A look at items out of the National League East..
- Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria is getting pressure from his top executives to fire Ozzie Guillen because they believe he has brought an unprofessional culture to the club, two people who have spoken with the front office told Joe Capozzi of The Palm Beach Post.
- The Phillies announced that Ryne Sandberg will join the team’s big league coaching staff as its new third base coach and infield instructor. The Hall of Famer had been managing in the Phillies’ minor league system and is considered by many a likely candidate to replace manager Charlie Manuel eventually.
- Manuel isn’t seeking a contract extension right now, but he stopped short of saying 2013 will be his final season, Matt Gelb of the Philadelphia Inquirer reports (via Twitter). Manuel’s contract with the Phillies expires after next year.
- Phillies GM Ruben Amaro Jr. “made no promises” to Sandberg, Gelb tweets. The 53-year-old will be permitted to interview for managerial jobs elsewhere if teams express interest.
- Rick Maese of The Washington Post looks at the unique relationship between agent Scott Boras and the Nationals front office. Despite Boras' incredible success as an agent, he said that he has no aspirations of building a team from the other side.
Ben Nicholson-Smith contributed to this post.
Hard to imagine that sandberg isnt already a big league manager somewhere.. guess he is turning down offers
Had the Cubs not made two bad manager choices, he’d be their coach by now.
2 bad choices? more like 1, Sveum aint bad
I have been mostly happy with Sveum. I feel like he and his coaches have guys as prepared as I’ve seen them in a long time and I give him and Dave McKay most of the credit for that and for Soriano’s good defensive season.
That said, he has the same problem a lot of managers do: He develops some kind of man-crush on certain players (in this case, Louis Valbuena) and plays them entirely too much relative to their talent. I’ve never been on the Josh Vitters bandwagon and he has done nothing to show me I should change my mind, but why on Earth was Valbuena getting the bulk of the playing time at the end of a lost season instead of seeing if Vitters could put something together as a regular?
I think that the Phillies have told Sandberg that he’ll be named manager when Manuel retires after next season.
They’ve probably given him the notion, but they’re not going to come out and tell him that. Stuff like that is toxic when it gets out.
They want to fire Ozzie for “bringing an unprofessional culture to the club.” Fire themselves for putting him there in the first place! I mean yeah his personality isn’t really fit for a club that disciplined one of its players for tweeting too much, but Ozzie’s personality is known to pretty much everyone in baseball and it’s impossible to believe they couldn’t have seen this coming.
It’s not Ryan, it’s Ryne.