Source: www.murraychass.com --- Sunday, October 22, 2017
The price of winning in Baseball has gone up meteorically, in case you hadn’t noticed. This month two managers, Dusty Baker of Washington and John Farrell of Boston, have been fired despite directing their teams to a second successive division championship. Baker and Farrell weren’t fired for lack of winning but for not winning enough. That is, their teams lost in the division series – the first round – of the playoffs and didn’t win – or at least advance to – the World Series. In dismissing Baker after two years as the Nationals manager, Mike Rizzo, the president of Baseball operations, stated it simply. “Our expectations,” Rizzo said on a conference call with reporters last Friday, “have grown to the fact that winning regular-season games and winning divisions are not enough. Our goal is to win a world championship.’’ There was a suspicion that Rizzo might not have been speaking for himself but for the team owners, the Lerner family, but that doesn’t really matter. The Lerners wouldn’t be the first owners to fire a manager for not winning the World Series. Fellow named Steinbrenner used to do it all the time. Baker’s fans, including Baseball writers who like Dusty, and he’s easy to like, were outraged at his dismissal. But decades of covering and writing about Baseball have taught me that managerial firings are routine. They come with the territory. No manager is immune from dismissal unless his name is Connie Mack and he owns ...
from Baseball http://ift.tt/2yK4jIT
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