Barry Bonds a Wild Thing?

The Frontier League’s Washinton (PA) Wild Things have offered Bonds a contract. And check out those sweet incentives…

Publicity stunt or not, this is hilarious. Amazing. Superb. Best-thing-I’ve-seen-all-year brilliant.

Way to go, Wild Things.

Filed under: baseball , barry bonds, baseball, frontier league, washington wild things

John Russell, irrelevant?

The Pirates are set to name John Russell as their new manager later today, replacing the fired Jim Tracy, or so the Pittsburgh papers are reporting. You might remember Russell as the Buccos third base coach under Lloyd McClendon–more specifically, he was the one that always seemed to get a lot of guys thrown out at home, which is sort of the one bad thing a third base coach can really do.

Anyway, my thought through the whole managerial search process was, whoever gets hired is ultimately going to have about zero impact long-term on the Buccos. 2008, barring some sort of super-coup by Neil (say, J-Bay for Ellsbury and Dice-K), is a lost cause already, mainly because we’ll field mostly the same players and they’ll end up with mostly the same record–most likely again under .500. Guys will get better and guys will get worse, and because we don’t have really any great players and none on the way, the Pirates as a whole just aren’t that great. And I’m OK with that. As long as the new guys in charge realize we are NOT a Matt Morris away from contending and that our baseball club needs an entire overhaul from A ball up (which they seem to), then I’m alright with whatever happens on the field for the next couple of years. Hope for actually fielding a legitimate baseball team for a while is much more important to me than .500 for a year.

But anyway, John Russell. He coached the Phillies’ AAA team last year and didn’t win a lot, but supposedly that Ottawa team had some terrible, terrible players (so it’s not a reflection on Russell, really, because it seems to me that which team wins and which team loses has much more to do with who actually plays the game, rather than who sits on the bench and answers questions at the press conference, i.e. the manager–which would count as a vote for “irrelevant”). But, I read something just now that made me maybe actually like the John Russell hire, and could provide a glimmer of hope for our 2008 Pirates:

It didn’t hurt Russell’s chances that when Huntington, formerly a special assistant with Cleveland, did some scouting of the Ottawa team in August, Russell’s club still showed energy and took infield before games…

“We knew going into last season that our strength in the minor leagues was going to be from [high Class A] down,” [Phillies' assistant GM Mike] Arbuckle said, “and that our weakest team was going to be at [Class AAA]–and it certainly was.

“But when I was there in August, John still had his team getting after it and competing with nothing to play for. You’ve got to be a pretty good manager to get a team to do that. John did a great job with a team that was extremely thin talent-wise.”

The Lynx finished 55-88, the 55 victories being the lowest in the International League. They were last in the league in runs scored (553), home runs (59) and team earned run average (4.77).

Remind you of any team we know and love? Terrible players, terrible result. But, Jim Tracy clearly lost control of the 2007 Pirates, and they just didn’t care. Whether John Russell can make the 2008 Pirates care remains to be seen, as does whether or not them caring will make any difference in how many times they can win (it probably has more to do with the players–as it did for the Lynx). Ottawa, under John Russell, was still terrible, as the Pirates most likely will be next year. But if Russell can coach and teach and not try to make the Buccos the 2004 Dodgers, than he’ll be an improvement over his predecessor. Preaching “fundamentals” doesn’t get me all that excited (as things like scoring runs lead to more wins), but for a team that can’t throw, catch, or hit (like the 2007 Buccos), then they probably should learn how to do that.

The next few hires Huntington and Coonelly announce, i.e. the guys in charge scouting and player development, will be much more important to analyze and scrutinize, because they’ll have something to do with the Pirates over the next decade. We’re in such bad shape now not because Lamont, McClendon and Tracy couldn’t get the teams to care, but because Dave Littlefield and his crew were awful at identifying good players and teaching them to play baseball. John Russell probably won’t be the Pirates manager the next time we win the World Series, but someone we draft in the next year or two could play for that team–if we draft the right folks, develop them, and make some savvy trades.

So, is John Russell irrelevant? Most likely. But, will fans be forced to watch Ronny Paulino make a mockery of the term “catcher” every night, see Cesar Izturis bat second, and hear a defense of Jeromy Burnitz for not running out a ground ball? No.

And that’s a good thing.

Filed under: baseball , john russell, new manager, pirates