Duck! The baseball season is over for the shitty teams and it didn't take long for the ax to start swinging.
Buck Showalter was fired Monday as manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks after a disappointing season that saw the team go from division champions to third place. On Monday the Pittsburgh Pirates fired manager Gene Lamont after four seasons on the job. Jack McKeon was fired as manager of the Cincinnati Reds and the Philadelphia Phillies canned Terry Francona. Finally, saving the best for last, manager Davey Johnson is scheduled to meet with Dodgers executives on Friday, and he reportedly has been told he won't return next season.
Being a big league manager is kind of like a freelance job.
Now if you look closely you'll notice that there is a common denominator, all of them are from the National League. Not one manager from the AL was cut loose. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays (stupid name) decided to keep Larry Rothschild. They were one-half game better than 1999 and set a franchise-best record of 69-92 but they still blew. Not only did the Twins decide to keep Tom Kelly, nicknamed ``TK'', (boy that's real freaking original huh?), they gave him a one-year extension. They finished the year at 69-93, twenty-six games out of first. They have had eight straight losing seasons! That's pathetic!
I find it amusing that of the five NL teams that fired their managers two of the five had better records than the Devil Rays (Sssss…) and the Twins. Maybe the land of the smaller ballparks, the AL, doesn't want to win as bad as the NL. But I guess I can't be too hard on them since they can't even figure out the whole DH thing. Once again, the game is hitting, throwing and catching not two out of three. But that's another story for another day. I can't solve all the problems of the sports world, at least not today.
Big bad Buck had the D-backs in the hunt last year and this year, after some fat spending, he couldn't get it done. With an $80.8 million payroll, baseball's sixth highest, expectations were high. They finished 85-77, third place, 12 games behind the division clinching Giants. This team is clearly in a downward spiral. Last month they had to seek a loan somewhere in the vicinity of 80 million dollars to stay afloat. Can't bounce those checks. They acquired Curt Schilling who was supposed to ride in on a magic carpet and take the team to the Promise Land. Wonder Curt ended up going 5-6 as a D-back. Home attendance dropped from 3.6 million in 1998 to 3 million in 1999 to 2.95 million this year, but team president Rich Dozer said fear of losing fans had nothing to do with the decision to fire the manager. I'll bet it didn't help matters though.
The Pirates finished in fifth place in the National League Central with a 69-93 record, 26 games back. Lamont was fired after a meeting with owner Kevin McClatchy, who had predicted the team would win 90 games. Instead the Pirates lost 12 of their first 18 games and were never a postseason contender. It sounds like to me they should have fired McClatchy; he was the one shooting off his trap.
Jack McKeon got shit-canned for one reason, the Reds went out and got the big fish, Ken Griffey Jr., and they didn't make the playoffs. They finished in second place behind the mighty Redbirds at 85-77, 10 games out. Last year McKeon took the Reds within one game of the playoffs, this year, squat. Now to McKeon's defense, Griffey didn't actually light it up this year. He finished strong but started very slowly. It's a cross between the classic struggle of "what have you done for me lately" and Griffey being better at what he does than McKeon is at what he does. Rumor has it that this has opened the way for Ken Griffey Sr. to manage his kid. Griffey Sr. now acts as the bench coach for the Reds. What the hell does a bench coach do anyway? "Uh let's see, you sit there, you sit over there and you…clean up these seeds!"
Poor Terry Francona. Let's face it the Phillies suck! The concrete-like artificial turf at dilapidated Veterans Stadium sucks! Their run total, last in the majors, sucks! Their attendance, which was their second-smallest attendance total (1.6 million) in 27 years, sucks! Most importantly their record, last in the NL East for the third time in five years, and tied with the Chicago Cubs for the worst record in the majors at 65-97, really sucks!! Hey Terry, you're better off.
(Side note to Don Baylor of the Cubs, don't answer your phone for a week of so.)
Davey Johnson and his hapless Dodgers, whose $94.2 million payroll was the third highest in baseball, finished with an 86-76 record and a second-place finish in the NL West, to the hated Giants no less. Tinsel town will have none of that. If the Lakers can win the title than so can the Dodgers dammit. They have the highest paid player/crybaby in baseball with Kevin Brown. They have Gary Sheffield, maybe a bigger crybaby, and they made some key trades during the season. The bottom line in Hollywood is no playoffs, no job. Although teams managed by Johnson have finished first or second in 11 of his 12 full seasons. Give the man a chance, they gave him a team of whiny assed prima donnas. I'm by no means a Dodger fan but they haven't been the same since FOX bought them and then tried to buy the World Series. I love when shit like this goes wrong for teams. I have my fingers crossed for a Washington Redskins demise.
"We have a good future here, and I enjoyed being a Dodger,'' Johnson said after Sunday's season finale. "I'm going fishing.''
Hey Davey, you better go fishing for a job.
Here's the season in a nutshell. The average length of a nine-inning game was 2 hours, 58 minutes, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, baseball's statistician. That is a five-minute increase from 1999 and an 11-minute increase from 1998. It breaks the previous mark of 2:54, set in 1994. It only seems like six hours.
It was the first season since 1942 that a manager wasn't fired during the season. Apparently it makes for better media fodder when five of them get fired right after the season ends.
There were 5,693 home runs hit in 2,429 games this year, an average of 2.34 per game. That topped the previous mark of 2.27 per game, set last year. Sixteen players hit 40 or more homers, three more than last year and one short of the record set in 1996. A record 47 hit 30 or more, two more than the previous mark, set last year. I guess that also means that more money was spent on balls too.
Todd Helton of the Rockies had the highest average in the majors, .372414 to .372401 for Nomar Garciaparra of the Red Sox, and finished with a major league-leading 147 RBIs and 42 homers - missing the Triple Crown by eight home runs. Sounds like horseshoes and hand grenades to me.
Helped by three new ballparks, baseball drew a record 72,748,970 fans this year and the average attendance topped 30,000 for the first time since the 1994-95 strike. Cleveland led the major leagues at 3,456,278, followed by St. Louis at 3,336,493. Houston, San Francisco, St. Louis and Boston (2,586,032) set team records. Houston set a record this year???
With all of the talk of the watered down pitching, the decline in talent, all the homers being hit and the ball being juiced not one team won 100 games this year. The Giants had the best record in baseball at 97-65 and three teams, St. Louis, Atlanta and the Chicago White Sox tied for the second best record at 95-67. In fact the Yankees won the AL East without even winning 90 games. Here we are again talking about the mediocre American League. You throw it, you catch it, you hit it!
One college football note: Last Saturday the Beavers upset the Trojans.
I feel better now!
10/6/2000
phardoe@sportshollywood.com
How Will They Manage? 
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