Nick’s Twins Blog tries to make sense of why the Twins fired Bill Smith. He figures either Smith wanted to rebuild slower, or wanted a bigger payroll to make the team competitive now. This passage struck me, however:
I wrote a post back in late September yearning for an injection of fresh thinking into the Twins’ front office power structure. While swapping Ryan for Smith qualifies as a major shake-up, it hardly guarantees a complete change in philosophy; in fact, it falls right in line with the good-ol-boy, promote-from-within strategy for filling vacancies that we’ve come to expect.
Maybe Bill Smith wanted some fresh thinking. Maybe Smith wanted to fire Ron Gardenhire. It’s quite clear that Ron is not a good field manager. He may have some talent in motivating players, but as far as strategy and game philosophy go, he leaves something to be desired. (This was the manager who wanted David Ortiz to advance runners with ground outs.) Given the Twins record, managers have been fired for a lot less. Here was a chance for Smith to make one change to improve the club. As we’ve seen in the Boston, Chicago, and St. Louis searches for a manager, there are a number of great candidates out there. If Smith wanted Ron gone, the good-ol-boy network that is the Twins might have shown Bill that you don’t go there.
I somewhat agree that Gardy is not a good field manager. The Twins fans are somewhat like the Cubs fans in that they come to expect less but are somewaht forgiving for more, it’s the midwest Norwegian thing(church going crowd). It’s kind of ironic that Texas manager Ron Wwashington played under Tom Kelly toward the end of his career and coached with other rather good managers but was totaly out-coached and out-classed in the last World Series by La Russa.