never stay healthy all together at any point in the season.  Manuel was recently told by Mets GM Omar Minaya that he would get a second full season as manager.  Considering that the Mets could lose 95 games this year, I would say Manuel is lucky the front office has some patience with him.  If the injury bug can stay away from the Mets next season, maybe the playoffs won’t be so far away from Citi Field.

Jerry Manuel joined WFAN with Mike Francesa and talks about the Mets season finally coming to an end, what has went wrong during the disastrous season, the injuries, and what’s in store for 2010 for the Mets.

Asked about the tough losses this team has had recently:

“Yeah, it’s been tough and I just think that we put forth a decent effort down there in Florida.  We made a couple of mistakes there but we won two out of three.  We come here with an opportunity to win the last two games and you know a lot of it probably has to do with the fact that we haven’t clutched up at the plate at any given time.  You see teams with walk-off hits, walk-off homeruns, all these types of things and I am not even asking for a walk- off, we are just asking to get a hit when, what looks like that might be a simple thing to do or drive in a run.  We just havent been able to do it and defensively just haven’t performed up to expectations.”

Asked what is the best argument he can give for not cleaning house in the offseason:

“Well it’s the face that the year in its entirety was pretty much an aberration and I don’t think anybody has been able to overcome what we have gone through.  I think that when you lose those types of players regardless of what you have…I mean that’s a testament to depth, that’s a difficult thing to do in the course of 162 games.  Now you can hold off for a period of time until you can get reinforcements, but that never happened.  We went through July and were one or two games out of first place.  In the sense that we get through to this break, we are going to get core players back and that never happened and I think really in all honesty with what we had we just kind of ran out of gas for the most part.”

Asked what he thinks the core guys will think about the 2010 New York Met team:

“Well. I think they will probably not recognize a lot of players when they go back to spring training.  I think there will be a lot of different complimentary players coming in than the players we have.  The guys that we have had a good shot and they have had the opportunity and for the most part haven’t taken advantage of it.”

Listen to Jerry Manuel on WFAN in New York with Mike Francesa

Tags: Jerry Manuel, Met injuries, New York Mets, WFAN