*John Donovan, CNNSI:
No self-respecting general manager wants to hang around from October to April reading about everybody else doing something. Sitting still? Standing pat? That's for losers. That's for the Pirates.
"Every single team is different," says Frank Wren, a longtime front-office deal broker and the new GM of the Braves who earlier this winter wrangled a notable trade for Oakland centerfielder Mark Kotsay. "But my view, in general, is if you're standing pat, you're probably going backwards."
Extra bonus pwnage for quoting Frank Wren, who was offered the job as Pirates GM in 2001, and turned McClatchy down flat.
*Jesse Spector, NY Daily News:
In a fantasy baseball preview on March 10, the Associated Press noted that Duffy “came into spring training saying he was in the best shape of his life, after working with the Pirates’ training staff for much of the winter.” Duffy played in a career-high 84 games, but hit just .255 with a .317 on-base percentage after showing promise with a .341 average and .385 on-base precentage in 126 at-bats the year before.
Extra bonus pwnage for writing this helpful historical primer a few weeks after Duffy said, "I feel like I’m in the best shape since I came into pro ball seven years ago."
2 comments:
The thing that leaped right off the page at me when I saw that article was the long list of highly respectable names. Before we ended up with Doofus Dave Littlefield, there were at least several prominent GM candidates who were interviewed by McClatchy. Why did none of them take the job here in Pittsburgh? I can understand why Wren might want to play it safe as the (then apparent)heir to Schuerholz in Atlanta, but not one of the other eminently respectable, bright young names wanted to come here? What's up with that???
Very, very odd. It does make me a bit more sympathetic to McClatchy in retrospect if in fact he did offer the Pirates' GM job to one or more of the names on that list before ending up with Littlefield. Perhaps he had a bit more on the ball then we gave him credit for, though that's still not saying much in the end.
But we're still left with the unanswered question of just how and why Littlefield ended up here if the team in fact interviewed the parade of candidates named in the 2001 article you linked. Very strange.
Littlefield was regarded as a strong candidate when they hired him. He was Dave Dombrowski's right-hand man in Florida (this was before so many of Dombrowski's other proteges, like Dean Taylor, had totally bombed out), and if there's one thing DL could always do it was tell someone what they wanted to hear in an interview process.
It's interesting to look back on the guys we interviewed and see how they all turned out.
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