Coverage so far
DMZ · June 19, 2008 at 12:04 pm · Filed Under Mariners
Let’s see if I can do this without pushing the whole site somewhere:
Baker for the Times
Hickey for the PI
SEATTLE — The so-called dream job that landed in John McLaren’s lap almost one year ago ended on Thursday morning when he became the latest victim to the Mariners’ nightmarish season.
Victim?
I’d link the AP piece on ESPN, but I refuse to link to AP stuff any more.
I don’t like how the M’s are doing this in dribs and drabs. The GM canned one week, the manager the next, a couple of big names possibly DFA’d later in the week … it just draws the whole “Mariners Management Stinks!” storyline out.
From the Tacoma News Tribune – sorry if this has already been discussed as well (if it has, I guess I somehow missed it)
> Lee Elia, who recently replaced Jeff Pentland as hitting coach, will move to the bench-coach role under Riggleman. Jose Castro, who has been a roving hitting instructor in the organization, will replace Elia as hitting coach.
So Elia was hitting coach for what, one week?
It’s always a bit of a conundrum how to tersely describe the perpetrator in a murder-suicide. All the more so when it was as much a group effort as this one.
Victim in a self-infliceted sort of way, perhaps.
Hey, I hear Willie Randolph’s available. Yost soon may be as well. 😉
This is so turning into the “Night of the Long Knives”
oops, my bad. It was meant to be:
They were fired within three days of each other. Why? I have no idea. Weird stuff.
I read somewhere (Baker I think) they are doing like this so that whenever they have a bad week they can throw some meat (a Personell firing) to the wolves (Us the Fans)
I am just waiting for Sexson and Turbo to be DFA’d in the middle of the game. That would put the icing on the cake. Standing in the ondeck circle, getting called back, and then slowly making that walk to the lockers.
Gotta love it…even a Tom Verducci article on the dangers of Maple bats begins with
Nice.
There may be a method to their madness, though. I’m reminded of the ancient full-page color cartoon in Playboy showing an elegantly dressed 19th century Russian couple frantically whipping a horse-drawn troika across a moon-lit snow scape, closely pursued by a slavering pack of wolves. The husband is saying to his ermine-wrapped wife, “Dammit, Natasha! I told you we should have brought the children!”
Sometimes, dribs and drabs come in handy.
Jim Street? Is that you?
Pelekoudas says Elia is still in charge of hitting; he has instituted a new hitting program, which Castro is to run.
According to Stark at espn, Bavasi wouldn’t fire McLaren or trade Bedard, so he was first to go. Now McLaren’s gone…..
Nothing like giving away everything for half a season and worse prospects/players than we gave away.
Yeah, I would definitely say so. Of all the folks involved, he’s the guy I really feel bad for. Yes, he is not cut out to be a MLB manager, but a good team would have won under him, and not even Earl Weaver could have prevented the terribleness this year. He was placed in a no-win situation, asked to a job he couldn’t do, and his flaws were exposed and then left hanging for all to see like raw meat before wolves for months on end. A *smart* organization never would have hired him in the first place. A *stand-up* organization would have released him a long time ago rather than put him through what must have been the most miserable 2 months of his career.
even a Tom Verducci article on the dangers of Maple bats
Illustrated with an awesome shot of Batista ducking shrapnel from Vlad.
Nothing like giving away everything for half a season and worse prospects/players than we gave away.
Yeah, I’m terrified of the trading deadline, and waking up to read that Bedard was swapped for Sidney Ponson and Melky Cabrera.
It’s like cutting a mangled finger off of someone with lung cancer.
I wonder if the whole “fire a manger at the end of a homestand” tradition that got brought up with the Randolph firing came into play. This seems like almost a textbook example of it. So maybe they decided to fire both Bavasi and McLaren earlier, but figured it made more sense to fire McLaren just before a road trip. Maybe there were going to fire Bavasi today to, but got so fed up after the National’s sweep they fired him early.
It’s straight Machiavelli. Give the bad news all at once, and then the good news little by little. The good news (the firings) seems like more news if it comes in smaller pieces.
Though it does remind me of the classic line:
I agree with CCW. I feel bad for McLaren. He bears maybe 1% of the responsibility for this mess, probably much less. Imagine finally getting the thing you’ve worked for all your life, and having it look like this. It’s like finally becoming Ferrari’s lead Formula One driver, only to find that the day you get there, they’ve decided to give you a car carved out of soap. “Jose Vidro? What the hell am I supposed to do with this piece of $%^&*?”
He chose to play players who were unsuited to their position/roles. Vidro, you bench. Sexson you bench. I’d rather run Willie out in left and have Ibanez on 1b with Cairo as our DH than let Vidro’s option vest. Also, if you read the post on roster construction, there are some very, very valid points.
A good manager doesn’t help his team much. But a bad one can do a lot of damage.
brief note from Drayer
Jim Caple on “disrespectful” firings ….
No, McLaren is not responsible for the team he was given; but he is responsible for how he played them. How he played them could have made the situation better (if marginally) or worse. Willfully choosing to play Vidro, and placing him 2nd in the order is his responsibility. Same goes for Cairo, WFB, etc. Sure he had them, but how he used them was awful.
His firing is just and with good cause. He’s a nice guy, and I feel bad for him; but I don’t want a Peter Principle for a manager of my team.
kudos for the AP boycott
I apologize for getting the timeframe wrong … I just got back from a vacation on Tuesday, so everything that happened before then I mentally filed as “last week.” That’s what jet-lag will do.
But I still don’t like it, and I’ll be disappointed if things continue on like this — like if they DFA Sexson on Sunday and Vidro on Wednesday, and then change some random coach on Saturday. At this point, I’d rather see them do what they need to do with the untradable parts of the roster in one fell swoop and send a message that the past is now officially gone and the guys left are there for the rest of 2008, or at least until the trading deadline gets closer.
What’s wrong with AP?
I don’t imagine there is a boycott of Gregg Bell…
What’s wrong with AP?
I assume Derek’s protesting AP’s decision to send out takedown notices to bloggers for quoting and linking to AP stories, and putting out a rate sheet that would charge you to license quotations starting at five words.
ok, I have to shut things off. Dick Fain is now happily revising Mariners history.
Here’s the thing about McLaren: regardless of how much responsibility he might bear for the team’s current record, I don’t think anybody here would argue he’s the best possible person for the job, or even the best possibility among people who’d be willing to take the job. So he should be fired. The only question then is timing: do you have him muddle through the rest of a lost season (which, as Dave suggested, makes it easier for the new GM to clean house), or do you presume that as an obvious lame duck under a cloud, he would no longer be an effective manager even compared to an interim guy? I don’t know that, honestly, because I don’t know enough about the actual situation in the clubhouse or how these things go. I do know that he was a dead man walking.
As for the timing, well, could we really have handled it if they fired both Bavasi and McLaren on the same day? The USSM server would be nothing but a smoking crater.
As an aside: does Hargrove now look a like prescient genius, or what?
Interesting note on the timing, from Baker: Howard and Chuck were content to let him finish the season, but evidently Lee’s first order of business once he got the job was to convince them McLaren needed to go now. Interesting…
A veritable Daniel come to baseball judgment.
I know it’s fun to rag on Mac for hitting Vidro cleanup and stuff, but seriously: his lineups cost us maybe ONE GAME in the standings.
True…but what about his other areas of (in)competency?