From JOEL SHERMAN

We very well may be at the moment that decides if Jerry Manuel was a glib interlude in a sorry time in Met history or the right man to lead the team into a new stadium next year. Willie Randolph lost his job for many reasons. But this one seems to me to be the big one: When his team got knocked down, it had a tendency to stay down too long. And nobody hit Randolph’s Mets like the Phillies, who did not only exist in the same division, but seemed to have taken up permanent residence in the Mets’ collective psyche.

What the Phillies did late last September to the Mets gave them a hangover that lasted all the way into this season regardless of how much various members of the organization suggested it was a boil lanced.

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