If you don't know where that quote came from, it's from an old Saturday Night Live skit from the 70s. Don't worry about it. This blog is about baseball, though and how something has finally gone right for my baseball team, the Arizona Diamondbacks.
A little background. I have been a Diamondbacks fan since they were founded and entered Major League Baseball in1998. Back then, they weren't a great team, but I still rooted for them, still bought their merchandise and did everything I could to get to as many games as I could.
In 2001, the Diamondbacks beat the Yankees in one of the craziest World Series in recent history during one of the darkest periods in American history as well. Over the years, the Diamondbacks have gone from that World Series win to winning the NL Pennant or the NL West and then they started going downhill.
In 2009, Bob Melvin was fired and AJ Hinch was hired. My problem back then was that Hinch was the Director of Minor League Operations. He wasn't even a coach. With so many coaches out there just nipping for a chance to be a big league manager, the DBacks did something unconventional - they hired a desk jockey. And they put their faith in this desk jockey, thinking that he could do what other managers with experience or coaches with talent and skills in teaching or strategy, couldn't do - win baseball games. The kid (and he was rather young) didn't know certain aspects of the managerial position and had to look to his bench coach, Kirk Gibson, for advice and information about some of the most basic things that you are taught as a coach and a manager. And what did he do? He lost. Well, not every game, but a lot of them. And it got to a point where tonight, after only a year and change on the job, AJ Hinch was fired as the Diamondbacks manager.
I am actually happy about this decision. While I don't like it when managers get fired from a team, it usually means that the team is in a position where they don't have a chance to compete and want to start rebuilding the organization from the top. And this time, it included the GM, Josh Byrnes as well, so the DBacks really did start rebuilding from the top.
AJ Hinch had no business being in a Major League dugout as a manager and I am glad that he has been relieved of his duties. Kirk Gibson will do a great job with what he's been handed, though it is unfair that the organization will start to dismantle the solid players in hopes of getting some young talent that they can groom as their own in hopes of winning games once 2014 comes.
Until tomorrow.
1 comment:
Very well said ... Why do you say 2014? I know that's when most of the money will be back in "our" hands but you don't think we can do well before then? I'd hate to be on the bad side of Kirk Gibson.
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