So the Astros fired manager Cecil Cooper yesterday with 13 games left to go in the season. My initial reaction was, "They couldn't wait until the end of the season?". I guess they really wanted him out of there if they simply wouldn't let him finish the season with a non-contending club with nothing to gain or lose.
I then read an article by Richard Justice of the Houston Chronicle titled, "Astros fire Coop. What took them so long?" which put it into perspective a little.
The article referred to Cooper's poor game management skills and also a general lack of respect for him among the players. Apparently some of the players had been wearing t-shirts asking, "Really?". Really as in, "Did he really just do that?"
Ok, that is brutal and I am understanding this a bit more. If you have such open ridicule going on in the clubhouse such that your players are brashly wearing shirts like this, the end is no doubt near.
This got me to thinking. What t-shirt slogans would other managers expect to see from the players in the clubhouse in their "dead man walking" final days? How about these?
Lou Piniella - "Milton Bradley was right!"
Jim Leyland - "Second-hand smoke kills!"
Dusty Baker - "How many pitchers on DL?!"
Charlie Manuel - "No age discrimination here."
Ozzie Guillen - "F@&$! Ozzie!"
If these managers start to see these, they are toast.
Bank on it.
4 comments:
Interesting about the T-shirts. Hadn't seen that one. And too bad for Coop. Always liked him as a player.
Also, I'd like to think that a man like Richard Justice would take a long hard look in the mirror before lobbing bombs about other peoples' job competence. I mean, I've seen C students in Freshman comp with a better command of logic and a better ability to state a thesis and stick to it. His piece on Schilling's Hall candidacy come immediately to mind.
Thanks for the tip. I am going to attempt to locate that article.
Unfortunately, I think the standards for sports writers are not the same as that for other writers at the paper. One example is Peter Gammons who is a nationally respected sports writer. This is fine and everything but he does not write in complete sentences. He doesn't. How do reconcile that with his profession?
He could easily (I would hope) clean it up and an editor should make him.
Could this be the Richard Justice Schilling article?
Mark,
This is probably it unless there was a subsequent article. It is good to see that our crack research staff got right on this.
It certainly is a meandering piece. It also contains a few too many one sentence paragraphs for my taste. (And before anybody accuses me of the same thing, yes I do this frequently here but I try to keep my writing style HERE conversational and the posts rather short. It is a break from the lengthy stuff I do at work that because of the nature of the content would bore the average reader to tears.) In a longer piece, I think you need to tighten it up, lengthen the paragraphs and frankly add some content. I think CCC also intimated that a professional writer needs to stay on point.
I simply don't have the formal (well any) expertise to critique this further (my degree was elsewhere) though I know CCC can do it.
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