NEW YORK - Jerry Manuel was in a joking mood.

“I was trying to get 15 years on my deal,” the New York Mets manager said Saturday. “They cut it down.”

Manuel's “interim” tag was removed Friday night when the Mets gave him a two-year contract that guarantees him more than $2 million and includes a club option for 2011. Now he must figure out why the team collapsed in each of the last two Septembers and find a solution that gets New York back in the postseason.

“We have to grow from every time that we get as close as we get and don't make it, and we have to review and kind of marinate on why we don't make it,” Manuel said during a conference call.

“My job is to make sure that each guy is clear with his responsibilities for not being there, for us not making it,” he said. “I have to look at myself first, and we have to kind of look at the team and see where we failed, why we failed and talk about it as a group and grow from it.”

On his first full day as the Mets' long-term manager, Manuel forcefully attacked the SABR-type mathematical analysis some have fixated on in recent years.

“You get so many statistical people together, they put so many stats on paper, and they say, well, if you do this and you score this many runs, you do that many times, you'll be in the playoffs,”