Bowden On His Guys
Bowden's weekly Examiner column is out, and I was prepared to like it. It's about the front office staff he's assembled, and what they offer the team.
Interesting, right? Sorta. In typical Bowden fashion, we get him pimping for his friends: Bob Boone, Jose Rijo and Barry Larkin. The Boone section is almost laughable.
If that's true (and I don't believe it is, because he's just trying to pump up one of his buddies), then he should be fired. I don't know CRAP about amateur prospects and even I knew that Zimmerman was a Gold Glove fielder. That's all most people talked about!
Coming into the '05 draft, there were 4 or 5 picks rated highly at the top of the draft, and Ryan Zimmerman was one of them -- along with Alex Gordon, Troy Tulowitzki (no, I'm not bothering to check the spelling!) and Jeff Clement. To imply that Boone 'discovered' Zimmerman or that only he could see through his flaws is a joke.
Bob Boone may very well be the most brilliant baseball man there is. But this doesn't demonstrate that.
He dedicates 294 words to Boone, Rijo and Larkin, and here's the sum total of what he says about the most exciting person in the front office, Mike Rizzo:
We can't pump up the guy who's going to take our job once Mark Lerner wakes up and realizes that the Emperor's hoohah is dangling in his face, huh?
Oh, and to prove how much he loves the little people, he spells the name of his Executive Assistant wrong. Sure, he probably didn't type it, but...
Interesting, right? Sorta. In typical Bowden fashion, we get him pimping for his friends: Bob Boone, Jose Rijo and Barry Larkin. The Boone section is almost laughable.
He’s the reason Ryan Zimmerman is in Washington. A lot of baseball people were scared of Ryan’s mechanics, thinking he had a “bar” in his swing. Bob thought that, despite this, he still could bring his hands through the zone close to his body to hit the inside pitch. He also saw that Ryan could be a Gold Glove caliber third baseman. Before Bob told me I had to see him, Ryan was not on our radar.
If that's true (and I don't believe it is, because he's just trying to pump up one of his buddies), then he should be fired. I don't know CRAP about amateur prospects and even I knew that Zimmerman was a Gold Glove fielder. That's all most people talked about!
Coming into the '05 draft, there were 4 or 5 picks rated highly at the top of the draft, and Ryan Zimmerman was one of them -- along with Alex Gordon, Troy Tulowitzki (no, I'm not bothering to check the spelling!) and Jeff Clement. To imply that Boone 'discovered' Zimmerman or that only he could see through his flaws is a joke.
Bob Boone may very well be the most brilliant baseball man there is. But this doesn't demonstrate that.
He dedicates 294 words to Boone, Rijo and Larkin, and here's the sum total of what he says about the most exciting person in the front office, Mike Rizzo:
And we added Mike Rizzo as an assistant GM. As Arizona’s scouting director, he helped take a farm system that was ranked 29th in 2001 to No. 1 before he joined us. Enough said.
We can't pump up the guy who's going to take our job once Mark Lerner wakes up and realizes that the Emperor's hoohah is dangling in his face, huh?
posted by Chris Needham at
9:06 AM
1 Comments:
Rizzo is really the only standout thing the franchise has done since Kasten has taken over. Retaining Brown was also a good thing and pretty much a no brainer. My hopes for the future of this franchise really lay in those guys and I place very little in the rest of the FO. Any new ownership with one living brain cell would have fully staffed the scouting and PD depts. That’s just SOP along with having to get into the DR and Venezuela to find players for any team serious about the farm system. Whether or not the scouts they hired are the super-duper-allstar- no-I-mean-all-world-no-I-mean-all-universe hype that Kasten and Bowden spout remains to be seen and is difficult to verify. The long term strategy is fine if they can keep Rizzo and Brown with the franchise for awhile but some team may want to hire those bright guys away for a higher position. The short term strategy in almost every area falls far from desirable to say the least or the Kasten hype to say the least from retaining Bowden to the product on the field to crowd control at the stadium (well at least the opening day crowd) to food operations to tickets etc. I’m giving the Lerners a pass on most of the mess we see. I think they, like everyone else, have deferred almost all of the decision making and budgeting to Kasten and are merely passengers on the Stan Train to Planville.
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Anonymous, at 4/12/2007 10:34 AM
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