The wrong person left the Colorado Rockies on Sunday when manager Jim Tracy tendered his resignation after two days of meetings with the club’s front office. Still with the Rockies is the true culprit of the 64-98 record, Dan O’Dowd, who enjoys a very comfortable position as the right hand “yes” man to complacent owner Dick Monfort. His seat at the table seems guaranteed as the Rockies either forced Tracy to resign or he finally had enough. Tracy wasn’t the Rockies’ problem; the front office is to blame for the fifth-place finish. The manager can only do so much with what he is given, and he was not given much to work with.
He was given two stinkers in Jeremy Guthrie and Jamie Moyer, he was dealt a bad hand with injuries to the veterans who have shown promise when Jorge De La Rosa was set back in rehab all season, and both Juan Nicasio and Jhoulys Chacin both ended up on the DL. The club has a dearth of pitchers at every level, and the worst part being half of the starting rotation is hardly worthy of major league action in the first place.
Now for the worst part of this whole situation: The Rockies are not the only ones in the hunt for another manager. The Rockies next manager will be a tool of the front office, a puppet of the penny-pinching statists at the top. They will maintain the status quo of mediocrity by losing out in the manager hunt to Boston and any other team that fires a manager during the offseason. No one will want to manage the Rockies when they can manage the Red Sox or even the Marlins if they fire Ozzie Guillen.
Why would any respectable manager on the market want to come to Colorado, where they will be given nothing to work with other than a top five and a sales bin worth of injured and unworthy pitchers? They won’t want to. They don’t want to be told the front office has all the power and will concede none of it to the manager. The Rockies manager will be powerless and expected to stay in line and keep the heat off of the front office.
I feel bad for the players who are stuck here with little ability to change their situation. The success of this organization is going to be solely on the players to produce because the front office has given up on lifting a finger or spending one more dollar to help them out. They have been abandoned in this mess to fend for themselves against the rest of the league.
