Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Dugout
M2, you said that O'Brien needs to do more roster manipulations before we can know too much about him. "Roster manipulation" makes me think of Bob Boone, who manipulated his roster daily: playing Dmitri Young at 3B, batting Adam Dunn leadoff or any number of places in the batting order, putting Graves in the rotation, etc., etc. The players have made it no secret that such manipulation lead to poor play because people's roles were confused and no routine was established. Roster manipulation doesn't sound like a good thing to me, and not overly manipulating the roster gives players an opportunity to get into a routine to establish their role and their playing ability. If this isn't what you mean, can you clarify what you do mean by roster manipulating???
|
I'm talking GM roster manipulation. Not that I want to turn this into another Billy Beane discussion, but one of his central tenets is that as a GM you get roster full of players to mold to the best of your abilities.
DanO did next to nothing to manipulate the major league roster. He signed Cory Lidle, which was a BAD idea, and brought in Javier Valentin, ugh. It's just about as close to taking a pass as you can get. This is still JimBo's team in terms of construction. Honestly, if this team was so good and needed such little tweaking, then why on earth was JimBo sent packing? If anything, at the major league level, the Reds have been heading in the exact same direction as during JimBo's regime.
And O'Brien can't depend on the draft alone to build the club. He need look no further than his assistant Dean Taylor if he doesn't think that's the case. Taylor managed to restock the minors for the Brewers, but got canned before it paid off. DanO has got to figure what to do in the interim or he's going to be a footnote.
He's got to figure out to how to get what he needs with what he's got. In short, he's got to manipulate his roster.