Thursday, July 24, 2008

You Talk Too Much, You Never Shut Up

This week Bowden announced on a sports talk radio show, more or less in passing, that Chad Cordero would be non-tendered after the season. The team would hope to resign him, but they would allow him to become a free agent first, thereby avoiding arbitration and hopefully signing him for much less than he would get otherwise. In fact this move would make sense, but it's bad news for Cordero, and it's a decision the team doesn't need to make until December. Announcing it now is unnecessary and feels like a slap at Chief. This widely linked NFA post from yesterday explains it all in much more detail.

Here's the problem: according to Cordero, Bowden dropped this mini-bombshell without ever talking to Chief himself. Cordero evidently heard the news from his dad and now, understandably, feels disrespected. Here's the MLB.com article, which includes the following: "One baseball source said that Cordero is so angry by the early announcement that he plans not to re-sign with the Nationals next year." And here's the Washington Post's Chico Harlan's blog with some choice words from Cordero.

What is Bowden thinking? Is he trying to alienate people? What possible reason would he have for saying this without talking to Cordero first? And if it just slipped out, why didn't he call Cordero immediately to apologize and let him know what was up? This is Cordero's livelihood we're talking about. At best, Bowden was flippant. Do we need to impose a gag order on him like they did in Cincinnati after he compared the players union to al Qaeda?

At this point, given how many times he has hurt himself and/or his team by shooting his mouth off in the press, I really think there might be something wrong with the man. He really seems to have some compulsive, self-destructive need to draw attention to himself.

So since Bowden's apparently learned no lessons from all his prior foot-in-mouth gaffes, I thought I'd send a message along from Run-DMC. Maybe they can get through to JimBlow.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've sat still for a lot of crap in the past. And I've tried not to pile on in this forum.

But enough is enough. Bowden needs to be removed from his post with due haste.

Steven said...

Thanks Hendo.

And certainly feel free to come back with Bowden praise and criticism as you see fit. I'm not really interested in having a mindless piling-on fest. I have a POV, but I like to think we're thoughtful about it and able to acknowlege the good things that he does (which exist).