Yankees: sternly worded letter; no one fired Red Sox: Blamed the video intern; Cora kept job (after year vacation) Angels: killed their own player (no team/owner penalties; guy sentenced to 22 years) Astros: lost the GM(basically banned from baseball), lost the manager(later hired by Detroit), lost draft picks Carlos Beltran: working in Mets front office Hey Jim, have a backbone and stand by your GM/Manager. Nope. “If you don’t fire him, we’re gonna strip you of your World Series!” Ahh yes, just like they “stripped” Reggie of his Heisman that everyone and their mother knows he won. … “We do not acknowledge the 2017 title.” “No team won the World Series in 2017.” Ran off Luhnow, Hinch, Click, Reid Ryan for Jeff Bagwell, Reggie Jackson and “old baseball heads”. Quite the choice! Hey, let’s hire Ausmus for GM! Hey, let’s hire Ausmus for manager! Hey, let’s hire Dana Brown because he was Craig Biggio’s teammate in college! Luhnow sued Crane/Astros but later ‘resolved’. He’s not coming back. Think he’s doing soccer now?
You think Luhnow wants to be in Spain running a 3rd division soccer club right now? dude is blackballed from even minor league ball.
Elias was already the Orioles GM in 2018. If it was as simple as Crane not being “forced” to fire him by MLB, Luhnow would have another job in an instant with any other team (including the Astros after the year-long ban ended).
Let's pray Dana Brown made the most under the radar move in trade deadline history by acquiring Kikuchi. So far, so great. He got JV last year, but that was gifted to him by the Mets and JV himself. He hired Joe Espada. Jury still out on that. The Caratini pickup was excellent. Not taking care of first base and a quality reliever was just a total failure on his part. Not sure how that came to be. The win totals are dwindling since his arrival after 2022. We still have a shot to match the win total of 90 from last year. Maybe even best it by a couple. I'm not impressed with him frankly.
I’d love to see a Mount Rushmore or a top 5 of best Gm’s ever. I think Branch Rickey is probably at the top of the list. Luhnow way up there obviously. John Scherholtz needs a ton of credit. Gillick is good. I don’t know any Gm’s prior to me starting to understand baseball pretty well in the mid 80’s but I wasn’t paying attention to Gm moves until the 90’s. Theo Epstein has to be really high up there.
Does anyone here long for the time when Luhnow and his great blue ox cleared forests from the northeastern United States to the Pacific Ocean? Good times.
I am thinking that's a tough task since GMs have different roles based on team across baseball history. Would owners that acted as GMs count? Connie Mack was GM/Manager... and owner.
I have grown more confident in Dana Brown over the course of this season. I think the early returns on his drafting give plenty of reason for optimism. Some of the FA moves haven't been great, but not crippling, which is the biggest concern with FA signings. Contracts like the one to Montero suck but they aren't the reason a team completely falls off the map. I think the trade for Kikuchi gave reason for concern, but his improvement since joining seems to indicate the Astros were pretty confident that they could "fix" Kikuchi. So the team's recovery this season has made me much less negative on Dana Brown, and I think the drafting especially gives me reason for hope that this golden era can be extended and losing Luhnow wasn't the death knell so many declared it to be.
With the amount of talent that has left the past several years combined with the draft penalties, it was only a matter of time before we started to see the effects on the team, regardless of the GM.
