was going to show up. Is this the first official, “Fire Geren Now” diary? If so, I look forward to many more in the near future. Which is kind of unfortunate for Bob. Here he has been given his first MLB job, and yet his roster hasn’t really changed all that much from the Cats. Bob, if you’re reading this, your biggest mistake was winning in the PCL. Should have finished second, that way you wouldn’t have been expected to dominate the AL with AAA talent.

Look at the team he has been given. Of the batters on the team only Sweeny and Suzuki are better than 250 hitters. Crosby and Ellis are just average hitters. That leaves him with rookies Cargon and Barton. Hannahan and Cust are part time bench players. And a few back up non starters. Geren has done the best he could do under what was given. I have picked them around .500 team at begining of season before the trades of harden and blanton. On that note the hitting coach Ty is doing a bad job. You can see many of these hitters getting burned by the same pitches and not adjusting. That is the hitting coach fault for not adjusting hitters. He needs to help not be stubborn and have them wioth 1 batting stance for every pitcher.

Fairly or not the role of the manager is often downplayed by many fans. I think this is an effect of the book Moneyball. That book expressed the view that the GM is more important. Because of this and Beane’s domination of the franchise the GM gets more of the attention/ heat/ praise.

Other fan bases complain/ praise the manager much more often than the A’s.

The dismissing of Howe and Macha (guys who were sent off following seasons in which they won the division was done without much complaint.

Most teams (fair or not) would be calling for Geren’s head last year (especially considering the team had 8 straight winning seasons that was broken on his watch.

since the trades of Blanton and Harden. It is like the players, while not openly admitting it, are not trying. That is Geren’s job to motivate. I do not have facts to back up my feelings, but it just seems that the team is just going through the motions. Offensively this is just a different team than the first three months of the season. My gut feeling is the team is not behind Geren and are performing in a passive aggressive manner just to set this guy up for failure. Call me paranoid, but that is my assessment. It is all too strange on how things have transpired since the trades.

I think the reason the players are going after Geren is that they don’t like all the nepotism surrounding him and Billy, how Geren has been given a free pass, and the players can’t show their irritation at Billy for throwing in the towel because, as we all know, Billy will launch those players out of there and never be seen again. Now, there is some paranoid thought in these statements.

A good manager gets his players to excel above what they are capable off.

If the player is not capable of something there is nothing a manager can do. If the player does perform something then clearly they were capable of it.

You might as well have said “Give 110%.”