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Shite
List - 2
 Shiteheads
#2 Arizona Diamondbacks Management - The second Full of Shite, jack ass, top idiots of the day, month and year.
Offense - Mismanaging a club into near obscurity with boneheaded
trades, annoying marketing schemes, ill advised financing, and
general malfeasance.
The Arizona
Diamondbacks won the world series in 2001!
The World Series! If you are not suitably impressed, strike up a
conversation in a corner tavern on your next visit to Boston or
Chicago so the denizens can explain to you what that means. Both
cities are nearing a century long drought without such an honor and
are sensitive to the difficulty of the task. Tell them your are a
"lifetime Diamondbacks fan" and see what they say.
Because in just their fourth year out of the womb of baseball
expansion, the D-Backs won it, beating the oldest and most storied
franchise in baseball, the New York Yankees, in what has been
rightly called one of the most exciting seven game showdowns of the
modern sports era. Right place, right time manager Bob Brenly had
stepped out of the broadcast booth and onto the field, inheriting a
perfect mix of grizzled veterans (that did much of the managing for
him), roll players, and brash young kids who didn't know any better.
It was truly a magical season capped off by a game seven, bottom of
the ninth comeback off the game's most dominant closer with a
winning hit by the teams most loved player. It was one for the books
and such a season should
have been all the impetus that was needed for the young franchise to
buck the odds and plant the permanent ground roots for a beloved
franchise to sprout up and thrive in the inhospitable environs of
the Arizona desert.
Unfortunately, due to mismanagement, this has not happened and the
D-Backs are now, just three short years later, in danger of slipping
past mediocrity on their way to
eventual and almost certain baseball death. Instead of capitalizing on their good
fortune and taking advantage of the first generation fan that will
never forget Gonzo's winning hit, an
increasingly apathetic and fickle transplant desert crowd is rapidly
losing interest and looking elsewhere for it's entertainment and heroes.
As we sit by watching management squander, talent, money and time,
many of us are finding other places than
Bank One Ballpark to get out of the stifling summer heat and other
things to watch on TV other than the pathetic D-Backs. The only
thing the Diamondbacks may have going for them is that, as many
other cities like to do, turning to football isn't an option in
Arizona because the Cardinals are even more of an embarrassment.
As many major league cities in any sport can attest, building a fan
base is often a thankless and unpredictable business. Obviously,
what most
people want is a winner and, since there can, by definition, only be one of those
ultimately during each given year, many cities never have that to
offer. However, since roughly half the teams have winning records
and a quarter make the playoffs, sustaining interest throughout a
season should be easier for a significant percentage of squads. Such
traditional baseball cities as St Louis, Chicago, New York, and
Boston never
have a problem of course while sun drenched beds of hedonism like
Florida, LA and San Diego often face attendance challenges no matter
what they put on the field. Overall however, most cities have
cultivated a relationship between their teams and the fans, not just
in the immediate city where the games are played but in the
surrounding area and state which will sustain them through the down
times. As long as management is seen as attempting to make a good
faith effort to keep the team competitive, shows appreciation for
the players that are crowd favorites and attempts to keep them signed, enough people
will file through the turnstiles, purchase all the accompanying caps
and crap, swallow down enough 8 dollar beers, and choke home enough
ball park food, even in an off year, to keep the lights on.
And then you have the
Diamondbacks. Let's examine what they've done since winning it all
in 2001. First, instead of riding the wave of success and rewarding
the players that gave it to them, they announced that they'd be
cutting payroll since they were losing money. If your business is losing
money the year after winning the ultimate prize in your chosen field
then someone isn't
doing their job correctly. But Diamondback management began to slowly change the face of the team.
Lets examine one position as an example. Since they had a sweet swinging, can't miss prospect first basemen
in Lyle Overbay waiting in the wings to replace the soon to be
retiring Mark Grace at first base, they decided to get rid of fan
favorite Erubial Durazo to make room for Overbay in the lineup. In
return they got pitcher Elmer Dissens. While Durazo was hitting cleanup for
the playoff bound Oakland A's, Dissens was stinking it up every fifth
day that they trotted him out there. And then later, after Overbay struggled
a bit in his first season putting up respectable but not great numbers, they decided
to package him with the rest of the starting infield and sent
Overbay, and team favorites Craig Councell, Junior Spivey and Chad
Moeller along with pitcher Chris Capuano, to Milwaukee for one
player. That player, Richie Sexson was hitting a few home runs early
in the 2004 season, but promptly separated his shoulder and was lost
for the year. Meanwhile Overbay is hitting .345 and is tops amongst
first baseman in the league, and the rest of the guys are combining
to lead the Brewers to one of their best years in recent memory. And
all while being paid collectively less then the D-Backs are having
to shell out to the bench ridden Sexson who probably won't even be
around next year.
