Hurdle Takes the Fall, Bye-bye to Blass, and Who Ya Got in the Series?

The blood-letting began at PNC Park yesterday when the Pirates, in the smarmy personage of General Manager Neal Huntington, fired manager Clint Hurdle, right before the team's final game of the season.  The Pirates can manage to screw up just about anything, even a firing.

Clint Hurdle rides off

into the sunset

Let's face it, a case can certainly be made for Hurdle's dismissal.  He's been on the job for nine seasons, and his message had probably gotten stale with the players and was no doubt falling upon deaf ears.  His fate was probably sealed with that unbelievably horrid twenty-eight game stretch after the All-Star Break when the team went 4-24, and if THAT didn't do it, the tales of a clubhouse completely out of control during the second half of the season surely did.

All of that aside, though, the site of GMNH smugly saying how Clint needs to be "honored" for all he did for the Pirates, and short time after he fired him, is enough to make to make you want to retch.  And how about Bob "Mr. Dithers" Nutting going on and on about how great Clint was, and then telling us that GM Neal and his "excellent leadership team" will remain in place and will no doubt lead the Pirates to greater heights into the future?

As the PG's Paul Zeise said in his online column today, Hurdle's firing can be justified, but it can also be said that he did HIS job with the Pirates one helluva lot better than Neal Huntington and his scouting and development team did theirs.  And if you don't believe that, just take a look at the collection of sub-standard, non-major league quality pitchers that Clint had available to him in the bullpen whenever the underachieving starting staff faltered, which they did almost all of the time.

Clint gets the last laugh.  He is owed $6 million from the Pirates over the next two years, and I hope that he collects every dime of it from this sad sorry-assed organization that the Pirates have become.

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Until the front office screwed it up with the timing of the Hurdle firing, there was a "feel good" story this weekend, and that was the final series of games being broadcast by retiring announcer Steve Blass, after sixty years serving the Pirates organization.  (Has anyone served the Pirates so well for so long?  I think not.) The fact that Blass' final season turned into a complete shit show was a shame, and the hijacking of his final game by yet another inept front office gaffe was icing on the cake.

As my own tribute to Blass, I will tell my own Steve Blass story.  I've told it before in this space, but, what the hell, here it goes for one more time.  Back in the '00s  when I was chairing the local SABR Chapter, I invited Steve to be a speaker at one of our meetings, and he accepted.   How cool was that to have a genuine, honest-to-God World Series hero come to speak to us free of charge.

Well, he showed up, spoke for an hour, and did a great job of being Steve Blass.  The following week, as was my custom, I sent a thank you note to him for his time and for the job he did at our event.  A few days later, my phone rang at the office - I was still working then - and it was Steve Blass.  He want to thank me for sending him a thank you note.

Who does that?

Here's to a long, happy, and healthy retirement for Steve Blass.

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The Major League Post-Season begins tomorrow with the first of the Wild Card games, and culminates with the World Series, which might end right around Thanksgiving.  Ten teams are alive for a chance to obtain that World Series gonfalon.  Here is my Grandstander Confidence Ranking (GCR) for the teams still standing, with (1) being "most confident" and (10) being "least confident".

1. Astros
2. Yankees
3. Dodgers
4. Braves
5. Cardinals
6. Twins
7. Brewers
8. Rays
9. Athletics
10. Nationals

Feel free to factor the GCR into your calculations as you make your own World Series predictions, and, as always, watch, but don't bet.