Rescued from the purgatory of running a team in baseball receivership working its way out of Montreal and into Washington, Omar Minaya hit the ground running after being hired as the Mets’ director of baseball operations at the end of the 2004 season.                He overhauled the coaching staff and the roster, making splashes on both counts and letting it be known that his Mets were intent on doing what needed to be done to turn around a franchise that had put up three consecutive losing...

The 2004 season was eventful for the New York Mets, not all of it in a good way.                The season saw the arrival of a pitching guru whose self-confidence would, in the end, hurt the team; the major league debut of an iconic third baseman who would make it to the Mets’ (if not MLB’s) Hall of Fame; a flurry of deadline deals, including one that would haunt the team for years; and a Mets-signature second half collapse that would cost both the manager and the general manager their jobs....

Fred and Jeff Wilpon tried mightily to erase the sting of the awful 2002 season by bringing in new personnel, but all they ended up with was a repeat in 2003: a team of high-paid underachievers led by a manager who, if you listened to the pundits at the time he was hired, was not up to the task, and a general manager who would finally pay the price for moves that did not work.                The end result: another last-place finish, nine games worse  than 2002.                It all began...