World Series co MVP Randy Johnson lives in the Phoenix area and has
long made it clear that he'd like to finish his hall of fame career
here and even signed a long term deal to prove it. But when the D-Backs let
the second and third members of the rotation from the championship
year, Curt Schilling and Miguel Batista, go for basically nothing,
Johnson found himself alone and playing for the club with the worst
record and baseball. Meanwhile Batista and Schilling were going a
collective 20 and 8 in the American League East. Now it seems likely
that Johnson will ask to be traded as well to a team that actually
has a chance to contend for the playoff spots that the Big Unit
thought he'd be contending for when D-Backs management convinced him
to come here.
And the television situation is embarrassing. Not only is the
asinine Thom Brenneman the front man for the broadcasts, but part of building a fan
base in your home state involves having a TV deal in place to show all the games.
That way, fans can
build a relationship with the players. Since the Goliard offices are
based in Tucson, we'd like to think that we are still close enough to jump in the company
van and head up to a game once in awhile, but realistically are only able to
follow the team on TV most of the time. Well it turns out that only about 75 percent of the games are
broadcast so we found we were missing many of the good ones. To
rectify the situation, we went out and got MLB ticket from Direct TV
for the offices figuring it would be well worth it because so
many on the staff have an interest in different teams around the
country and we hoped that those so inclined could follow the D-Backs that way. Nope.
Tucson, despite being two hours away, is considered within the
D-Backs blackout zone so, as a result, we see far more Mariner and
Red Sox games on TV then we do D-Backs. And since the hapless Backs are always
calling up players from Double A to fill the holes in their depleted
lineup anyway, when we do tune in, we aren't even sure who we are watching half the time.
"Who are the fuggin guys?" We can't say how many times we've
placed a little wager to make it more interesting, grabbed a six pack,
and pulled up a chair in
anticipation of say a D-Backs/Dodgers showdown, only to find that
the game is the only one being played in the country that we are
unable to watch.
We turn on the radio once in awhile but they are constantly playing
highlight clips of old radio calls so you keep thinking you're
hearing a new home run or something exciting only to find that it is
just a sound bite from last year. Does any other radio broadcast do
constant highlights of the calls from old games? We've never heard
of it and there's a good reason why.
And don't even get us
started on the commercialization involved in a trip to the BOB these
days. We'd
go up there more but the experience has become one big sales pitch
wrapped in a billboard beneath a banner and a blurb. Advertisements blare from every possible source, sponsors messages
are pasted on every possible surface, and so many bells and whistles are
going off with people shouting this and that that it's almost impossible to pay any attention to the game
being played on the field that is supposed to be supporting the whole thing.
So good job and good
riddance D-Backs.
You'll realize how good you had it soon when you are lucky to draw a
third of capacity, are getting skewered in the local press, and
ratings are down so low that advertisers, formally thrilled to glom on to a
winner, don't want to touch you after deciding that a loser is not
where they want to associate themselves and their businesses with. And not loveable losers either. It takes a hundred years to
build that following and by then Phoenix will have sunken into a
vast hole where all the groundwater used to be. The
honeymoon is long over and your bone headed trades, shrill and
overblown marketing
campaigns, nonsensical television packages, and cost cutting roster
moves seem destined to drive this young franchise into the ground
before it even had a chance to thrive.
Shite
list is a new feature of the Goliard where staff members and readers
alike may post names of people or entities who have either committed some
egregious act against them personally which is deserving of public
mention, or are public figures which have fallen out of favor to the
point where a feature story cataloging their offenses is in the
works but is not yet complete and a brief preview is needed. It can
be seen both as a public forum for publishing names (and pictures if
available) of offenders and a preview of more in depth vitriolic
writings to come. Offenses can range from being the guy who drives
too fast in a school zone to being George Bush. We'll see how it
goes.
Previous Shite heads
#1- Jay Kernis
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