Farewell Felipe
Well, everybody knew it was coming, but now it's official, Felipe Alou is no longer the Giants manager. Remember, in sports it's never official unless the press conference and statements are released.
Considering we were calling for him to go almost a month ago, we think it's all for the best, but still, Felipe personified class and dignity and is one of those people who personifies everything that is baseball. He seemed like a pretty okay, dude too, almost beyond wise with a mischievous little sense of humor that usually had a bit more edge to it than it appeared.
There seems to be some bitterness in his statement and comments about the teams he had, lack of good players and not being given complete control of the team, but we stand by what we said earlier. Despite all the injuries and the elderly roster, the team just didn't play well in ways that had nothing to do with injuries and an elderly lineup. They just never played good, smart baseball and they never really played with any sort of urgency. Just look at the last couple of weeks where they were still in the pennant race and just rolled over and died, winning just two games.
So now the big question is just who is going to manage the team next year. There's a lot of speculation about some of the bigger names out there, mainly Lou Pinella and Bob Brenly (somewhere out there, somebody will mention Dusty but that will never happen). Also mentioned are some up and comers, like Angels pitching coach Bud Black, Oakland coach Ron Washington and two of the Giants coaches, Dave Righetti and Ron Wotus.
On KNBR, they were thinking it's going to be Brenly. He's a famously nice guy, an ex-Giant, and has a World Series ring on one of his fingers. To which we say, "meh." Yeah, he won the 2001 Series but if we remember correctly, Torre managed circles around him and the only reason he won was because Schilling and Johnson pitched pretty much every damn inning of that series that wasn't pitched by Byung Hung Kim. We could have made a decent showing with Johnson and Schilling that year.
Who the Giants pick as the manager is an interesting question mainly because nobody knows what the hell the Giants are going to do this off-season? Retool or rebuild? Pinella and Brenly seem like the kind of guys you bring in if you have a veteran team that's close to winning while the others seem like the kind of guys you would bring in if you were going in the opposite direction. Who they pick could give us a sign as to what they are going to do.
In other words, we dunno. We're darn sure Sabaen probably doesn't know either. But this is pretty much where the Giants off-season fun begins.