Eric Wedge Up for Yankee$ Job?
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A BJOL reader wanted to know, would you compare the firing of Yogi Berra in 1964 -- after the Yankee$ won 99 games but lost the Series 4-3 to the Bob Gibson Cardinals -- would you compare that to the Yankee$ firing Joe Girardi after the 2017 season?
His terse answer, "I already have."
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Meanwhile it is announced that the Yankee$ are considering Eric Wedge for the head job next year.
In Dec. 2013, Wedge publicly aired the Seattle Mariners' dirty laundry in one of Geoff Baker's best and most honest baseball pieces. Wedge didn't stop there; he fired 4-inch broadsides into Lincoln's and Armstrong's GM-by-Committee fiefdom in other places also.
Dr. D assumed, and assumed 100%, that this meant that Eric Wedge was tired of working in baseball. Under normal circumstances, a departing manager does not say Word One about his former organization NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENED there. You'll notice that even Lou Piniella, as one of the most powerful people in the game, held his comments to just one or two oblique sentences after he left. Of course, Jerry Dipoto has had next to nothing to say about the strange things that occurred under Morena and Scioscia.
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The fact that Eric Wedge could broadside Lincoln and Armstrong with impunity -- and now get very real consideration for another head job -- tells you just exactly what an organization like the New York Yankees thinks about the Seattle situation back then; whether we're viewed in similar terms now, who knows. Presumably with Jerry Dipoto, who is respected throughout baseball, it's different at least in terms of relationships. Of course we'll start talking real respect if and when the Mariners ever schedule a playoff game.
But back then? "Well, sure, Wedge went off the rails and broke code on THAT one, but who wouldn't have. No worries about his doing that to US; this is a professional baseball organization."
No slag, just fact.
Right after the Mariners' signing of Shohei Ohtani, Dr. D's best possible outcome for the winter will be, of course, the appointment of Eric Wedge as field manager of the New York Yankees. :- )
BABVA,
jemanji