have signed Terry "285-363" Francona as the club's new manager. All right. If that was the price for landing Curt Schilling, who played under Francona when both were members of the Philadelphia Phillies organization, then I guess it was worth giving Grady Little (188-136) the old heave-ho. Maybe. Perhaps it's that - if you can believe it - I'm still sore about the absolutely undeserved mid-season firing of Jimy Williams (866-746) by the slick and incompetent Dan Duquette back in 2001, but it seems to me that there is no rhyme or reason to the Sox' human resources practices, the farther up the food chain you go. Either that or the owners, in a misbegotten attempt to be "down with the fans", tend to have an itchy trigger finger when a manager becomes temporarily unpopular with Red Sox Nation. What's upsetting is that this habit appears to have carried on from the old ownership of the Yawkey Trust to the new and supposedly improved Lucchino Group.
This is no way to run a baseball team. Just a Jimy Williams shouldn't have been axed for a midsummer slump and the antics of one Carl Everett (who was subsequently traded after Williams was fired), Grady Little shouldn't have taken the fall for Pedro's failure to seal the deal in Game Seven of this year's ALCS. As I've mentioned here before, Little wasn't about to tell Pedro Martinez that he was going to have to sit out the most important inning of his career as a Major League pitcher; nor would Pedro have listened to him anyway even if he had. That a competent manager should lose his job over getting his team further into the postseason than any of his predecessors since 1986 is absolutely moronic.
No comments:
Post a Comment