The "Why I Don't Want Rick Dempsey As Our Manager" Thread

I prefer somebody who has managerial experience and no connection to the O’s whatsoever. I think we need to reach outside of Birdland and bring somebody else in with a new mentality and a different experience then the “Oriole way” because right now, the “Oriole way” isn’t working.

I’m not saying Showalter or Wedge or Valentine (I know he’s out of the running now) would turn the club around and make the club a .500 team. But I do think someone with more recent managerial experience and past opportunities with a young team would be a start.

Hither:

Valentine has not managed in MLB since 2002. More experience then Dempsey, but not as recent as I prefer and he hasn’t really managed a “young”.

Showalter last managed in 2006 has a pretty good track record with his record being 882-833. However his most recent managerial job (the Rangers) wasn’t very successful finishing 3rd in the AL West three of the four years he was with Texas.

Wedge to me seems to be the best fit. The 2007-09 Cleveland Indians were a fairly young team full of guys with a lot of potential, similar to the 2010 O’s. In 2007 Wedge took that team to the Playoffs and was AL manager of the year. He has been down a similar road before with working with a younger team and I would like to see him as the next manager.

But again, just a personal opinion.

1) The domestic violence joking previously outlined above. As Manager you have to be more media savvy than that. And just because he hasn’t stuck his foot in his mouth since doesn’t mean he has learned the lesson.

2) His lack of prolonged managerial experience. He has had a few brief stints as a manager in the minors, but he has done nothing to demonstrate that he has what it takes to be an effective manager at the MLB level. It is my belief that the O’s need a highly experienced manager this time around. Dempsey does not fit the bill

You say you would walk away if Dempsey got hired, but you are still here 6 years later after Perlozzo, Trembley and Samuel?

2nd of all, if you have such a vicious attitute towards his hiring, why don’t you back that up with why???

I have no preference on who gets hired, just don’t hire a clown. The managers input is minimal. All you can ask is proper line-ups and good decisions on when to pull pitchers and the occasional throwing of dirt at the ump!
Seems like Dempsey (like many others) could fit that bill.

By the way, i am not trying to be a hater, it just annoyed me when some makes awkward statements like that

<—awkward

anyway, its still his personal opinion, and still no reason to walk away, especially with the recent managers, that is just dumb

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2010-06-09/sports/bs-sp-orioles-manager-0610-20100610_1_orioles-catcher-rick-dempsey-orioles-next-manager-principal-owner-peter-angelos

Of his own chances to manage, Dempsey said:
“I think if I don’t do something now with this organization, it’s never happening,” said Dempsey, in his fourth year as a MASN broadcaster after five seasons as an Orioles coach. “If the next guy comes in and he lasts two or three years, by then I’ll be so far removed from being down on the field that it probably would take an act of God to actually make it happen.”

If he has the skills to manage, why must it be with this organization? If he had the experience or reputation to serve in this role, he could sell it anywhere. He himself knows that what he has is an association with past glory and fan favorite status to score easy points with the public via his hiring. Absent those characteristics, he’s not a serious candidate.

We need a serious candidate.

I honestly don’t know what I’m looking for in a manager. Ideally, I want someone who is savvy in advanced statistics and creative in his approach to the game, but I don’t really know who that person is. Manny Acta was supposed to be that guy and I wanted him when the Nats fired him, but of course, he has a career .385 winning percentage and has done nothing impressive with the Indians.

I guess the question I wonder is who is the next Joe Maddon, but the problem is that I can’t have any idea. Who knows who the next career minor league manager and bench coach to go on to greatness is, at least outside the game? I’m not that impressed with the Wedge/Showalter rumors; I’d much rather have the next great manager than I would an old pro who has done good but not great jobs in multiple places before. So the guys I’m hoping for I know are guys who I have no reason to be sure will be any good but who I liked as players and like as people – guys like Alan Trammell and Willie Randolph. But they could suck too.

Ultimately, I find the whole situation unfortunate. I’d have thought the Orioles would have had a lot clearer picture of who they would be wanting before they fired Dave. Heck, Bobby Cox is still the manager in Atlanta, and they already know who is coming next.

From Schmuck’s page:

“The Orioles of recent years don’t seem to know how to play intelligent baseball. I think Rick could change that.”

Wow

…is why I don’t want him as manager – and given the fact that neither I nor anyone really knows the nuts and bolts technicality of how he would hypothetically manage the team, I thinks it’s the best we have to go on.

Dempsey has always struck me as the Matthew McConaughey character in Dazed and Confused: the guy who just…keeps…hanging….around….the organization….forever….and…ever. Reveling in the glory days. The days of old. That Ol’ Time Rock ’N Roll.

There’s something pathetic about it. Something that spells L-O-S-E-R about it in bold, capital letters. And the last thing this team needs in the manager’s position is anything that even remotely resembles a loser.

I know, I know. All of these things are intangibles. But intangibles are all I really have to go on about the guy.

- he exudes a drama from his pores that scream “if they don’t want me ain’t no one gonna want me and I’m just gonna DIE!”
- which brings up another point: he hasn’t been courted by ANYONE else it seems, and I have never heard of a team who has had him on their managerial radar outside of the Os, who it looks like gave him an interview out of pity
- I’m sorry, but we just gave the boot to a guy who reminded me of William Shatner. I’ll be damned if we downgrade to a cross between Ted Turner and Hal Holbrook.

whether this year or next year has a good chance of putting Pie and Roberts in their line-ups and a daily basis and not Atkins.

