sinicalypse wrote:
where's JORR's thoughts on this? i ask because IIRC JORR was one of the few white sox fans on here to be overtly/overly critical of robin even back to his first season honeymoon when he was a total darling for getting a surprising .500+/late-season-collapse-via-bataan-death-march in a division where everyone and reinsdorf's mom picked le tigre to walk away with the division.
IIRC, JORR has had very specific beefs about ventura's in-game strategy (or more appropriately, the lack thereof?) i believe relating to baserunning (or more appropriately, the lack thereof?) and he pretty much came to the conclusion (even if via my own inference) and robin was largely asleep at the wheel managing a club that nobody really has expectations for, so as long as you don't have terry bevington v2.0 shitting the bed and obviously costing you ~10 games from your pythag W/L, meh, who cares because it's not like anyone picks the white sox to do anything anyways, and if they do it'll be because a few of the core guys get hot and have career years alongside some solid pitching and an effective bullpen.
so yeah i dont have any strong feelings either way about robin.... i mean he's just kind of there presiding over white sox baseball, and in the end all you can really say about him is that "he sure isn't ozzie guillen", who btw i'd be willing to bet eventually returns home like the prodigal son if/when this team becomes a consistent contender that could use a good manager to push them over the top / through-the-playoffs.
until then, here's to hoping that one of these next few years has the big/$$$ bats step up and hit 30HR/100RBI without hitting .198, and then the pitching does a notch or two above expectations with a bullpen that isnt blowing games left and right (like 2011 i wanna say?) and then the perpetually-underwhelming tigers will creep back towards them with ~90-94 wins and the indians will have 80someting wins but remain "scrappy" and "creeping on the come up" and the dumbass royals will continue to rue the day that they dumped off a future cornerstone in wil myers (even if he left after his arb years) for BIG GAME JAMES shields, immediate success notwithstanding good god man that was a boneheaded trade. tampa can't develop position players to save their life (even longoria being the obvious exception) and with their prospect pipeline drying up (when terry boers says its over, its over) they had no chance to get out of their rut unless some dumb desperate team was willing to give up a blue chip stud for one of their pitchers..... but man, why not give wil a year to prove his worth in MLB and then you can trade/sign david price instead of settling for BIG GAME JAMES, who is prone to have another 4.20/1.25 type 13-11 season, of course with 7 CGs so that's gonna be invaluable, eh?
dumbass royals.
I just think way too much is made of managers in general. I'm relatively indifferent to Ventura. I was disappointed in that I had hoped the wanton wasting of outs and baserunning nonsense was gone with Guillen. It seems worse than ever.