DPD: It’s Official: Dusty’s Getting the Ax!

On Wednesday, Chicago Cubs' General Manager Jim Hendry was asked about the status of his field manager, Dusty Baker, for the 4,237th time. Since Monday. In typical Handry fashion, he denied not only that he's considering Dusty's fate, but he even went so far as to deny that he said he would be considering Dusty's fate.

This was because reports last week indicated that he would be doing exaclty that. According to the Associated Press and ESPN news sources, Hendry said:

"I'll spend a lot of time over the break not just with the way the situation is, but with your own players. I'll sit back and reflect on the first half,"

Forget for a moment that he manages to lapse not only tense (present and future) but also person (I/you) in that one sentence. Think about the fact that this really shouldn't be news at all. A General Manager of a baseball team, especially one whose team has played incredibly disappointing baseball for all of this season and most of the last one, is going to take a few days to think about things? Isn't that his job? He's supposed to be thinking about the team pretty much all the time, isn't he? Nobody writes a news story when a CEO goes to a board meeting to think about how to make more money for his company, so how do Jim Hendry's musings over the future of one of his employees qualify as news?

Another Hendry quote from the AP last week:

"You are getting ready to go into a month where you have to evaluate what you have. You want to give everyone a fair chance to succeed,"

Well, yeah, I suppose that's true. Granted, his comments are a little vague, but it would be tough to construct an argument saying that this quote in particular had anything to do with anyone other than Dusty Baker, right? You wouldn't say that the presence of, say, Greg Maddux or Todd Walker on the Cubs' roster isn't giving "everyone a fair chance to succeed" would you? No, I think that you would only say this about a manager, or a coach, perhaps, especially one who you think might be holding some players back.

So it seems therefore that it was fair of the reporters who interviewed Hendry last week to construe those comments as being about Dusty, and it was therefore fair of them to ask him about Dusty 4,329 times (it's been a few minutes since I wrote 4,237).

Read the rest at Double Play Depth...