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.

Hail to the Red Sox and Other World Series Thoughts

After a particularly unmemorable World Series last year (wherein the Giants defeated the Tigers, and no one will blame you if you didn't remember that), the Red Sox and the Cardinals ratcheted up the Memorable Scale for us with the Fall Classic that ended last night with Red Sox 6-1 win in Game Six.  

Congratulations Red Sox!

This Series is made memorable due to the following factors:

• The absolutely other-worldly hitting of MVP David Ortiz.
• Pitching performances by Jon Lester, John Lackey, Koji Uehera, Michael Wacha (despite last night's loss), and Trevor Rosenthal.
• The unbelievable and unprecedented finishes in Games 3 and 4.
• Only the blow-out nature of the Game Six finale - which also meant that there would be no Game Seven - scaled back the Memorability Factor where this Series was concerned.

As a rule, I am a fan of the broadcast team of Joe Buck and Tim McCarver.  Indeed, there are times when I think that I am the only guy who likes McCarver, but I have to say that the incessant pointing out that the "Red Sox have not won a World Series clinching game in Fenway Park since 1918", followed by such facts as "Babe Ruth was a pitcher on that 1918 team" (really???) was enough to make me want to throw a shoe at the TV set.  Yes, it was an interesting factoid the first, second, and maybe even the third time we heard it, but it seemed like that as ALL THEY TALKED ABOUT for the final three innings of the game.  It was even incorporated into Buck's closing call when the final out was recorded.  

As final calls go, it was a 180 degrees removed from "I cannot believe what I have just seen." This one where as time goes on I will bet that Joe Buck wishes he had a Do Over.

Speaking of John Lackey, wasn't he one of the guys who was part of the Fried-Chicken-and-Beer Brigade that indirectly led to Terry Francona getting fired in Boston two years ago? Unless you're a real Sox fan, that made him a hard guy for me to root for last night, or any night for that matter.

And at the risk of sounding like a right-wing reactionary from the 1960's, I hope those guys will now shave those God-awful beards.  I gotta tell you, I did not like that look, and if they decide to keep them, we'll be stuck looking at the all the time when ESPN decides to televise every one of the Red Sox games in 2014.

Finally, and this is good news, I think, the last-place-to-World-Series season for the Red Sox will pretty much guarantee that Bobby Valentine will never manage in the major leagues again.

Oh, and for the record, The Grandstander had this one wrong, as I had called for the Cardinals in six.  Can't win 'em all!

Now, it is time to officially get into the Hot Stove League.  106 days, more or less, until Pirates pitchers and catchers report in Bradenton.