I’d hope they’d hire someone who worked under Luhnow and is clone in the analytical approach of operation. Putila or Gelles is an easy bet. Don’t know who will manage. Fine with Espada, mention of Dusty Baker doesn’t excite me.
Is it possible this is all just a front in order to save face and we'll re-hire Luhnow and/or Hinch next year? Are we even eligible to and SHOULD we?
This divorce feels permanent to me, not like my sister-in-law who's been married to 5 different men and remarried to one of them 3 times--insane!
Looking at his wikipedia page it looks like he gets into confrontation with his players. He doesn't seem great but I see people comment on he would be a good hire for the Astros.
Evaluating Pete Putila’s candidacy to be the next Astros general manager By Jake Kaplan Jan 15, 2020 18 When Astros owner Jim Crane announced in Monday afternoon’s press conference that he had fired general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch, he broke the news not only to the public but to his own front office. Following the press conference, Crane then paid a visit to the fifth floor in Union Station, the building next door to Minute Maid Park, home to the team’s baseball operations department. He spoke to the shellshocked group only briefly at that time but told those in the office that he planned to meet with many of them individually over the rest of this week to get a better feel for the various departments. It is a time of thorough evaluation for Crane, who appointed himself the temporary overseer of the staff that Luhnow left behind. The first thing he must determine, as it relates to baseball operations? Whether he wants a GM already with the team who will simply fall in lock step with the infrastructure the front office already has in place or if he needs to bring in a strong leadership presence from the outside. Convention would suggest the latter as the most logical, especially considering MLB commissioner Rob Manfred’s damning assessment of the Astros’ “very problematic” culture in the baseball operations department. But Crane also is already on record as disagreeing with that assessment, so he might not subscribe to the line of thinking that he can’t replace Luhnow with a Luhnow disciple. https://links.e1.theathletic.com/a/...EHTW6UsWfBYLQfhLlq5RL8yvpDp4X3RMdALtwkCu4TAU=
It is also not feasible to expect other teams will let the Astros poach their current GM, which would seem to limit the external candidate pool to former GMs looking for their next chance and up-and-coming assistant GMs with no experience as the top decision maker. This dynamic could lead Crane to attempt to ride things out for the year and conduct a true external search after the 2020 season. If Crane is truly willing to make an internal hire for his next GM, even if it’s only an interim basis for 2020, Pete Putila is the only viable candidate. Putila is the team’s lone remaining assistant general manager, which by default makes him the highest-ranking member of the baseball operations department other than Crane. He is also regarded highly enough that both the Giants and the Pirates interviewed him for their GM positions earlier this offseason. However, the 30-year-old Putila also lacks experience in the duties he would be assuming as GM, and experience figures to be paramount given the team is embroiled in scandal. He has been an assistant GM since only late September and under Luhnow he didn’t have much involvement on the major league side of the department. Putila has specialized in player development, where he has been at the forefront of implementing new-age processes driven by data and technology like the TrackMan radar-based tracking system and Edgertronic high-speed cameras. He has been lauded by current and former colleagues for his work ethic, his ability to connect with players and staff alike and he is seemingly universally liked throughout the organization.
But the public relations component of a GMs job – as important as ever in the wake of the cheating scandal – is another significant area in which Putila doesn’t have much meaningful experience. The ideal first GM job for him would probably have him leading a rebuild in a situation with relatively modest expectations in the first few years, which is the opposite of the situation he would inherit as the next GM of the Astros. Putila has worked for the Astros since 2011, when former GM Ed Wade hired him as an intern straight out of West Virginia University, where he studied sports management. He survived the 2011 changes in ownership and general managers and gradually worked his way up the ladder of Luhnow’s front office. He actually handled the in-game video replay review duties with the major league team in 2014 and 2015. In 2016, a year before the Astros would enact their electronic sign-stealing scheme, his duties shifted to the player development side. He’s been the team’s farm director for three and a half years. Recently, his responsibilities were increased to include oversight of the sports medicine and performance department. Putila, special assistant Kevin Goldstein, senior director of baseball strategy Bill Firkus and senior director of player evaluation Ehsan Bokhari made up the leadership group under Luhnow at the time of the GM’s firing. The team’s baseball operations department has experienced massive turnover in the last 15 months, a span that has seen the departures of two assistant GMs: Mike Elias, who left following the 2018 season to become the Orioles general manager, and Brandon Taubman, who was fired in October for his inappropriate clubhouse conduct during the team’s pennant-clinching celebration.
Gibbons, Baker and Showalter are all three competent managers but none of them are very appealing. Baker would be seemingly the worst fit of the three because he’s 70 years old and very old school. He’s pretty much the opposite of everything that has made Houston successful recently, so I can’t imagine them hiring him. Gibbons is the very definition of “meh”. I like Showalter the best of the three, but, again, “meh”. This situation just totally sucks.
I don’t know officially or anything, but Gibbons always seemed like a real negative manager. The kind of guy that finds a flaw in everything you do and points it out so much that you’re not sure if you’re doing ANYTHING right. I don’t know if he is actually like that, but he seems that way to me.