Communication skills are the first thing that pop into my mind and I know they’ve already been mentioned so apologies. The man literally can’t put sentences together and I think communicating is one of the most important things a manager does – to players, coaches, media, front office executives, scouts, minor league coaches, etc. I seriously worry about his ability to absorb and communicate information and if you can’t do that I don’t want you running any organization.

A lack of actual baseball knowledge is the other major problem I have with him. He really seems to have no idea what he’s looking at. He’s constantly misidentifying pitches when he’s watching on the monitor, criticizing decisions with faulty logic, quoting statistics that are not indicative of anything, etc. I have zero confidence that he can put players in positions to succeed, call plays effectively, or make decisions on playing time based on meaningful information. He really seems like a classic old school gut feel baseball guy and I don’t see how that could possibly help this team. As others have said, I don’t think we need a purely advanced stat guy as a manager, but it would be nice to have SOME confidence that the guy at least understands what he’s looking at in terms of numbers and plays and can make reasonable decisions based on that. I don’t think Dempsey has any clue what he’s looking at and I have even less confidence that he can make reasonable decisions based on what he sees.

coming together as a group @ an Orioles game where we all just wear something Ravens and just sit there like a huge purple ink blot in the stands as a sign to the organization that we can’t wait for football season to get here? That is if there are some Ravens fans on here. i will post this same question on a Ravens post.

say again

baseball is gorgeous. football is hideous.

This is a baseball site, not a ‘sports’ site.

As posted earlier, his antics would likely confuse and alienate an already ambiguous and young roster. Uncle Demp’s ceiling is most likely a bench coach, someone with some baseball wisdom and street cred who can lighten the mood if needed.
     I think it’s most important that our new manager be able to attract top coaches. Some managers, like Torre for example, have a staff in place that they have worked with for years (Schaefer, Mattingly, Bowa). I hope that consideration is being paid in the interview process of the new skipper’s ability/willingness to surround himself with a quality, philosophically syncopated staff. I feel that Dempsey’s assistant options are largely already here, and for that, he is not a good candidate.

I was shouting at my radio this morning as Mickey from 98 Rock barked out his blowhole about how great Dempsey would be as manager. The crux of his argument was that Dempsey would get pissed if the Orioles lost and that he would put butts in the seats. Thankfully, Keith Mills pointed out that the only thing that would put butts in the seats would be a winning team.

I’m not sure what I can add that hasn’t already been said. I’ll just appeal to logic. Dempsey was a hot managerial candidate in the mid-90s. It’s now 2010. He hasn’t been hired by any MLB team in those 15 years. Why is that?

Is it off-base to think that any capacity he had for managing might have been dulled in the 15 years since he was last in charge of a pro baseball team?

The thing is, I have no idea what a good manager does, and even if I did, I doubt it would be something that I could really identify through words (which is not to say it isn’t quantifiable, just that I don’t know how I would go about doing it).

I guess I look at the whole thing like this: I was an actor through high school and college (none of that musical bullshit, we were – especially in college – more of the Beckett, Sartre, Shepard, Goethe, Brecht, Overmeyer, Ives, Stoppard, and Steve Martin variety of kids really full of themselves) and in the last six years, I probably worked in some capacity on the stage (or in student films) for roughly 20-25 shows. And a lot of them were crap. They were directed by first-time student directors, some of them were directed by student veterans who had done really, really good work but just couldn’t get the same performances out of the unique configuration of actors and crew members.

And when things didn’t work, there were a lot of reasons why, but what it came down to was that that director couldn’t get good work out of those actors and those crew people. And then the exact same cast and crew would go to work on a different play by one of the professors or one of the other student directors (first time or otherwise), and they would pop out something incredibly nuanced and wonderful and charming and thoughtful. And absolutely nobody could tell you what the difference was. It was very, very much a feel thing, a personality thing.

I wouldn’t even call it as simple as “this guy knocked heads and kicked ass”, “this guy was laid back and stress-free”, “this guy inspired everyone to focus”, “this guy paid extra attention to the little things”, “this guy understood respect was a two-way street”, or “this guy communicated really well”. It’s way more complicated than all that. Is managing a baseball team similar? I’d very much imagine it is (though, maybe it isn’t at all like that).

So, is Rick Dempsey a good choice for Orioles manager? I have no fucking clue whatsoever.

to NO EXIT.

because he probably thinks “OPS” is the name of one of those robot characters from Star Trek or Star Wars or something.

Because he probably thinks that 24 year old pitchers should throw 130 pitches and 180 innings, just like they did when he was young.

Because he almost certainly believes that batters should be aggressive.

Because I am absolutely POSITIVE he would retain Terry Crowley as hitting coach, and that is just not to be fucking tolerated.

Just a gut feeling, why do I feel that Arizona is going to make a playoff run now.

I think my biggest fear with Dempsey is that he knows baseball of a different era. I would argue that the biggest role of any manager is to set the lineup and manage the bullpen. Dempsey seems like a guy who thinks pitch counts are for wussies.

I’d love to see the Indians fire Manny Acta and the Orioles hire him.

Rick Dempsey cannot pronounce ORIOLES…He often says URIOLES…on TV!!!