Archive for the ‘John Farrell’ Category

I don’t want to write a full on This Week in Morons post about this, because there are still a lot of words out there to be digested on the Jays, their ex-manager, and their search for a new one, plus, I entirely understand that it’s the Toronto Sun’s job to be petty little trolls. Very obviously it’s part of their business model to rile up the masses, to get people talking, and perhaps even to get folks like me to start linking back to them all over the place going, “look at this steaming pile of shit in the Sun!”

Yet, knowing full well that I may be falling into that trap, um… look at this steaming pile of shit in the Sun!

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So much has been written about John Farrell over the last few days, and so much needed to be done here on my end, that it was inevitable that some of it would slip through the cracks. Or… y’know… that a lot of it would slip through the cracks. And rather than just flush it all out of my RSS reader, never to be seen or heard from again, I figured I’d go through a bunch of stuff we’ve seen written since this story first broke late on Saturday night, and link it all up here, even though I know full well that most of you are probably as sick of it all as I am. But there are a number of good pieces to read about the whole affair, and we’re in the dead zone of an off-night before the World Series starts tomorrow, so why not have a look and see if there’s anything here that might be worth a read, or a re-read. There sure is lots of it…

Cathal Kelly of the Toronto Star thinks the Jays need a “leader who will lead” (or so says the headline), and suggests that Alex Anthopoulos got “as close as the GM will get to taking a parting shot” when he told reporters that “after you’ve lived in the [first house] for a while, you say I’d like ‘x’ and ‘x’ and ‘x’ from the next one.”

In his first reaction piece for the Star, Kelly calls the deal lopsided in the Jays’ favour, as they got something for nothing.

In a blog post at the Star, Richard Griffin points out the conflicting chronologies given by John Farrell– who says he told the Jays he wanted to move to Boston last year– and Alex Anthopoulos, who said the subject wasn’t broached until last week.

In his first reaction, Griffin goes deep to explain why he thinks the Jays ultimately let Farrell go, in a must-read piece for the Star.

“For me, the clear sign that there was something to this Farrell speculation came on Aug. 25 when the Dodgers and Red Sox reached an agreement on a blockbuster trade,” writes Gregor Chisholm on his North of the Border blog. After relaying the details to the Jays’ manager, “Farrell thought about it for a few seconds and then began running down the list of players I just mentioned were in the deal. Within a minute, Farrell had the total amount the Red Sox would be shedding in the trade. I remember being somewhat taken aback by this because — despite public opinions to the contrary — this is not the type of information most managers would know off the top of their head.”

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Did he ever looked remotely this happy in Toronto?

John Farrell was introduced to the media in Boston today (video here), and while I made it clear on Twitter that I wanted no part of the agonizing over it, there were certainly a few things that require our attention– which I’ll mostly do below, via the angry tweets that populated my feed when I returned from recording the Getting Blanked Podcast. In particular, there were two moments– which I’ve, of course, heard about after the fact– that I think require a bit of additional scrutiny.

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The long saga has finally ended, and John Farrell is back where he always wanted to be– something I didn’t always believe to be the case– and back with the organization that, stunningly, “helped set up the difficult radiation treatment for Farrell’s son Luke last Fall in Boston that was thankfully successful and sees Luke back in school and pitching again at Northwestern University,” according to an excellent grope around the cold grey murk of this failed relationship– this challenge one part slithered away from, one part reset by Jays’ management– from Richard Griffin of the Toronto Star.

There’s a lot to digest here, as Farrell returns to Boston, potentially taking a big chunk of the coaching staff with him– Brian Butterfield, although having preceded Farrell in Toronto, is a New Englander who may jump at the opportunity, if extended, and Torey Lovullo, ex-manager of the PawSox who was hand-picked by Farrell to join him here, could also leave, provided the Jays don’t offer him their now vacant managerial position.

Like most aspect of the story, there’s good and bad that may come with additional departures.

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Crank up the ol’ intrigue machine, because Alex Anthopoulos had been scheduled to appear on the Fan 590‘s Jeff Blair Show tomorrow morning at 9 AM, to address– presumably among other things– the nauseatingly rampant innuendo about Boston’s coveting of Jays manager John Farrell. And now that appearance has apparently been cancelled.

FYI: #bluejays GM Alex Anthopoulos has cancelled his scheduled appearance on @globlair show tomorrow morning. at 9 a.m.

— Mike Cormack (@MikeCormack) October 18, 2012

Obviously there could be many reasons for Anthopoulos to back out: it could be personal, it could be a scheduling conflict, or some piece of crucial business (unrelated to you know what) may have come up. But… um… one guess as to how many people are going to be speculating any of that.

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