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LaBombo

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Everything posted by LaBombo

  1. LaBombo
    It's not surprising that the Twins would give Anderson the small but symbolic gift of quitting instead of getting fired. It's a nicer way to end this chapter for the Twins front office, and a more pleasant parting of the ways to talk about in an interview for Anderson. But either way, in the end this is the one guy you most need to be rid of after four years of almost mind-boggling starting pitching futility.
  2. LaBombo
    You may be right! I may(almost certainly) be crazy!
  3. LaBombo
    But it just may be a lunatic we're looking for! This is another thing about Gardy I won't miss. It's hard to deny the Pohlad legal defense team's assertion that the Twins have never acknowledged publicly exactly how much influence Gardenhire had on roster construction and other personnel decisions. But we've seen enough of Nick Punto sliding head first into the dugout and the team bus to the airport, as many catchers on the roster as the White House had Secret Service agents until recently, and the Mystic Lake/Medina Ballroom revival tours of players we remember from better Twins times to wonder if the organization's most enthusiastic past booster (pssst... gardy) of all those things may have had... an undue influence.
  4. LaBombo
    Take out the 32 2013 starts of Scott (5.43) Diamond and PJ (5.95) Walters and plug in 32 starts by Phil Hughes using his pre-2014 4.00-ish career away ERA, and you get about 50 fewer runs allowed by the rotation. If you add 50 earned runs (32x about 1.5 runs per game) to the 2014 pythag calculator, you get 5 more losses than the 87 that the calculator 'credits' them with this year. Use Hughesies's 3.50-ish pre-2014 road FIP and you get a six win improvement. So Gardenhire stood to gain not only the four extra wins he actually did get if Hughes pitched like pre-2014 Hughes away from Yankee stadium, but a couple of extra wins to cover the marginal losses of Morneau and Doumit. At any rate, a perceived lack of talent has almost never been enough to save the job of non-expansion managers throughout the post-war history of baseball who've lost 90 games three seasons in a row. Gardenhire had four. For me, the more relevant question than whether it was fair to let him go at the end of the 2014 season is whether it was worth ignoring conventional baseball wisdom to let him start the 2014 season.
  5. LaBombo
    They've already proved they're willing to spend less when the situation calls for it, which should indicate a willingness to spend more when the situation calls for it.
  6. LaBombo
    Major league baseball started one hundred and forty three years ago, just six years after the civil war. In all those years, not one team has brought back a manager with no championships to his name after four consecutive losing seasons. Not once. So the question isn't whether Gardenhire is a good manager (imo he is, with some frustrating flaws) or whether he should have been let off the hook due to rebuilding, or who they can get to replace him and whether they'd be better for the team, or whether a new manager can bring about improved results next year and beyond. The question is... why should the Twins have made baseball history by bringing him back? What's so different about Gardenhire and/or the state of the Twins that he should manage the Twins after four seasons that would have meant the end of the tenure of every non-championship manager in the history of the game?
  7. LaBombo
    My thought as well. Unless the perfect job comes along for 2015, he probably will not manage, and will at least sit on FSN as a guest. If that goes well, it wouldn't surprise me if he became part of a Blyleven/Smalley/Gardenhire/and possibly some other ex-Twin broadcast rotation, maybe as a career if he really enjoys it. But my guess is that having been a part of the '91 championship but having come up fairly spectacularly short in the postseason as a manager, he would still love to try to take an underachieving veteran, win-now team to the playoffs a couple of times before he hangs it up for good.
  8. LaBombo
    From a preseason 2010 article - "Pohlad said Target Field revenues should allow the Twins' payroll to remain in the $95 million range beyond this season." 95 million or 52%, take your pick. The Twins dug this hole for themselves by making predictions sound as much like promises as they possibly could without technically obligating themselves, and then making those predictions not become reality. And now they've kicked off the run-up to the 2015 season by saying they'll probably keep trying to get out of the hole by continuing to dig. It's confusing to me that you don't see this as cause for consternation, or at least disappointment.
  9. LaBombo
    Well, one side's argument changed at least somewhat. Those who thought it was a bad trade for the Royals didn't all feel it was entirely because they gave up too much. It was that they thought that the Royals would continue to be crap, and that acquiring Shields would accomplish nothing but make them "crap with a star" (love that movie). Or perhaps less dramatically, make them measurably better but still a team that would come up short against an improved Indians team and especially against a Tigers team anchored by a perennial triple crown threat and a rotation that appeared to be stronger than a theoretical AL Central All Star rotation made of the other 4 teams' best. That was my impression, despite the fact that my valuation of Shields as a legitimate #1 for a contender exceeded that of most of the other critics of the trade. But now the Royals are playing postseason baseball with James Shields on the mound, and it didn't take any sort of bizarre series of fluke events or a bunch of positive outlier seasons. They really were improved enough by the trade to be a contender. That's a significantly greater outcome than many non-fans of the trade foresaw, including me. Completely agree it's too early to evaluate the balance sheet, but a tip of the cap to the Royals for making a risky, unpopular, oft-criticized trade that helped overcome nearly 30 years of futility.
  10. LaBombo
    Dave, you're maybe going to think I'm a dink for this, and you may be right (, I may be crazy), but your rebuttal to the Gardenfiring sums up my support for it better than my support for the support of it does. Think back to what you or a close family member or a close family member's memory were doing just after the Civil War. Between then and now only Tom Kelly got asked by ownership to return to a 90x4 loss team and accepted. The Twins lost another 90-some games afterward. So my proposal is that I will be happy to throw out some replacement manager names that you can probably shoot down like the Red Baron in a Peanuts cartoon, but only after you share your feelings for why Gardenhire deserved to make history with another year as the manager of the flailing Minnesota Twins.
