John Bertie, Jim Crane, John Birdie discussed on Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast
Automatic TRANSCRIPT
Time. Did you know there's only one scheduled off day on a weekend during October? Wow. Yeah, it's going to be a bit compressed. How about that? I kind of like in terms of playoff play styles and how you have to structure your restor and how it maybe mirrors the regular season more so than just building tons of off days and letting certain teams take advantage of that more. Maybe we can talk a little later in the week about which teams just look like good playoff teams, whatever that means to the extent that we can even tell a good playoff team is it's pretty hard to predict that sort of thing beyond just saying it's a good team they wouldn't want a game that's probably a good playoff team too. But that would be of interest to me. So a couple of quick things John birdie got his 40th stone base. So yeah, that was a big race that was a big source of suspense for everyone. I know was this going to be the first season since 1958 not to have someone steal 40 and as it turns out because the moments John Bertie swiped his 40th bag, so thanks to John Bertie and I read a couple of reports from Ken Rosenthal and I believe bob nightingale also that the Astros are considering possibly a leadership change and by the answers owner Jim crane, which boggles my mind. Yeah. I guess not that that would cross his mind, but that that could actually happen if it because the asterisk they've handed that team over to James click running baseball operations and dusty baker running things on the field. And really could not have done a better job taking over under somewhat difficult circumstances. Good circumstances in that they inherited a good team and they have not run it off the rails, but tough circumstances in that they're the Astros and everyone hated them and a lot of people still do. And not only have they not added fuel to that fire, haven't had an additional scandals or anything, have more or less operated like a normal baseball team as far as we know. But they've kept winning and there was a great foundation there, but they have taken that foundation and they have built on it, or they have made the most of it. They have not torn it down. They have just conducted business as usual. And deflected at least some of the ire toward the esters that was existing or again not fan the flames, and so Rosenthal nightingale reporting here that Jim crane could be considering changing both of them, potentially hiring a new manager, maybe making a change with click. Seemingly because there's been some clashing that maybe baker and click have clashed a tad over click's desire for a more analytical approach. I suppose that is not surprising, given their respective backgrounds and ages and styles and everything. And that kind of thing has been docking dusty for so long, right? Oh, dusty baker, he's not like analytically oriented. And maybe he wasn't initially using the baseball guy, but I think he's gotten on board at least to the extent that he needs to. I mean, all the old narratives about him overworking pictures and all of that, that's out the window, like he's done a great job of breaking in all of these new homegrown pictures that the astors have and handling them responsibly. And whether he's fully on board with analytics and the language that click speak safer metrically, I don't know, but you can't really argue with the results, like how much better could the esters be than they've been under dusty baker, not to mention the fact that just everyone loves dusty baker and his players seem to love dusty baker. So that's one possible clash according to Rosenthal and then the other one, the bigger one seems to be between crane and click. So reading here from Rosenthal, the athletic crane is difficult, demanding, and heavily involved in baseball operations, acting almost as an owner slash GM, et cetera, et cetera, crane does not trust click the way he trusted Jeff luno. How did that work out? With whom he worked for 8 seasons, crane is also more inclined to act quickly and boldly than click who comes from the raise a more frugal deliberate operation. None of clicks transactions has been particularly flashy. It goes on, but basically it sounds like maybe crane wants to meddle more than click wants to or he wants to do some things that click doesn't want to do. And if this were to happen, it seems like it would be a huge cell phone just given how well things have gone for the asterisk lately and also the sort of message that would send to prospective replacements if the message is that crane wants to bring in his own person so he can basically be the boss and make moves himself. So the whole thing just seems wild like the notion that the Astros would need to win a World Series for James click to keep his job or for dusty to feel secure. I know they have a assistant GM Pete patella around who's kind of been the architect of their player development machine I know people think highly of him and for all I know crane has had his eye on him but after everything that organization has gone through and all the self inflicted reputational damage to think about kind of cleaning house after a 105 win season from the outside at least just seems really rash to me.