Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 by Adam Wagner
This is Awful
The Pirates came back from the All-Star break apparently ready to lose some more baseball games and generally continue this streak of constant futility that they seem to be destined to ride out. There is no question that now is the time for changes to be made, that, as Joe Starkey stated in his column today, employees must begin to be held accountable for their actions.
The first casualty of this housecleaning should be Jim Colborn, who should be hit in the rear end not by the door, but by Jeff Manto on his way out. Colborn’s actions towards Jack Wilson were reprehensible and out of line. Sure, Wilson has dogged it at times this year, but recently it’s Colborn’s pitchers that have not been getting the job done, not the expensive shortstop. Colborn’s staff has given up 9, 5, 5, 10, 6, and 5 runs in the games since the All-Star break. Those are not good numbers, especially considering the importance of starting pitching to the success of this team, which quite simply doesn’t score that often. If Colborn really wanted to chew out a player, why didn’t he chew out Ronny Paulino, who fails to protect the plate both when he’s catching and when he’s hitting? Jim Colborn is simply a man who wants to be a manager somewhere and is willing to overstep the bounds of authority in order to feel as if he has some degree of power and to save his own butt.
Manto has taken a team that was projected to be at least average offensively at every position on the diamond in the preseason, and turned it into one in which a replacement level relief pitcher can set down the heart of the order on 12 pitches. The belief that a man with a .230 lifetime batting average and 31 homeruns over 10 big-league seasons can make a team an offensive threat is ridiculous, and Pirate management should have known better than to let this man touch people like Jose Castillo and Adam LaRoche, guys who should be able to hit. If an ex-player couldn’t hit when he was supposed to, how will he be able to teach players trying to learn how to hit how to be effective?
Dave Littlefield should also go, for reasons constantly stated on this website (just go to any post labeled Pirates, and you’ll see what I mean).
Jim Tracy needs to go. Fans in Los Angeles became so fed up with this poor excuse for a manager that they set up firejimtracy.com (it used to work, I promise . . .) and Dodger executives hired Forrest Gump, aka Grady Little, to manage the club. It seems as if he is resigned to the losing, which reflects on the players and makes them resigned to the losing. The manager should be the most fired up person in the clubhouse when things are going this bad, especially on a young team like this where there is really one potential veteran leader, and he’s too busy being chewed out by the pitching coach to be as good of a leader as he can be.
This team needs sweeping changes in the front office and on-field management so that the changes that need to be made to the current team can be made effectively and without an eye on acquiring relief pitching, which is the only area where Dave Littlefield is even decent at procuring talent (and he did let Matt Guerrier go for nothing). This trade deadline presents a perfect time for those changes, as this season is obviously lost (and was when the All-Star break coincided with the team’s annual Hey, We’re Not THAT Bad Streak) and the looking forward to the future must begin.
Again.
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