Here is a quick, shallow look at the situation from Peter Gammons' perspective. As meaningless as it may be, I find a couple of his comments slightly interesting. <object width="384" height="216" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" id="ESPN_VIDEO" data="http://espn.go.com/videohub/player/embed.swf" allowScriptAccess="always" allowNetworking="all"><param name="movie" value="http://espn.go.com/videohub/player/embed.swf" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/><param name="wmode" value="opaque"/><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/><param name="allowNetworking" value="all"/><param name="flashVars" value="id=4492949"/></object>
I guess if Gammons ever said anything good about the Astros at all I'd take his negative comments more seriously. I guarantee you he got that Jeff Bagwell thing only from Richard Justice. It's media speculation and that's it. A national sports news program getting its information from an editorial comment in the local paper....from Richard Justice, the Writer of Wrongs.
i think he likely got the whole thing from justice. i have a hard time believing peter gammons has given the astros more than 8 seconds of thought this entire year.
Gammons didn't mention anything about Cooper's failures which is pretty ridiculous for somebody who supposedly follows baseball that closely but I, too, thought it was interesting how he dug right in and slammed McLane. Uncle D has accomplished a ton since taking over but he has also allowed the farm system to deteriorate completely. You can't credit him for his successes without pointing out his failures, and vice versa. Unless you're the Yankees or Red Sox, you can't fill all your holes through free agency. You also need some of those low-cost, high-production players coming in through the pipeline. That way you can use free agency to fill in a couple of holes instead of having more holes to fill than you can afford, which is the situation we are in now. I also found Berkman's comments about the firing to be interesting. The impression I got was that he had no problems with Cooper. When Berkman is vocal about something, I usually feel like I'm hearing his genuine opinion on the matter. He rarely sugarcoats things. Personally, I'd like to hear more about which players had problems with Cooper. I have a feeling there were quite a few on both sides of the fence. My guess is that there were more pitchers that had a problem with him than position players.
Agree on the Bagwell take but even Gammons sounded like that was a pipe dream scenrio. Gammons was pretty much dead on everything else and while he was a little hard on Uncle D, its hard to argue he was wrong on anything he said.
There was almost no substance to that Gammons piece. The only part I found somewhat interesting was how harshly he slammed McLane. I know there are people here that fully support McLance and others that are easy to slam him. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle, probably closer to those who support him. While he's accomplished a lot, he's definitely had some serious shortcomings. The fact that we have the worst farm system in baseball has to at least partially fall on his shoulders. He's hiring personnel and he's the one writing checks (and not writing checks). We may have drafted relatively well by our standards the last two years but even those improvements won't like remove us from the cellar. And if you dig a little deeper on how we actually spent compared to other teams, particularly this season, we may not have done nearly as much as a team in our position should have. My guess is that even with Lyles, Seaton, Castro, Mier, etc..., we'll still be the worst of the worst when it comes to organizational rankings. We have a looooong way to replenish our system. A few decent prospects won't change much. We need to flood our system with talent for several years and make sure that we don't get back in this position once things are fixed.
Not likely indeed--in fact guaranteed they will *not* remove the Astros from the cellar. ....because they're not *in* the cellar. Kidding aside, from one of Drayton's biggest supporters who won't apologize for it, I agree that he has to shoulder some of the blame for the current state of affairs. Bad draft day decisions, bad hiring, and silly firings. Every organization has lulls, even the Yanks. So while McLane can be blamed for some of this, I give him much more credit for the building that happened in the 90s than some of the earlier posts, as well as for keeping something together that was very competitive for 10 years, and I trust him to build another something great.
If I'm Drayton, I commit to lowering my payroll from whatever the planned budget was to $5MM less, and use that money to commit to drafting the best available talent in the minors in every round. Do that for this year and maybe next. The major league team might suck a little more, but no one's going to notice the difference between 75 wins and 80 wins. But every effort should be made to accelerate the quality of prospects in the farm system. If we're not willing to trade established guys, then this is the other way to do it.
gammons isn't going to remember the one double switch cooper didn't make in some meaningless game like the arm chair manangers on this board. he's got a whole league to cover you know. he can only evaluate this team as a whole in comparison to what he sees around the league.
horse puckey. if he's not going to do research before opening his pie hole on national television he should go play bingo and let someone else do the job.
the only complaint that i see regularly that may should have been in their is that Cecil had some problems in the clubhouse. other than that, and the game time decisions that everyone complains about should be covered by local media i'm sure a guy like gammons does his research. he isn't some ex athlete hack.
no question about it. that's what i'm saying, actually. it's my same problem with jim rome. they can talk about the state of the league, generally...or how teams look in the standings and make judgments based of statistics. but ask them who they'll hire next?? no way pete gammons is getting that right on his own. ask him how coop manages a game?? no way pete gammons is getting that right on his own....because he's not watching them. i'd value the opinions of people on this board who follow the astros closely far more with respect to any detail of the game, including how their skipper is doing as a manager.
I agree generally about the limited exposure a national media guy gets to individual teams and I actually think Gammons is pretty good compared to most. The problem I see with that argument, pgabriel, is that I wasn't even talking about Cooper's problems in the clubhouse or that one double switch. I don't even know about the real facts of the clubhouse issues so I have pretty much avoided that topic most of the season. The fact is that Cooper has made countless blunders, several of which were widely publicized. I don't expect Gammons to watch the games but it doesn't take that much effort to learn about Cooper's ridiculous over-aggressiveness on the basepaths and his complete mishandling of pitchers, particularly the bullpen. You can almost determine those things from five minutes of looking at statistics, not to mention that a guy with Gammons experience should have plenty of reliable sources that he can turn to get the skinny on Cooper's parade of bad in-game decision-making.
National coverage will almost never cover a team close enough to have inside information plus Gammons isn't interested if its not the Rsox or Yanks. No inside info was provided but he also didn't make anything up, just a board review of the Stros situation.
He did mention Coop was Selig's guy and Mclane is Selig's "friend" so its obivous he was saying Uncle D really didn't want Coop from the start.
