Get bent Tracy. You traded for half of the 2004 Dodgers for the 2007 Pirates team.

What were the criticisms of Tracy's tenures in Pitt and LA? There's obviously not a lot of love for him, but I don't know what the issues were. Were the Dodger teams expected to do better than they did?

In Colorado, I think he's riding a pent up wave--the team was bound to play much better. OTOH winning 15 of 16 is crazy--I have no idea how much credit he deserves for that, but he probably deserves some. He has played Barmes and Stewart regularly and they have benefited, though to be fair, I don't think it was wrong earlier in the season for Hurdle to try to juggle the lineup to try to get both Stewart and Atkins at bats. He's been riding his main pitchers a bit; that might not work out so well. (Corpas has gone on the DL with bone chips in his elbow, which I assume is a coincidence...I assume bone chips don't form that quickly.)

Chris Duffy says hi.

For one thing, he buried Hee Sop Choi, directly leading to the firing of Paul DePodesta.

Well, maybe, just maybe, Choi wasn't all that anyhow

Anyhow, Tracy lucked out pretty nicely with the Rockies.
They probably would've turned it around for Hurdle too.
But Tracy gets the glory for showing up...

Tracy did it after Choi homered 6 times in 3 games. The 2005 season was a wash, so the Dodgers should have played everyone who had a decent chance of coming back for the next season, including Choi.

Instead, he tried to convert the backup catcher into his first baseman.

Also, he had Oscar Robles bat 3rd. The bastard. And the constant sniping at DePodesta, and he even tried to spin him leaving the Dodgers for the Pirates as a slam against DePodesta.

Tracy did it after Choi homered 6 times in 3 games.

Oh well then. Tracy killed the career of a first ballot hall of famer
And I don't even like Tracy

Tracy wasn't a bad manager in LA - until he decided he'd make personnel decisions as a reaction against DePodesta. Not that all the decisions were horrendous - just that they weren't logical. He seemed to prefer that the team lost with his players rather than win with any moves DePodesta made that were not conventional. So Choi was buried, for instance. There were reasons to dislike Choi - but since there were more reasons to dislike the players that were being played instead of Choi, including their lack of any upside while the Dodgers were out of contention anyway, it was frustrating. Since it was obvious by the end that he was doing it because of his hatred of DePodesta, that is enough grounds to hate Tracy. A manager should never stab his team in the back in order to wage war on the front office. By the time he was playing personnel games he already was expecting to go to the Pirates after the season, if he could get out of his Dodgers' contract.

akrasian- Isn't (or wasn't) there plenty of blame on both sides? It seemed like certain of Depo's moves were designed to tweak his manager. The Roberts trade for nothing, despite the fact that a playoff team might need a 4th outfielder who can run the bases well, always struck me as symptomatic of the tug between Depo and Tracy.

I'll admit that I never got the fascination with Depodesta, and the effort to blame everyone besides Depodesta for his termination always struck me as silly. My bias aside, it's not clear to me that Tracy was the problem- as opposed to being one-half of a bad situation.

In addition to being a lousy tactician who packed the roster full of crappy ex-Dodgers, Tracy was also the most phony and insincere and self-aggrandizing guy I've ever seen in baseball. A real "I won"/"we lost" type, if you know what I mean. And he was a terrible judge of talent, starting Duffy over McLouth, Randa over Sanchez, and Paulino over Doumit, for example. And he had this weird fixation with his old Dodger teams, to the point that he tried to make his Pittsburgh regulars look and dress and act like their LA counterparts, which was super-creepy.

Probably the lowest thing I remember from his tenure was when he refused to let Jack and Sully stay with their 9-months-and-a-bit pregnant wives right before a west coast road trip in August or September, using the excuse that the (post-roster-expansion) team owed it to the contenders to try as hard as possible to win. In reality, he just wanted to try and save his job by sneaking a few more wins, and if Sully's wife happened to die from her unusual presentation in Sully's absence, well, that's baseball.

Dick. I hope he dies in a fire.

His point about the Pirates is true - you can boil everything else about why teams win or lose over a period of many years down to talent. Can you identify it? Can you organize it? Can you keep it? Can you motivate it? The key for Tampa will be whether or not they can draft major-league talent when they don't have top-five picks in the draft, whether or not they can identify more talent that is undervalued to keep their payroll affordable (Carlos Pena, for example), and whether they can build enough depth to survive a few key injuries or free agent losses, year-to-year.

What makes the Red Sox situation so desirable is that they are producing one or more legitimate major-league players annually through their system (this year, Bard; last year, Lowrie, Delcarmen and Masterson; in 2007, Ellsbury and Pedroia; in 2006, Paplebon; they turned Hanley Ramirez into Josh Beckett; Youkilis is a product of the system; next year, it is likely Buchholz will be in the rotation). This allows them to drop down big money on a free agent every year. Then, they pick up talent off the scrap heap (Wakefield, Ortiz), and can take short-dollar, caluclated risks because of the depth of their talent (Smoltz, Saito, Penny).

The Pirates could do this, too - maybe they can't afford to overpay for veteran talent (Pat Meares and Julio Lugo are the same signing for each team - the difference was that we can toss Lugo's salary overboard and keep going, whereas the Pirates were killed by Meares' contract), but they can invest in their minor-league system, which is the key to having rm, sustainable talent.

The Pirates actually had some talent in the majors at the end of 2005. McLouth, Duffy, Doumit, Paulino, Maholm, Duke, Gorzelanny and Capps had come up during the season, joining Bay and Wilson and Gonzalez and guys who needed playing time like Sanchez, Castillo, Baustista. Not exactly All Stars, but major leaguers and they were young. No reason in the world they couldn't have made it over .500 over the next couple of years (i.e., the Tracy years).

No reason in the world they couldn't have made it over .500 over the next couple of years (i.e., the Tracy years).

Does Tracy count as a reason?

#10 - I'm definitely not saying that DePodesta did everything right - although I don't see his bad moves as attempts to tweak the manager, but rather mistakes. Some of Tracy's moves were just mistakes, but many of them the latter half of the 2005 season were his decision that he was out of there at the end of the season, and he would run things his way and not his boss's way, even if that meant the team wouldn't get to evaluate players for future seasons. And that's unforgiveable - if he couldn't do his job properly, he should have gone to the team and admitted he couldn't work with DePodesta, and taken a buyout, not punish the team and its fans.