In Rob Neyer's new blog post today, he talks about the Astros' front-office disconnect between Run-DMc and Eddie:
If you don't trust your baseball people to choose your manager, you should get new baseball people.
If you think it's silly to give a manager a three-year contract but don't mind throwing $100 million of your ill-gotten gains at Carlos Lee, you probably need to have your head examined (though of course something similar might be said of half the owners in the majors).
It's not likely that failing to hire Manny Acta is debilitating, because it's not likely that Manny Acta is a great manager...
...What's debilitating is a sense of the organization, both within and without, that the owner and his top lieutenants aren't on the same page. Whether that characterization is fair or not, often the perception becomes the reality.
We didn't come out here to play tiddlywinks, son.
-Hal Smith
