Tuesday, October 05, 2004
Today was a great day to be a Mariner fan as one of the worst managers in club history, Bob Melvin, was shown the door. Also getting the ax along with the rest of the coaches (save pitching coach Bryan Price) was third base coach Dave Myers.
While there's some hope for 2005 and beyond the unfortunate thing is that Bill Bavasi is still general manager. To exemplify what a complete and utter idiot this fellow is here's a Bavasi's quote from the press conference on Monday announcing Melvin's firing:
We knew we had some holes," Bavasi said. "And we felt that to be competitive in our division there would have to be some fallback by the other teams and we had to get fortunate. We did show some age real quick on the field."
WHAT THE HELL? Bavasi basically admits that he knew that the club he constructed last winter wasn't good enough to compete and that the club would have to get lucky in order to compete in the AL West. This has to be one of the stupidest comments ever to come out of the mouth of a so-called "baseball executive". Bavasi had the money last winter to put together a competitive team, heck he even got an $8 million windfall in January when Kaz Sasaki decided to go back to Japan, but he didn't spend it, not on Pudge Rodriguez, not on Greg Maddux -- only $1 million of the Sasaki money was spent -- on signing lefthander Ron Villone (who actually probably got $2 million for reaching incentives based on starting X number of games).
This is the team we purchased season tickets for, a team that would have to have other teams suffer a bunch of injuries and poor seasons to compete? Is this Bavasi's idea of a joke? While it's great that the organization recognized that Melvin had to go, it's truly unbelievable that this is the clown running the franchise. He presided over one of the worst falloffs in baseball history yet he gets a mulligan because it was his first year. A team with a payroll over $90 million should not have to hope for other teams to stumble in order to contend.
In the press conference Bavasi alluded to his own potential firing (after next season) saying that if he didn't make the right managerial choice (and the team sucked in '05), next year there'd be a press conference and Tim Hevly (Mariners Director of Baseball Information) would be standing there instead of him...
While there's some hope for 2005 and beyond the unfortunate thing is that Bill Bavasi is still general manager. To exemplify what a complete and utter idiot this fellow is here's a Bavasi's quote from the press conference on Monday announcing Melvin's firing:
We knew we had some holes," Bavasi said. "And we felt that to be competitive in our division there would have to be some fallback by the other teams and we had to get fortunate. We did show some age real quick on the field."
WHAT THE HELL? Bavasi basically admits that he knew that the club he constructed last winter wasn't good enough to compete and that the club would have to get lucky in order to compete in the AL West. This has to be one of the stupidest comments ever to come out of the mouth of a so-called "baseball executive". Bavasi had the money last winter to put together a competitive team, heck he even got an $8 million windfall in January when Kaz Sasaki decided to go back to Japan, but he didn't spend it, not on Pudge Rodriguez, not on Greg Maddux -- only $1 million of the Sasaki money was spent -- on signing lefthander Ron Villone (who actually probably got $2 million for reaching incentives based on starting X number of games).
This is the team we purchased season tickets for, a team that would have to have other teams suffer a bunch of injuries and poor seasons to compete? Is this Bavasi's idea of a joke? While it's great that the organization recognized that Melvin had to go, it's truly unbelievable that this is the clown running the franchise. He presided over one of the worst falloffs in baseball history yet he gets a mulligan because it was his first year. A team with a payroll over $90 million should not have to hope for other teams to stumble in order to contend.
In the press conference Bavasi alluded to his own potential firing (after next season) saying that if he didn't make the right managerial choice (and the team sucked in '05), next year there'd be a press conference and Tim Hevly (Mariners Director of Baseball Information) would be standing there instead of him...
