Comments on: Valentine never offered Marlins' manager gig

By: Old Gator

Old Gator — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 13:57:48 +0000

As long as I can keep my real life and my fantasy life more or less separated, my wife and Gillian will never have an opportunity to replace each other. Fortunately, I lack both the inclination and the nerve to have more than one real life, but – subject again to being able to keep them separated – I see no reason not to entertain multiple fantasy lives. And once I lose that ability, my son is under orders to stand on my respirator hose. He’ll be a lawyer by then so I trust him to know what he can and can’t get away with.

By: TF in Tampa

TF in Tampa — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 13:33:57 +0000

Ok, your one up on me on the Craig Cal visit. Does he look at all like that animated pic of him under the HardballTalk heading from the lead MLB front page, you know better or worse? Sounds like you two ripped up the eastcoast highways like those Nascar guys up in Daytona last week!
Be careful how much you fall in love outside of your wife, but who am I to preach…..What happened to Gillian? has she been replaced by Karin or just another one of the many?
Well, I have some items to cross off from the ‘Honey Do’ list now, I will check back later.

By: Old Gator

Old Gator — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 12:26:47 +0000

Joe Girardi represents “what might have been” to me. Then again, a micrometeorite through the left front of the roof of Scrooge McLoria’s Jaguar represents the same thing. And consulting the probability tables, it appears that both have an equal chance of happening in any but an alternative universe in one of my opium dreams. The Girardi calculations didn’t have to take into account the Cretaceous-Tertiary impact in terms of chronological averages (and this from a guy who views Sabremetrics as a gift from the Prince of Darkness), but it didn’t seem to make much difference.
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Had a good old time with Craig yesterday. Plied him with a variety of Cuban foodstuffs, made an earnest attempt to educate him musically, bestowed upon him a copy of my favorite 9/11 book, took him over to see the unnatural growth we know as Macondo Banana Massacre stadium, and then instructed him on how to move over to the left on the Dolphin Expressway so as to access the ORT lanes and speed his way to Port St. Lucy – then watched in my rear view mirror as he got into the wrong lane and wound up waiting for one of the cash booths anyway.
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I urged the Ringling Brothers museum upon him when he gets to Sarasota yet again – especially the hall of the horse drawn steam calliope wagons.
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Then I raced Craig up the turnpike as far as Stuart (I won!) and went to the Lyric Theater to hear Over the Rhine for the first time live, fell madly in love with Karin Bergquist (how could one not?) and had to work on wiping the guilty expression off my face before I got home two and a half hours after the show.
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Interesting town, Stuart. Mostly retirees (a lot like St. Petersburg), none of whom seem to own a dog bigger than a rat.

By: TF in Tampa

TF in Tampa — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:49:45 +0000

Now why do you have to bring in Joe Girardi into the mix? He is a reputable manager,supporting excellent credentials and has a secure job, at least for this coming season. “The Boss” George doesn’t run his Yankees anymore, persay, thats why he has his more logical thinking sons running the team. George was an absolute mainiac when he got too involved in telling his managers how to run the team on a day to day basis. If he wanted total control then he should have managed the team himself. No, his bigger goal is to win another WS, and it takes an owner allowing a competent manager, one who knows how to control enormous egos, to accomplish that goal.
So leave my boy Joe alone, thank you very much, and get your ass up here to Tampa while Craig’s in town this coming week and somehow catch a game with us.
We’ll talk later!

By: Old Gator

Old Gator — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 23:14:41 +0000

I strongly suspect that these rumors originated because some sportswriters, being human beings with consciences and approximate minds in their brains as well as hot air bloat despite all appearances, figured that an owner with such penuriousness in his hearts would be disappointed if his cheapskate policies failed to produce yet another miracle run within a reasonable period of time, and if he didn’t care much about his fans or the wellbeing of his team he sure wouldn’t care much about his manager either.
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Bobby Valentine got off lucky. He would have failed for lack of resources, and then followed Joe Girardi out the door for coming to the same conclusion: that his owner was a greedy clown.