Pinella to manage Cubs
 

AP says Piniella is the new man for the lovable losers. Not to be officially confirmed yet. Reported in Detroit News online.

I guess it's a safe bet that Steve Lyons won't be near the Cubs dugout anytime soon.

First reported on ESPN radio. They say its a 3 year deal.

well actually there is no problem between Lyons and Pinella. After the whole "incident" they were out to dinner and Pinella suggested that if he got the Cubs job he'd put in a good word for Lyons as a broadcaster

Why didn't Pinella stick up for Lyons when he got fire. Pinella could of said he was just joking around. Its ok, don't fire him.

Instead Pinella kept quiet when Lyons got fire.

see

Lyons was fired because what he said was offensive according to FOX, not because he offended Lou. It's not like Lou had anything to do with his firing

Are Cubs fans happy about this? Anyone? I'm looking for a reason to feel like this is a good thing.

The typical Cubs fan (knows little about baseball and the team in general) is pretty much in favor with the deal. They recognize the name, hear he won a WS before, and can live with the choice.

Die-Hard fans for the msot part hate the move. Pinella is Dusy Baker on crystal meth. He hates rookies even more and he abuses his starters even more, if you can believe either of those. He also subscribes to the "walks are no good, they only clog the bases" philosophy (coined by Big Dust), so expect more free-swingin.

The only positive I take from this is that Pinella is NOT going to accept the awful lapses in fundamentals that the Cubs were known for under Baker. In terms of personality, Pinella and Baker are possibly polar opposites.

I'd rather have Girardi.

Lou has an extremely good record as a manager. He's not young, but this could certainly be another Jim Leyland thing.

Which is exactly what this team needed. No fundamentals, no passion, no drive was this team last year. Piniella will not accept that in a team.

Further, as a side benefit, I don't see him agreeing to a contract unless he had at least a verbal committment to the Trib spending some cash on players. Hopefully this means the Cubs will do something useful this offseason.

Good god, man, the Cubs had a payroll over $100 Million last year. How much do you expect them to spend? You can only spend $10M and still have the worst record in the NL.

The key isn't spending more, it is spendig better.

I wouldn't.

Girardi has managed one year, and gotten fired. Lou Piniella has won a World Series as a manager.

Their credentials are not even close.

Yeah that worked well for him in TB.

He led the Marlins to a pretty good season, and it's not like he got fired because he did a bad job. I'd much rather have him than Piniella.

Which I do agree with, but the fact of the matter is, if they are gonna nab any top tier free agents this season, that payroll is gonna increase by a fair amount.

Trib is just gonna have to live with the MLB equivalent of dead cap space and pony up some more cash.

Girardi was fired because his owner was a colossal egomaniac. Though he probably won't get it, he is amongst the top candidates for manager of the year.

Casey Stengel won six more World Series than Piniella. I'd rather have him. I know, I know. "But Lou's alive!" Not if you heard him announcing the playoff games. Good lord. I can only hope he's a naturally terrible announcer, because if not it means he's gone senile.

As a Saint fan, this feels exactly like when the Saints hired Ditka. But as somebody who picked the Twins, Yankees, Dodgers, and Padres to advance to the LCS round, I haven't been right about anything in quite some time. So, I hope I'm wrong here as well.

Your opinion is that Girardi did a good job managing this year. The Marlins' opinion was that he did not. Lou Piniella at one point was considered a potential Hall of Famer as a manager. Perhaps some people have forgotten that.

It could be a Mike Ditka coaching the Saints situation, I agree. We've lately seen some older guys have some success in MLB, though.

Well, I don't know about that -- I don't think it went too much deeper than Jeffrey Loria despising him personally. Almost everyone thinks Girardi did a hell of a job this year.

Based solely on his announcing, Lou does not sound like he knows where he is most of the time. I hope this is nothing more than really bad on-air presence.

Actually the Marlins' opinion was that the owner couldn't get past his dislike of his manager.

Actually, if you read some of the personel decisions that Girardi wanted to make, you would see why they fired him too.

