I was emailed a potential blog idea pertaining to the firing of Ned Yost. However, I'm probably not going in the direction that most people think I'm heading with this topic. I believe baseball is a very bizarre sport. It's a sport full of accepted norms and unwritten rules, but they're followed because, "it's how things have always been done." Imagine yourself as the CEO of a business with an inept manager running one of your branches right before a crucial stretch for the company. Would you hesitate to fire that manager? Of course not. And yet somehow, when the Brewers make a similar decision with Ned Yost it's "drastic" and "desperate". Instead of considering that nothing like this has happened in recent baseball memory, let's view this move from a different angle.
The Brewers were sinking fast, having lost a 5 1/2 game lead in 13 games. With 12 games to go, there seemed to be almost no hope of them playing a game better than the Phillies to snag the wild card. After the collapse was complete and the season over, Ned Yost would have almost certainly been fired. Why wait? If you can do something about a bad situation, don't you have to do it?
The bottom line on Yost is that he's a bad manager. His in-game decisions are questionable at best and it seems to me, from reading between the lines of quotes, that Ryan Braun has either called him out or gone right over his head in public at least twice this year. Where was he when the whole scuffle happened in the dugout? How about the collapse from last year when they blew an 8 1/2 game lead? Throw in his insane whining about the CC Sabathia one-hitter and you've got an all-out distraction for a team making a pennant run.
It seems crazy that the Brewers fired him with 12 games left, but I think it's crazier that they waited this long.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment