|
Pity Dave Miley and Don Gullett, victims of circumstance.
Or are they recipients of mercy?
Time will tell, but it’s a shame the Reds let the only two intelligent people in the organization go today.
Their firing is a travesty
The switching of identities by the baseball and football teams in the Queen City is complete.
The Striped Kings of Incompetence are dead; long live the Red-Legged Leaders of the new era.
But seriously, what should we make of firing of the Reds’ manager (Miley) and pitching coach (Gullett)?
Are they to blame for the club’s disastrous season that currently stands at 27-43, last in the National League Central?
Hardly.
When a manager has bad players who don’t know how to play the game, it’s unlikely he’ll win with much consistency. With the way his team hit – generally it’s home run or bust – Miley never got many chances to flex his managing muscles. Trying a hit-and-run usually isn’t a good idea when your team can neither run well nor make consistent contact.
Two players, D’Angelo Jimenez and Danny Graves, were shown the door earlier this season, but those moves failed to shake the club from its struggles.
Of course, a team can’t go about firing its whole roster, so the manager was the next-most likely candidate to get the axe.
That is, of course, because the person who’s really to blame for this smoldering ash-heap of a MLB team is not going to fire himself.
That person would be general manager Dan O’Brien.
He is the one who put together this roster of mashers who whiff too much and treat “productive outs” like the plague, but he is still employed because he has in his corner the next-most negative force on Cincinnati baseball – Reds’ chief operating officer John Allen.
O’Brien’s firing Miley for leading to the bottom of the league standings the team he constructed is like a basketball official ejecting a coach for arguing an incorrect call.
The man who made the mistake sidesteps the blame and ushers out the victim of it.
How nice.
But maybe we shouldn’t feel too bad for Miley, a guy with a great reputation built during decades of managing in the minor leagues. It’s fair to assume he’ll be able to get another job eventually, possibly even with a good team. Maybe all the Reds did was save his career record from absorbing any more losses that aren’t his fault.
The same can be said for deposed pitching coach Gullett. Although he has been taking bad and broken down pitchers to respectability and even success for the past dozen years, he was relieved of his duty because Eric Milton and Ramon Ortiz, among other O’Brien acquisitions, can’t keep the ball in the ballpark.
Never mind that Gullett has been haled in his time for coaxing good seasons out of the likes of Pete Schourek, Elmer Dessens, Pete Harnisch and Ron Villone.
Apparently Milton and Ortiz – or maybe the ballpark – were Gullett’s kryptonite.
Oddly, Cincinnatians must look to the Autumn and the return of the suddenly stable (11 returning starters on offense) Bengals to find an object worth attaching hope to.
|
|
|
No comments yet - join this discussion...
|
|
|
|
|
|