As far as do I like Pinella managing the Cubs? I dunno right now. I'm not sure if there is anyone out there that would be better for them. Girardi? No. Showalter? No. Brenly? Alou? Washington? No, no and no. Bochy is probably the one guy I would want, I just can't see trading a player to the Padres for him.

They broke my heart again.

Joe Girardi would of been a perfect fit for the Cubs.




Girardi performed a miracle in florida this year with their payroll.

As a Giants fan, I can't tell you how excited I am about this development.

Well, that takes the air out of my joke. :(

No offense, but do you know *anything* about the Girardi-Marlins situation? Girardi is getting heavy consideration for nl manager of the year.

True, but the stories going around say Girardi resisted many of the personell moves that put the Marlins in the position to over achieve this year. Girardi also didn't approve of his coaching staff (backed up by the fact that the pitching coach chose to stay in Florida rather than follow Girardi) and clashed heavily with the GM and Asst. GM, not only with the owner.

Of course, how much of this is fact and how much of it is spin to justify the firing the Manager of the Year is speculation.

Dola - if the Nats do indeed hire Girardi, it will be a great move, and almost but not quite make up for the fact they are going to let Soriano walk with no compensation whatsoever.

Yes, I understand as well as anybody on the outside what is happening in Florida.


Look, Girardi might be a good fit for Chicago - I just think it's silly to get all worked up over a guy whos track record is one year, one firing, regardless of the percieved success of that year and the imagined reasons for that firing.

Forget the "stories going around". The only hard facts we have are that Girardi took a $14 million team and managed them to a 78-84 record.

That's black magic, baby!

Where do you get this from? Piniella managed a lot of guys with the M's that walked a ton, and many of his M's teams ranked in the upper half in walks drawn and OBP.

Just because he as a player didn't walk much doesn't mean he dislikes players that draw a lot of walks.

It's worth noting that ARod's best years, by far, came under Piniella. hmmm

You want a dickhead for manager, Pinella is your man.

You want to get a group of veteran players with some talent and greatly increase your chances of getting into the playoffs and winning, Piniella is your man.

He's good for the tirades I'll give him that. He's rated 99/100 in temper.

Because BubbaWheels is involved in this thread, is it fair to set the outcome of the Cubs decision to hire Sweet Lou, in the same lofty outcome as Maximum football? :D

Well, grasshopper, thread length is a matter of subject and timing...everyone here loves football, and the timing was kinda like, oh, the timing of a Magglio Ordonez bat on a soon-to-be-pitched Chris Carpenter fastball...yeah...kinda like that!:D

The Cubs? Players with talent? Chances of getting into the playoffs?

BWAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.....

*breathe*

.....HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

The Baker/Piniella eras are refreshing to me as a Cubs fan on one level. An organization that has been historically thrifty has made the commitment to act like a big market team and spend money instead of relying on one star (Sandberg / Sosa) to draw millions to the gate and just rake in cash. The downside here is that the executive strategy as adiminstered by Hendry primarily is so fatally flawed that there is no hope for the Cubs while he is at the helm. They want to mirror the Tigers ascendancy to the World Series, but what they are missing out on is that Jim Hendry should never ever be confused with Dave Dombrowski.

I thought that is what he did in Tampa Bay. OF course, I don't remember Tampa getting into the playoffs and winning. Or, did I miss something?

Losing 90+ games every year he was there, that I remember.:D

Yeah, you missed the "talent" part...

Seriously, those Devil Rays teams didn't have nearly enough talent to legitimately compete in the AL East. There were some hitters there, but not enough and not nearly enough quality pitching.

As I've said (perhaps in other threads) I don't think managers in baseball have a huge impact - I think their biggest role is managing egos and the atmosphere in the clubhouse. Sure, who they decide to play every day has some importance, and pitching decisions and substitutions play a part, but I think that in the big picture, the general manager has a bigger part in a team's success based off of who they get to populate the roster.

Lou by himself isn't going to make a bad team good. But he can be a guy to make a good roster better, good enough to be a W.S. contender.

