Adam Jones up on Friday, vets grumbling
Here’s Geoff Baker’s blog entry on this. Includes several quotes of Guillen being pissed off about it. Check it out, seriously.
MLB.com (“Fox News for baseball”) has the story, which follows their 7/31 story by Patrick Brown which included the line “As the old adage says: If it ain’t broke, don’t’ fix it.”
The new story gives us
“I would prefer not to talk about Adam’s role at this time,” McLaren said. “We’ll talk about that on Friday.”
Jason Ellison will be moved to make room.
As others said in comments, it’s unreasonable to expect people who are so driven they become elite athletes to think someone else can do their job better than they can, to recognize when they’re hurting their team, and so on. Almost no baseball player ever retires early.
Baker raises a particularly interesting issue for why they may not have made the move earlier: McLaren as a new manager needed time to earn the players’ trust (which you’d hope he’d have done as bench coach but never mind that) before doing something like this.
In any event — the M’s offense has some huge holes in it. Adam Jones is a huge bat. We’ll see how well he does, of course, but minor league performances are outstanding predictors of major league performance, Guillen’s opinions aside. The outfield defense has a huge hole in it. Adam Jones plays good outfield defense.
Moreover — no other team, contender or not, has a player like Jones in the minors. Any comparable prospect this year on any team has been called up. The Tigers managed to find room for Miller, and on and on. For all the talk about how you don’t want to be in a pennant race with a rookie, what you really don’t want is to be in a pennant race with a team that’s not as good as it could be, and that’s what the M’s have been fielding for a while, out of fear for team chemistry, the team’s trust in McLaren, or whatever.
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OUTFIELD ARMS (See # 271 and # 274.)
(This should hold you for a while.)
http://tinyurl.com/oegze
sad, Ibanez might not even start for his own bobblehead night. But who knows what’ll happen by august 17th?
#122, [unintelligible]!?
Crikey!
almost as worse as the imposter “survivaler” Bear Gryll. I tell ya, i tell ya…
BROUSSARD ’08
#302, thefin190 Says:
“sad, Ibanez might not even start for his own bobblehead night…”
Blimey!!!
I will not support this safeco maelstrom!
[noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo]