The games blurred one into another -- a steady, careless stream of August and September losses that turned Shea Stadium into America's largest spring training site, home of meaningless baseball. For all their money and big-city prestige, nothing could stop the Mets' downward spiral.

Yet, as the club lost a National League record 15 straight games at home in August and eventually sank into last place, owner Fred Wilpon continued to insist both general manager Steve Phillips and Bobby Valentine would return in 2003, honoring the final year of their respective contracts.

Suddenly, however, Wilpon fired Valentine on Tuesday, insisting simply, "I did change my mind. That change occurred in the last three or four days. That's not a lie."

Wilpon's reason? He cited what'd been obvious to the rest of the baseball world for months -- that the Mets had underperformed and underachieved and offered no real reason for optimism next summer, either.

Clearly, Wilpon knew the Mets' horizons were just as bleak in August as they were Tuesday. But one member of the organization said, "Fred's eyes were finally opened." The real intrigue, then, is what the owner saw or heard that prompted a coup, and why he chose to fire Valentine instead of GM Steve Phillips.

Wilpon admitted it was no easy choice, and even toyed with the possibility of dismissing both men. After all, if Valentine failed to motivate the Mets, it was Phillips who assembled them -- guessing wrong on experiments with Jeromy Burnitz, Roger Cedeno and Jeff D'Amico, and foolishly overpaying Rey Ordonez.

What sunk Valentine, though, was the power struggle with Phillips that spilled over into the manager's dealings with Wilpon. It was no secret that Valentine felt excluded from the front-office inner circle and in recent days forcefully told Wilpon he needed more input in 2003.

The owner answered Valentine by saying he didn't operate that way. According to The New York Times, Valentine shot back, "Maybe you should." Wilpon bristled at the remark.

Indeed, Valentine told the newspaper he contributed to his demise by deciding to stand up to Phillips in last week's staff meetings, a decision he did not regret. In the manager's words, "In the end, I'd like to think that probably my undoing was I had to be me. When I was in those meetings for the last seven years, I nodded. I finally decided not to nod anymore."

Another contributing factor may have been the informal poll Wilpon conducted of several Met veterans and team officials. He asked point-blank whether the Mets could win in 2003 with Valentine and was told the situation was beyond repair. Wilpon insisted, "This decision was mine alone." By Monday, he'd heard enough.

Thus, Valentine was summoned to a regularly-scheduled 10 a.m. staff meeting at Shea on Tuesday, unaware until the last moment that he was about to be fired. It dawned on him, only after he realized he was the only person in the conference room with Wilpon. The owner proceeded to tell Valentine he was deeply disappointed the Mets didn't play every game down the stretch "like it was the World Series."

Valentine leaves behind a unique legacy. He oversaw a renaissance that grew steadily from 1996 through 2000, when the Mets won the National League pennant for the first time since 1986. On Valentine's watch, the Mets finally siphoned away some of the Yankees' back page monopoly, and even though they lost the Subway Series in five games, the Little Blue Engine was at the height of its respectability going into the 2001 season.

But the Mets were never the same team after the summer of 2000, and their successes were replaced by a series of controversies, including recent allegations that some younger Mets were habitual marijuana smokers.

By the end of this summer, Wilpon conceded, "we have an image problem." Even the established veterans seemed to be drifting, and Valentine's managerial style -- he strongly believed in the separation of a manager from his players -- seemed to backfire. Like the Mets, Valentine seemed distracted, disheartened, almost broken.

Friends say it could've been the scars from 9/11 tragedies, a cause that Valentine selflessly devoted himself to. Others say it was from fighting too many corporate wars with Phillips, who'd failed to back him countless times over the years.

The GM refused to discipline Bobby Bonilla after he challenged Valentine to a fight in the dugout in 1999. And Phillips again took no action after it was learned Bonilla and Rickey Henderson were playing cards in the clubhouse during the final moments of the 1999 NL Championship Series against the Braves.

Phillips' distrust and professional dislike for Valentine had grown so steep, he refused to let the manager attend the annual winter meetings -- a ban that Valentine promised to fight this coming offseason.

He never got the chance, though. While the Mets begin the search for a replacement -- a hunt that will begin with ESPN's Buck Showalter, and will include Yankees coaches Lee Mazzilli and Willie Randolph -- Valentine will be paid $2.85 million, his salary for 2003.

The money won't ease his wounds, however, nor will it erase the feeling that he'd been made the scapegoat by Wilpon, who fired the wrong man Tuesday.

As Valentine told the Westchester-Rockland papers on Tuesday, "Nobody in this organization has done more for the community than I have. Steve Phillips has done nothing in the community. I went to his church for a father-son night, his church, and he was late."

Bob Klapisch of The Record (Bergen County, N.J.) covers baseball for ESPN.com.