The Shredder comes to town. Photo via premierespeakers.com, his current gig.
Boy, if there was something I didn’t expect to read this morning, it was that the Nats franchise has managed to embarrass themselves *yet again* in a basic baseball executive management function. Its like the bad old days of “The Lerners are cheap” and “Jim Bowden is incompetent.”
As noted in this Nbcsports.com piece and in this David Nichols districtsportspage.com post (which contains some pretty damning tweets), the Nats offered Bud Black a ridiculously under valued offer, he was insulted and refused to take it. It apparently was than $2M for two seasons (or less than what they’re going to be paying Matt Williams NOT to manage in 2016). USAToday’s Bob Nightengale reports it at $1.6M and only guaranteed for two years. By way of comparison, Don Mattingly got 4 guaranteed years for a million more per year despite having significantly less experience. Unbelievable slap in the face for a guy with Black’s resume.
And so now we’re apparently looking back at Dusty Baker, aka the shredder, aka Mr “walks are bad?,” aka “back when I played RBIs were important.” Yahoo and other places are reporting that he’s been officially hired … though we thought Black was hired last week too, so maybe i’ll reserve judgement until we see him putting pen to paper.
My opinion of this situation: Awesome. (that was sarcasm, by the way).
The team inexplicably makes itself look amateurish and incompetent in one fell swoop (how do they NOT know the going rates of managers in this league?? Pick up the frigging phone and call around) *and* miss out on a candidate that I personally thought was a pretty good transition away from the Matt Williams debacle.
I defended Jim Riggleman in this space when he abruptly resigned in 2011, putting some blame on Mike Rizzo for poor management/communication and leaving him out to dry for so long as “interim” manager. Now, with Rizzo dealing with his SIXTH manager in 6.5 years at the helm (inherited Acta, hired Riggleman, installed Davey Johnson, (not even counting the 3-game interim manager McLaren) hand-picked Williams as replacement, butchered negotiations with Black and now has hired Baker), at what point do you look firmly at the executive in charge here and start asking serious questions about his abilities to manage? Maybe you put this entirely on the Lerners … but isn’t it the job of the GM to counsel his non-baseball lifer owners on what is and isn’t possible in this game? How is it possible they so badly low-balled a senior professional candidate while so badly overpaid for sh*tty edge-roster guys over the past two years (ahem, Nate McLouth). How is it possible that the Lerners *still* seem to have this team in some weird corporate-world budgetary constraint system where they have their “slot” pre-defined for managers, for payroll, etc? I don’t get it.
You know, sometimes you get what you pay for. Lets hope this team doesn’t “get what it paid for” in Baker for the next two years (two years that will represent a significant “era coming to an end” situation for this team).