- Dick Heller of the Washington Times: "Nats' casualties of woe could be Acta, Bowden"
- DCist: "Nats Roundup: Fire Away"
- SI.com's John Heyman: "Nats GM in Trouble"
I've been thinking for weeks that the silence from the Lerners in the face of all this Bowden criticism seems like a confirmation that he's toast. If you're not planning on firing a guy, you have to respond to the press with a vote of confidence. But it's been silence, so far. I hope this isn't the beginning of a Bowden defense from the Lerners.
Nationals Enquirer focuses on the other notable item, that the team doesn't listen to Kasten.
6 comments:
Now we know who's been feeding Heyman all his stuff . . . it's our old friend Stan the Plan.
The consummate bureaucratic infighter our old buddy Stan is using his mouthpiece in the press to make himself look blameless and powerless to rein in this stupid GM and the bumbling owners who are captivated by JimBo's siren song.
A master at work. It's beautiful to watch.
You may be right. Oftentimes, reporters will signal the identity of the unnamed source by burying an attributed quote at the end.
It's totally wild conjecture, but someone inside is talking shiznit. And if you are inside and trying to put pressure on Bowden it's not a bad idea to have a little sucking up to the owners in there.
It's also possible that we all thought we were getting Stan Kasten, the man behind the Atlanta Braves dynasty, and instead ended up with Stan Kasten, the man behind the suspiciously Nat-like Atlanta Hawks. Fire Kasten?
Nate, you might be on to something with your Hawks-Kasten vs. Braves-Kasten. But I think the Anonymous commenter above might be on to something...there's a messy relationship between Kasten & the Lerners, with Bowden in the middle, and it's starting to play out as this sham of a Plan unwinds...
I think ideally Kasten would be focused on the business side and then would have smart baseball people to run that side, and I think this is what Stan wants. I think the best thing about him is that he knows he's not a baseball guy, and knows to stay out of the way, the anti-Danny Snyder non-meddler.
In the current situation though, he's been forced into the Bowden partnership, who he can see is the wrong guy, so now he's trying to manage it to push him in the right direction.
Kasten knows enough to know that we need to commit to rebuilding, the way any casual fan could see, but he doesn't know enough to scout or pick the guys.
He can see Bowden's track record is mostly that he doesn't pick the right guys either. And he can see he's an ass, and understands that even if Bowden was the greek god of scouts that it hurts the team to have him in this role.
But he wasn't able to push JimBo out because JimBo is a much better sycophant brown-noser than talent evaluator. But he was able to get Rizzo in there and keep Dana Brown and build a structure to rein in the disastrous "Bowden unplugged" situation that ran the team into the ground from 11/04-7/06.
But Kasten isn't the GM. He doesn't deserve credit for building the Braves or not building the Hawks, except to the extent that it was very helpful to Schuerholz to have someone managing the hell out of the business side and letting him deal with baseball.
So firing Kasten, or blaming/crediting Kasten for what's happening on the field would be dumb. Credit Kasten that he's a good businessman and the Nationals are profitable. But if you want to blame Kasten for the team's record on the field, you don't understand his role.
If you're not planning on firing a guy, you have to respond to the press with a vote of confidence.
How naive can you possibly be? The public vote of confidence is always a precursor to a firing, often an imminent firing. If you truly want Bowden fired, you should be begging for the Lerners to issue a public vote of confidence in him as soon as possible. Their silence in the face of all this so-called bad press - which is not all that much, really, just the same stories being repeated over and over again in the blogosphere - shows that they are paying it no mind. The Lerners do not conduct their business dealings in the public eye. The moment you start seeing them doing that, then you'll know something is up. Not before.
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