Dallas Green is gone as manager of the New York Mets. Elsewhere in these sports pages you can read about the numbers and the official comments of the team and their former manager. This is about the slow death that was not fun too watch.

In the off-season the Mets decided that to sell tickets and compete with the Yankees they would promote three young pitchers: Jason Isringhausen, Paul Wilson, and Bill Pulsifer. Isringhausen and Pulsifer pitched in the majors at the end of last season, but Wilson had no big league experience.

On every Mets press release in the off-season and into spring training the three were pictured together. They were the young guns and any other name that seemed catchy. They would sell the tickets and lead the Mets into a postseason spot as a wild-card entry.

Dallas Green was questioned from the beginning about his ability to handle young players. He was an old style coach, gruff and demanding and expecting pitchers to go late into games and gut it out. Pulsifer never got started. An arm injury put him out for the season before a quarter of it was over.

The other two slowly, game by game, lost their confidence. They couldn’t get the big outs. They fell behind hitters and their fastballs ended outside the yards.

As the season wore on and the Mets couldn’t reach the .500 mark, Green began to question his young starters. Did they have the desire to battle? Would they listen to him and his coaches? Would they understand they had to learn how to pitch and throwing wasn’t enough?

A couple of weeks ago, Green signed his own demise when he questioned publicly what the players, meaning his pitchers, had ever done to deserve to be in the big leagues. They kept making the same mistakes and at times when things got tough in games they seemed ready to come out rather than battle on.

Across baseball the need for arms has necessitated the rushing of pitchers to the big leagues before they have learned the art of pitching. There is the need to win now. Too many sports, too many games, and too many fans who no longer follow a team, they follow a winner.

In New York, that winner was the Yankees. The Mets fell out of contention by the middle of June and still the pitching didn’t improve. The attendence never really rose and now it is falling again as the dog days have set in.

There was no question of sending the youngsters back for seasoning. They had been touted too highly to do that. The organization would look bad and the names the fans had been told to love had to be kept at the major league level.

To make matters worse, the bullpen that Green thought would be good, was awful. A couple of the pen members Green was ready to rely on, were hurt for long stretches. He tried to push the starters longer to get to the closer, John Franco, but the runs were piling up against him.

When the inevitable rumors of Green’s demise began, there was no more support on the field from the players. They said to the press that it wasn’t his fault, that he couldn’t go out and play for them, but they didn’t go out and play for him either. It was a time to lose, to finsih the season and then see.

This past weekend the Mets were swept by the Dodgers to conclude a 2-9 road trip. Bad to worse just wouldn’t do. Yesterday was a day off and the Mets called a press conference to announce that Bobby Valentine, former Met coach, former manager of the Rangers, manager in Japan and this year brought back to manage the Mets’ Triple A team, would be at Shea Stadium for Tuesday night’s game.

Green had done what he could. His own organization’s press clippings had helped to do in and the Mets could wait no longer to right the ship. They had to show the fans they would act to improve. An oft repeated story, but it was painful never the less.