The New York Mets are the only organization in professional sports that can call a news conference to announce it has killed the Wicked Witch — and wind up running over Toto instead.

They are the only group currently known to harbor not one, but two people who actually claim to have liked and respected Tony Bernazard.
Unfortunately for those who care about the club, those would be Jeff Wilpon and Omar Minaya.
And they appear to be the only collection of individuals in all of major-league baseball who needed to conduct an internal investigation to discover what everyone else seemed to know — that Bernazard was a foul-mouthed, ill-tempered little cuss with a Napoleon complex and two last-place minor-league clubs on his resume.
Mets fans, your future is secure. Jeff Wilpon and Omar Minaya are a matched set, equals in ignorance, arrogance, incompetence and vindictiveness.
One lies, the other puts him up to it. And as long as they remain together, the idiot son of the rich owner and the clueless general manager content to serve as his dummy, the Mets will continue to stink out their shiny new ballpark.
And they will remain together, because what other respectable baseball man would work for a cipher like the Son of Wilponstein?
Not even Brian Cashman, who served under the reign of terror of King George III, would work for a guy this clueless or an organization this inept.
These guys had the easiest of slam dunks yesterday, the simple announcement that they had “discovered” that Bernazard — the ostensible vice president of player development who in reality served as Wilpon’s trusty little clubhouse mole — had gone rogue and needed to be replaced.
End of story. Move on. Let’s go get them Rockies.
But no, that wasn’t enough.
Along with the scalp of Bernazard, the Mets decided they needed to also have the scalp of Adam Rubin, the Daily News reporter who broke the story of Little Caesar’s ridiculous bare-chested throw-down to the entire squad of the Double-A Binghamton Mets.
That grubby little task was handed to Minaya, who ran with it, coyly mentioning that Rubin “had lobbied us for a player development position.”
The implication was clear, and moronic: Rubin wanted a job with the Mets and figured the best way to get it was to take down Bernazard, then replace him.
When that idiotic scenario was played back to Minaya, he backed off. And later, his boss, looking a lot like Edgar Bergen to Minaya’s Mortimer Snerd (ask your daddy to translate), repackaged Minaya’s charge as Rubin merely asking him for “career advice.”
Of course, the only useful advice Jeff Wilpon, Life Coach, could give anyone is “Have my daddy become your daddy.”
But then, it could have been worse. Rubin could have asked Jeff Wilpon for investment advice.
But whatever was actually said between the Mets and Rubin, whose relationship with the club until recently seemed uncomfortably chummy, the damage was done.
Clearly, neither Minaya nor Wilpon wanted to fire Bernazard, and both desperately wanted to squash Rubin. They wanted to control the message by killing the messenger, but the real message came though clearer than any of them could have ever intended.
Sent to slay a demon, they killed a puppy dog. Once again, when it comes to doing the right thing, the Mets lead the league in having it turn out oh, so wrong.