Pirates fire Jim Tracy

[sakata_catching]

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07278/823179-100.stm

He will not be mourned. From throwing young, inexperienced players under the bus while coddling underachieving vets, to cutting short players' family leave for meaningless September games, Jimbo proved unpopular with both players and fans.

[sakata_catching]

Update: they're cleaning house. Director of scouting Ed Creech, director of player development Brian Graham and director of baseball ops John Mercurio are getting axed, too. May none of them head toward Baltimore.

[Rockbird]

Maybe we can send some of our guys their way?

[sakata_catching]

Very interesting post-mortem piece from Dejan Kovacevic regarding Tracy's tenure with the Pirates.

Choicest nugget: Tracy's creepy, whatever-happened-to-Baby-Jane like obsession with remaking the 2006 Pirates as the 2004 Dodgers:

Quite curiously, the shortcomings that Tracy had in personnel or instructional matters seemed to originate from his never-ending emotional tie with the 2004 Los Angeles Dodgers, the $100 million team he managed to the West Division title.

He spoke about them incessantly, to the media and to the players. He even tried to recreate them, it seemed.

Before Tracy had donned a Pirates uniform, in the winter of 2006, he met with center fielder Chris Duffy and told Duffy he should play like Dave Roberts, the Dodgers' leadoff man, even though all Duffy and Roberts had in common was being fast. Among the instructions: Duffy, a line-drive hitter, was told to pound the ball into the ground. He failed miserably, quit baseball for a month and has yet to recover.

Tracy told shortstop Jack Wilson, a three-time runner-up for the Gold Glove, that he did not like his approach to ground balls, that it should be more like Cesar Izturis of the 2004 Dodgers. Wilson had his worst defensive year in 2006 and, at Tracy's behest, Izturis was acquired from the Chicago Cubs this past July. It was at Tracy's urging that Wilson nearly was traded to Detroit in late July, after which Wilson batted .401 in the season's final two months.

There was more: Jose Castillo was told to be like Adrian Beltre. Bench players were told to be versatile like Jose Hernandez, who also was acquired. Even Tracy's batting orders were modeled based on profiles of the 2004 Dodgers.

Another fallout of that connection, possibly, was that a mostly inexperienced group of Pirates was expected to perform -- and behave -- just as those veteran Dodgers did, without extra instruction or attention.

I don't expect Jim Tracy to get many job offers in the near future.

[Camden_yardbird]

Never knew it was this bad. Too bad too. Makes me think maybe chris Duffy could be rehabed into a decent player. He did bat .340 his first year up.