Joe Shlabotnik wrote:Reading between the lines, sounds like Tony became irrelevant there.
It sounds like he was fired a year ago, and the Diamondbacks finally fixed the glitch.
TLR doesn't belong in the MLB office, because he's just not much of a bureaucrat, as his stint with the Dbacks demonstrated. That's to say he really doesn't belong in a front office either; it's like asking FRBG to cook. I gathered from "Three Nights in August" that it got under TLR's skin that he witnessed the rise of the MBA in baseball, and now the talk of the game is dominated by front office wonks (i.e. Moneyball) at the expense of field staff ("stand on the top step, Art [Howe]"). I think that dynamic offends his sensibilities, and gets his aforementioned competitive juices flowing, but the dude was built to be a field manager of a major league baseball team. I work in the financial sector, where plenty of rainmakers don't have huge staffs or fancy job titles, but everybody with a fancy title understands the business only works with our equivalents to field managers.
Somewhat selfishly, I hope he steps away, and writes a book. That is contingent on him finding a co-writer with more talent than Buzz Bissinger. There are a lot of gaps in our knowledge he could fill (Haren, Jocketty, Rolen, maybe Rasmus) and there's plenty he could explain about the game that you won't see on FanGraphs. La Russa seemed to drive some good decision-making in St. Louis, but he had very little concern about how to articulate that decision-making to us fans. Would be nice if he rectified that state.