Baseball Musings gets results. From Wednesday night:
The Baltimore Orioles defeated the Athletics 3-2 Wednesday night, the ninth straight loss for Oakland. They’ve scored 26 runs and allowed 53, and the team was shutout twice. Something needs to be done. I almost think they should send down everyone they can send down and replace them with however is at AAA or AA. Maybe the manager needs to smash some items in a team meeting, or maybe they need a manager who wants to win at all costs.
Oakland fired Bob Geren this morning.
Geren’s four-plus season tenure at the helm in Oakland was marked by numerous injuries, a lack of offense and high-profile departures as he was unable to post a winning season after taking over an AL West championship team from Ken Macha. Geren posted a 334-376 record, including a 27-36 mark this season that has left Oakland eight games behind Texas in the AL West.
The A’s currently have four starting pitchers on the disabled list, including a season-ending shoulder injury for Dallas Braden. Oakland also was without injured All-Star closer Andrew Bailey for the first two months and is last in the American League with just 223 runs through the first 63 games.
The Oakland starters are 14-15 with a 3.06 ERA, so I don’t think the pitching is the main culprit here, even with the injuries. The offense just can’t score.
They replace Geren with Bob Melvin, who may be the most sabermetrically inclined manager they hired under Beane. It always disappointed me that they didn’t hire someone like Melvin sooner.
Brian Fuentes publicly called his manager out a few weeks ago about a lack of communication.
Huston Street then tweeted an Oakland reporter basically backing what Fuentes had to say about Geren.
It’s easy to tell ballplayers to shut their mouth, but maybe in this instance things had gotten so bad (for Fuentes and I’d just go out on a limb and say other A’s) that he didn’t care what the consequences might be.
Street than took the opportunity to make his feelings known, essentially backing what Fuentes had to say.
You have to wonder if Beane was made aware of some of the problems and if he didn’t do anything until the public snafu.
Anyway Melvin seems like a better fit for the A’s then Geren ever did. Of course, they lost their first game under him.