I recently ran two stories about Giants coach Ron Wotus, a longtime favorite of mine. There’s an op-ed piece here and an interview here.
Ron appreciated the stories, but as it turns out, he also interviewed for the manager’s job 
with the San Diego Padres, in addition to the five other teams mentioned in the story.
Good grief.
This is beyond ridiculous. Each season we see guys managing teams who seem to be functionally illiterate and can barely tie their shoes; yet Ron and other “solid baseball men” are kept on the outside, looking in.
Shame on them.
And shame on the Giants most of all, for not realizing what an asset they have in Ron, and for not having a succession plan in place. (And the way this season is going for San Francisco, several people in the organization are going to need some succession planning.)
When I started The Haught Corner, I swore I wouldn’t do “fan rants” full of uneducated opinions about teams and how they operate.
Well, this is an exception. It’s galling, and on some level, insulting. It happens time and again: the “name” manager gets the nod over someone like Ron, who has 20+ years of service to the organization and has succeeded wherever he has gone.
I asked Dave Bristol about what it’s like to be fired from major-league managerial jobs.
“That’s baseball,” he told me. “You just do the best job you can, and move on.”
But does it really have to be that way? After all, as Larry Dierker famously wrote, “this isn’t brain surgery” — and he should know.