The Cubs certainly have a ways to go to get that kind of roster, but they do have some building blocks - Zambrano, Hill, Prior (if healthy), Lee. Murton's decent, Barrett's decent - if they can stay healthy and if Hendry is smart about off-season signings and trades, I don't think the Cubs are as far away from contention as their '06 W/L record might suggest.

He also missed the "group of veteran players" part. I never understood the D-Rays' hiring of Pinella. You knew they were going to be a young team, and Pinella doesn't work well with young players at this point.

The first key to whether the Cubs will be close to good is what they do with Murton. True, the guy doesn't have OF power, but he has a way above-average OBP compared to the rest of the team and fills a major need in the lineup, so if they trade or bench him to pick up a power hitter who can't get on base, you'll know they have no chance of fixing the things that are killing them right now.

That was a forced marriage, at least on Lou's side. Piniella wanted out of Seattle, both because personal reasons (he wanted to be closer to his Florida home to help support his ailing father-in-law) and frustration with M's management (he felt they didn't do enough to bring in help at the trading deadline in 2002 & 2003).

The M's still had him under contract though and weren't going to just let him walk without some compensation. Lou really wanted to go to the Mets, but the M's liked Tampa's offer a lot better. Lou resigned himself to the Tampa job since the Mets deal wasn't going to work out and it had the advantage of being very close to home. In addition, the Devil Rays' brass assured Lou they'd bump the payroll and get in some veteran help to go with the kids.

Why the D-Rays thought it would work, I'm not sure - I guess they looked at the state of the M's when Lou started in '93 and figured that was a similar situation. I'm sure they also figured it would be a big PR boost for the team that would help ticket sales.

The Cubs teams the last couple of years were bad at drawing walks while surrendering a ton of them. Collectively they struck out a lot as well, but they made up for it with questionable base running and sub-standard defense.

How much do you hold the manager accountable for these things? What if the same things happen with different players? Is this the manager, the GM, or some combination of the two?

Personally, I've held Baker and his coaching staff largely responsible for this over the last few seasons by not having any kind of accountability for repeated failures in these areas. Which is why I was disheartened to see Pinella keep Rothschild around as pitching coach.

I agree with dawgfan that there are building blocks in place to put together a winner. Zambrano, Lee, and Ramirez are all strong players that are in their prime. The middle relief was pretty good last year, but woefully overworked. And there is a good amount of money available to try and build a deeper starting rotation.

There is no one in the NL Central who was particularly scary this season. The Mets, who pretty clearly had the best rotation, had a pitching staff that is led by a pair of aging starters who probably are not going to get better or pitch more games next year than they did this year. I think there is good reason for anyone in the NL to feel like they are just an off-season away from contending. Especially a team with a competitive payroll.

http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/...nagers_part_3/

Take it for what it's worth, but this study shows Lou Piniella as the top manager in the game since 2000. The study method is not perfect - there are certainly other explanations for variations in team performance than just manager ability - but there's enough sample data and projection methods used that it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.

He's also #1 in base toss trajectory and distance.

He cares. About what I have no idea.

You don't hold the manager *solely* accountable, though he bears some of the blame - in the previous case Dusty's complete disdain for walks has some bearing on the Cubs futility - but it is more of an organizational responsibility, with some blame belongingto the hitting instuctors and coaches.

Dusty picks his ML coaches, so reasonably he picks guys whose philosophy mirrios his. As such, the Cubs had hitting coaches and instructors that taught you swung an most everything and you didn't take any pitches.

The rest of the organization is built by the GM, Jim Hendry, and he has stocked the system with managers and coaches who also believe the base-on-balls is detrimental and that hitters should swing at everything.

This is why the Cubs haven't been able to produce a bona-fide major league hitter form their organization since Mark Grace and Rafael Palmeiro. And boy, was Andre Dawson right about that one? The Cubs traded the wrong guy.

Dola - the Cubs just hired Alan Trammel as a coach. Hopefully he'll bring some Motown Mojo with him.

Odd thing to say considering his firing lead to Leyland being hired, which is the only way they've gotten as far as they have. Since it's the Cubs, maybe he'll bring some of his 119-loss mojo with him.