Quote: Willie on Reyes
Last night on SNY’s Mets Hot Stove, Willie Randolph had the following to say about Jose Reyes, who hit .205 in 
September…
“I think he learned a good lesson from this. He’s a young player who continues to need to mature and get better. I’m going to down in the Dominican Republic and hang out with him a but, and talk to him and hang out, and get a sense of where he’s head is and where he’s coming from. But, I have no doubt he’ll bounce back…He lost a lot of confidence, and he’s used to having his way a lot, and playing the game very easily, and he just didn’t understand how to get back on track and the more he pressed the more it made it worse for him…
“It was bad timing at the wrong time, and we didn’t need our best player to go through a funk at that particular time. But, he was phenomenal all year long, and he just went through a tough time in his career where he had to learn how to get out of his own way, and it just hurt us at the wrong time…He just didn’t know how to build up and get out of that.”
…when talking about his late-season struggles with people who are close to him and watched him in the dugout and locker room, and before and after games, far more people cited mechanical issues, such as him dropping his back shoulder when he swings, as well as how he missed Rick Down as hitting coach, who was fired mid-way through the season…also, as has been suggested by a variety of reporters, including SNY’s Ron Darling while talking to MetsBlog a few months ago, reyes’s body may have taken too much of a beating from over 100 head-first slides, causing all sorts of problems for him in the second half…
…as i have written before, the conclusion i keep reaching is that jose is young, emotional, a bit head-strong, and while he’s a good kid, who wants to be the best player he can be, he needs to keep working, and working hard, learn from his mistakes and, in the end, he just needs to grow up, which is totally fair when talking about a 24–year-old young man…from what i can gather, he sulks a bit when he does bad, and he may let the game get the best of him at times, which is totally expected from a young player, especially one who had relatively quick stardom like jose…
…the best young players, the ones who go on to great careers, are the ones who rise above this, mature and learn to deal with adversity, fight through it, and keep getting better because of it…it sounds to me like jose had never experienced this before…hopefully, thanks to last season, now he has…
