Astros win the Word Series this year. Baker decides to ride off into retirement as a champion instead of dealing with the hate next year when fans are back. Crane says eff it and brings back Hinch for 2021.
Hinch will probably be a manager within 2 years. He is being mentioned for the Tigers job and would be a good fit there, and it doesn’t seem like there’s been a bunch of backlash surrounding the interest in him. I am more skeptical about Luhnow’s future in baseball. I think he was much less liked by other people in the game especially people in the league office. But I have noticed his wife is still active in baseball twitter so I bet he at least has some interest in coming back. It’ll be interesting to see if he gets another shot. Would be a shame for the Astros if both of those guys were able to move on and have success in baseball while the franchise they worked for pays the bigger price. Hopefully Click is up to the task.
I would not be surprised if both Hinch and Luhnow are properly employed at the start of next season. Competence will overrule politics.
Could y'all just imagine if the Dodgers fail to win the World Series...again...and they decide to move on from Dave Roberts...and hire Hinch? Who was that ******* that said nothing was Alex Cora's fault? Wonder if he'd say the same about Hinch.
On Luhnow, competence is not letting your team get caught cheating. Whether it is by being morally sound (i.e., not cheating), or being better at cheating so you don't get caught, either way demonstrates more competence than getting caught cheating in a fashion that didn't really help much.
How many players on the Astros do you think were aware of the trash can scheme? A dozen? two? The whole thing was doomed to come out. I dont know what Luhnow knew. Not sure anyone does other than him. So all of that said, I am convinced that the Stros thought they were only moving the goalposts by inches in what they did to cheat over what they feel other clubs were already doing. As it turns out, perceptually at least, they moved the goalposts by yards or to some, miles. And they just happened to have a nark on the team in Mike F#cking Fiers.
No chance. Dusty has this team in line for the playoffs in spite of devastating injuries all around and being forced to rely on 15!! rookie pitchers several of whom have been been exceptional. Click is the best GM hire we could have made. His draft was A++ and he didn’t panic at the deadline and mortgage the future window.
I'm not gonna say it's Baker's fault that the hitters don't seem to care, but the fact is that it has happened on his watch. Frankly it may be time to clean house if they are this mentally defeated.
I would just like to point out a couple of things: 1) Manfred told everyone, EVERYONE, to knock off the camera-related bullsh!t. 2) Crane told Luhnow, if you're doing it, ****ing stop it. 3) Luhnow may or may not have told Hinch about this MLB directive (this is very up in the air) 4) Luhnow lied to Crane about what they were doing 5) Luhnow's ass got fired 6) Hinch got thrown under the bus .... .... .... Why is Luhnow the good guy here? We've been over this so many ****ing times, get over it.
Agree with this 100%. Click I think will prove to be an excellent GM over time, he was the right man for the job. Hinch I think is a good guy who was thrown under the bus, even if one disagrees it's easier to make a case for him. I would support Hinch coming back (as HIGHLY unlikely as I think it will be, unfortunately), Luhnow I do believe deserved it.
I am sure many of you have better optical skills than me, but I don't see anything that different. A bunch of guys that are having a hard time keeping the wheels on, but still giving it an effort. I will agree they don't have as much of that youthful swagger that made you feel like they could leap tall buildings. Maybe less of that is what some of you are seeing and just translating the meaning a bit differently. Odd for me to see things a bit more optimistically than some of you.
Ain't no "manager" that can make a WS team not play like **** when they all decide to play like **** at once. It's just crazy because it's happening in a stupid 60 game season. It's happened every year (and it's happened to every good team) but nobody really cared much because it was only 1 month out of a long season.
Though, a manager could make a WS caliber team play like **** all at once. The only question is whether a bad streak is bad luck, a bad run of injuries at same time, manager-influenced, or other. It is almost always impossible to tell in a small sample.
Two things give me confidence that Click will turn out to be a solid GM: 1) Crane hired him, and as much as I still hate the fact that Luhnow got fired (rather than Crane just letting him serve his suspension), Crane hired Luhnow. So Crane has a track record of hiring smart people. 2) The league and its self-righteous writers threw a hissy fit when we hired him. They were legit whining that we were able to hire somebody good and that wasn't fair because you know...not only did they expect Crane to fire Luhnow, but he had to hire somebody crappy too!