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The Weekend Buzz while you were cashing in your mutual funds to pay for summer vacation gas:
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| John Gibbons' firing sealed the rare termination trifecta in a single week. (Getty Images) |
Tell you this: It would be vastly more entertaining than sending a manager to sleep with the fishes in the middle of the night, while everybody else is sleeping.
Failing that, things continue at this bloody a pace, the least baseball can do is send cleaning supplies to individual clubs.
"Damn, I guess," Detroit manager Jim Leyland says. "They're falling like flies."
Odds, however, are highly against another week like last -- in which the Mets fired Willie Randolph, Seattle relieved John McLaren of his duties and Toronto pink-slipped John Gibbons -- simply because ... well, it's only the third time in modern baseball history that three managers have been fired within one single regular-season week.
According to a weekend of digging by the Society for American Baseball Research's Tom Ruane, it's happened only two other times in the modern era:
In 1991, the Cubs fired Don Zimmer, Kansas City jettisoned John Wathan and Baltimore gassed Frank Robinson in the third week of May.
In 1948, Brooklyn fired Leo Durocher, the Philadelphia Phillies canned Ben Chapman and the New York Giants whacked Mel Ott on three consecutive days in mid-July. Entertaining thing there is, Durocher was then hired by the Giants. I doubt that Gibbons will replace Randolph in New York, even if he is a former Met.
According to Ruane's research, three firings in one week also happened one other time, back in the game's prehistoric days: In July 1889, when the Louisville Colonels (Jimmy Wolf), Indianapolis Hoosiers (Frank Bancroft) and Pittsburgh Alleghenys (Horace Phillips) all got it in the same week in mid-July. Figures Pittsburgh would be in here somewhere, eh?
The bloodshed is the result of historically bloated payrolls, underachieving rosters and good, old-fashioned blame. Of 10 clubs with payrolls of $100 million or higher, four of them currently are below .500 (it was five, but the Mets finally climbed back to even Sunday).
Randolph and McLaren were in charge of two of those $100 million-plus clubs, while Gibbons was a near-miss -- he had a $98 million player payroll on his hands.
McLaren's whacking came only days after the Mariners fired GM Bill Bavasi. That came only days after they fired hitting coach Jeff Pentland. More is expected where that came from. The Mariners are a club in need of a total housecleaning, and further changes are expected in the baseball operations department. Interim GM Lee Pelekoudas is viewed in the industry essentially as a housesitter keeping the dust off of the table until someone more permanent moves in.
