The Pirates haven’t played a baseball game in almost five weeks and even though they fired John Russell just about as soon as the season ended, they still don’t have a manager. The only other team without a manager is the Mets, who had to conduct a general manager’s search before they could hire a manager. Since I’m the guy that wrote “this may be a rather short process” the day they interviewed Eric Wedge, I’m sort of at a loss to explain why they haven’t found a manager yet.
Right now I guess the easiest explanation is that the Pirates really want Clint Hurdle to manage. Does anyone buy that? Hurdle wouldn’t really be an awful choice given his experience with Colorado, but … I dunno. I’m obviously not working from the same perspective Neal Huntington is, but I don’t see what separates Hurdle from the other guys that we interviewed and passed over. Some guys might be worth waiting out the World Series for, but I just don’t see Hurdle as one of those guys.
Does Huntington? That’s the question here. In my head, I kind of likened the managerial search to something I’m more familiar with: my own grad school search. I started with a huge list of schools, narrowed it down to the ten or so I was interested in based on some general criteria (program quality, location, my chance of getting accepted, etc.), and sent out applications. Some schools rejected me, some schools gave me interviews, and a couple I never heard back from either way. By the time I’d been through the process, though, I knew I was happy enough with UNC that I didn’t care whether the schools I hadn’t heard back from wanted me to interview or not.
It was my assumption that most teams followed the same process: draw up a list of candidates, interview whoever you can in the first ten days, and pick who you like even if one or two of the guys from that list are still managing in the playoffs (Hurdle’s a good example of this: he didn’t get an interview by anyone except the two clubs still hiring managers and now he’s interviewing with both of the two that haven’t hired yet; had the Rangers been eliminated earlier I bet he would’ve made the Eric Wedge rounds). Baseball managers aren’t like football coaches, who can come in and change offensive styles or defensive sets and make a difference. They make out lineup cards and decide when to ruin rallies with bunts and occasionally yell (or don’t yell) at people for doing stupid things wrong.
So what happened? Did the Pirates really like Clint Hurdle from the start? Did the other interviews go poorly? Did they create a set of parameters that no one would agree to accept? (I have wondered about this: are they doing something like telling any potential candidates that Searage or Banister or someone else have to be kept on the staff and that’s scaring people off? That might be one way to explain why John Gibbons went from interested to uninterested so quickly, though there are obviously a million explanations for that sort of thing.) Did they want someone like Wedge only to see him take another job? I don’t know the answer to these questions. I don’t know if we ever will.
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