Good read by Marc Normandiny of Baseball Prospectus who looks back at how much things have changed in just one year since Omar Minaya was replaced.

If you had to script an end to the Omar Minaya era in Queens, you couldn’t have outdone reality: Oliver Perez, the $12 million-a-year albatross in the Mets’ rotation, pitching for the first time in a month on the last day of the season, promptly walked three straight batters to send the Mets home losers in extra innings. A sarcastic chant of “M-V-P” followed the first out that Perez recorded during the debacle, and illustrated how fed up the fanbase was—not just with Perez, but with everything the pitcher and his contract represented.

Perez embodies so much that was wrong with the mindset of the Mets’ previous administration under general manager Minaya. The Mets gave Minaya his first genuine GM job, since his mandate as the league-appointed guardian of the dying Montreal Expos had included overseeing a form of organizational euthanasia, as opposed to the involuntary manslaughter he could be convicted of for bringing the Mets’ roster to its knees. While he had his successes in New York, there were far more misses, and they all came back to one fundamental and repeated problem.

He also points out the main problem with Minaya who loved to shop and spend, but never wisely.

What Minaya could not do was shop intelligently at a store like Target, where someone who is wise with his money can come away with a lot of valuable items on the cheap. Minaya never got a handle on putting the finishing touches on his roster. Instead, he was more likely to come home with a $300 Margaritaville Mixer that the Mets didn’t really need, blowing his remaining budget and leaving his to-do list undone

Credit is given to Omar for some of the useful pieces he found when he went “dumpster diving” like R.A. Dickey and Jose Valentin.

Minaya could be interviewing for the third GM job of his career this week, and if he gets the Angels’ GM job, I wonder if he’ll have learned from all of his past mistakes?

Some have said that Minaya has no chance to get the Angels gig and that they are only interviewing him to comply with MLB rules to interview at least one minority candidate for and manager or general manager vacancy.

We’ll see.

Original Post 10/22

Over the weekend, Adam Rubin of ESPN posted a quote from the Los Angeles Times that suggests Minaya MAY be a potential candidate for the Angels GM position:

Add Omar Minaya’s name to the growing list of candidates who will interview for the Angels’ vacant general manager post. Minaya, the former GM of the Montreal Expos, held the same post with the New York Mets from 2005 to 2010. The Dominican-born Minaya was baseball’s first Latino general manager, and Angels owner Arte Moreno was baseball’s first Latino owner. An Angels spokesman would neither confirm nor deny the team’s interest in Minaya.

If they do hire him, they should do it and send a press release at 3:00 AM for old times sake.