  11. LaBombo
    Oops. It was meant as a compliment, not a wish for the opening of a door to a Scottie Ullger returning to complement the coaching staff.
  12. LaBombo
    You're way ahead of me on this. Your first point is a welcome update worthy of your TD company organizational structure chart moniker. Stepping off a Gulfstream after the opening round of a quarter-billion dollar tax fraud trial with a defense that appears to some as 'TurboTax failed to AutoUpdate' or 'an airedale ate my tax attorney's hard drive' is always bad PR, but especially on a day like today. And if you have time, can you follow up on the Joe Schmit take on the replacement? My limited google skills came up with obscure Eagles references and a Youtube video of T.B. Schmit's hit "So much in love", a song that dates back to my early to late-middle adult youth. That song used to show up fairly often in the musical selections of friends' and acquaintances' weddings. Paid for a nice stereo for the Honda by always betting the drunken reception 'under' for how many months such a marriage in question would last. Not cynical, just lucky with odds sometimes.
  13. LaBombo
    Since my guess on a replacement is already pretty worthless because the Gardy firing caught me totally by surprise, I'll skip it. Instead I'll mention that the KFAN guy who sounds like Andre the Giant in The Princess Bride, Meathead or something like that, says that the Twins source for his Saturday tweet about Gardy being out also told him that Molitor is already the new guy. Fwiw. Nm (not much).
  14. LaBombo
    A complement to all Twins figures involved....
  15. LaBombo
    There was no question in my mind that his comment meant that it wasn't his call. My only question was whether that revelation was agreed on ahead of time, or just an unplanned byproduct of what was an emotional parting of the ways.
  16. LaBombo
    Funny you should ask... (30 TD regulars roll eyes...) 2001. Contraction backer Carl Pohlad brought back Gardy predecessor Tom Kelly, who had more WS rings than Gardy had ALDS series wins. Before that, just after WWII Philadelphia Athletics manager and future Hall of Famer Connie Mack was retained after 4 straight losing seasons by Athletics co-owner Connie Mack. Only two times in the history of MLB.
  17. LaBombo
    From what it looks like so far, the Gardy/coaches PC was the exact opposite of the Vikings AP public relations train wreck. Everybody got something good out of it. 1.The Pohlads got a ton of free 'We know it's messed up and we're fixing it' PR with the dramatic firing of a relatively popular manager of a team that hasn't fired a manager since Reagan was president. 2. Ryan got to advance the company theme of hope and change, but got to avoid being the villain with the thinly veiled admission it wasn't his call with the 'It was a mistake to say he'd be back; I have bosses' remark. 3. The coaching staff got an entire offseason to land new gigs, with no bridges being burned with the organization for possible re-hiring. 4. Gardenhire got to demonstrate to potential employers in MLB and the sports media that in addition to other fine qualities, he is either a} A class act for how he handled the public loss of a job he still liked or loved, or b} A smart team player who was ready to move on anyway but realized that ownership needed to publicly sack him rather than let him resign because of the need to send a message, just a little less shocking than a ritual sacrifice, to the season ticket base that losing is not ok.
  18. LaBombo
    Those are exactly the three names that came to mind when the news broke. They are the three newest, Bruno and Steinbach both seem well-regarded and are familiar names, and Cuellar seems like a fine choice to succeed Anderson and continue to be a bridge to Spanish-speaking players.
  19. LaBombo
    Your surprise is probably at least partly due to Gardy Fatigue Syndrome. Some people who were ready to see the Twins and Gardenhire part ways last year (including me) just got too worn down to add the disclaimers anymore. Over time, posts like 'Gardy is a good manager but he drives me crazy sometimes, and the organization should move on' in the 2012 or 2013 seasons became just 'Get rid of Gardenhire already' this season. The former gives the impression that he's well regarded but that change is needed, while the latter looks more like 'Fire Gardy because he stinks'. In other words, for many people who wanted to see him replaced there's nothing to gloat over. He's a good guy and a good manager. Why celebrate a guy like that losing his job? It's a shame, but that's how this business works. And as for me, I'm hoping and looking forward to the Twins making a good choice with his replacement, but there's a part of me that will miss the Roaming Gnome at the dugout railing, and picturing him in a Twins uniform as he charges red-faced onto the field to break the AL career record for manager ejections.
  20. LaBombo
    Yes. Gardenhire was a good manager (with some frustrating quirks) and I wish him well whether it be with another team or early retirement.
  21. LaBombo
    The Twins are already the only franchise in MLB history to bring back a manager after four 90-loss seasons. They're still owned by the same family who brought back Kelly and still run by the same president who hired Gardenhire.. It's very difficult to imagine them not repeating the same mistake twice. Not the end of the world, but another symptom of a larger issue. If there's any franchise more in love with its own obsolete narrative of how it has achieved past success, I can't imagine who it would be.
  22. LaBombo
    So you're saying you think you can mock the Wild enough more than the average Wild fan to generate conflict?
  23. LaBombo
    The low contact rate has really held his career back. Maybe if Anderson is let go by the Twins he can go get Pricey straightened out. Fingers crossed on both counts.
  24. LaBombo
    Don't you! Don't you?
  25. LaBombo
    Don't worry, ashburyjo...warr... uhhh, ash. Your secret is safe with me. And you were excellent in Connie and Blide, Mugsy, (both encrypted to protect your anonymity!) and whichever good movie that was where you didn't play an unstable, murderous thief. We know she was just jealous of your hair.
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