Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 by Adam Wagner
Pirates Hire Completely Useless Employees
Today, the Pirates announced that they are hiring Kyle Stark as Director of Player Development and Greg Smith as Scouting Director.
Smith, 41, was in charge of the Tigers’ drafts from 1997 to 2004. In the final four years of that time, he managed to draft six players who are now in the major leagues. And one of them was Justin Verlander, who was the number one pick. Smith is a young guy who is now being given charge of an organization that can go nowhere but up. The only issue is that he has encountered this situation before and managed to make the franchise go nowhere. If the goal is for the Pirates to draft effective major leaguers, this is not the right hire.
If they believe that they simply need to look like they are going to contend, he was probably a pretty good hire. He will probably be another tool of Coonelly, as is Huntington, and simply do what he is told.
Stark, 29, will be in a similar boat. One of Huntington’s cronies from his days in the Indians’ organization (i.e. three months ago), Smith is getting his first shot at an important position and is going to want to make an impact. He appears to have extensive experience, specifically with “Pacific Rim” scouting, but he just does not appear like he is an up and coming front office star.
All the Pirates’ hires in this recent wave, however, have no experience. And that worries me simply because this team needs to turn around somewhere and doing so with people who have no experience doing so is not the right way to do it.
As with all of the Pirates’ hires, these may turn out fine. Unfortunately, there were certainly better candidates for both jobs (Jauss and Dave Holliday, who basically scouted every important part of the Rockies’ National League Champion team) and these guys simply look like tools.
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