According to Peter Gammons, Mets COO Jeff Wilpon is the general manager of the Mets, not actual GM Omar Minaya.
Gammons went on to describe Minaya as "the one out there to take the heat” on Michael Kay's 1050 AM radio show Wednesday.
This has implications for how the Mets will proceed this winter, of course. The good news is that if Wilpon wants to spend money on a player, he doesn't need to run it by ownership, since he is, in fact, ownership. The bad news is, no one knows exactly how much baseball expertise Jeff Wilpon has.
The quote from former Mets' co-owner Nelson Doubleday in 2003 isn't encouraging:
“Mr. Jeff Wilpon has decided that he’s going to learn how to run a baseball team and take over at the end of the year… Run for the hills, boys. I think probably all those baseball people will bail… Jeff sits there by himself like he’s King Tut waiting for his camel.”
This has ramifications for recently-jettisoned Texas Rangers hitting coach Rudy Jaramillo as well. After all, Jaramillo has been linked to the Mets before, and the well-respected coach once managed a young minor leaguer named Omar Minaya.
While a failure to bring in Jaramillo doesn't prove much, if the Mets do bring him in, it goes a long way toward showing that Minaya still has some power with the Mets.
