I’m taking my first day off of work next week in 2010, and decided to go with the whole week off. I won’t be posting anything on the site, but I’ll be updating the Twitter feed occasionally. Hopefully by the time I get back Cristian Guzman will be traded for something of value, but that’s my usual farewell for the last four years, so I’m not that hopeful.
On to the D-Backs
Arizona Diamondbacks GM Josh Byrnes was fired last night. Via Twitter, Buster Olney said:
Byrnes will be unemployed for about 0.2 seconds. First, the Diamondbacks have him under contract for the next five years, and secondly, he is very, very, very highly regarded — and now some team can hire him as a consultant until he gets his next GM job, and it will be on the D-Backs’ dime. Today I posted a poll of 12 GMs, and of those, 2 said that of all the other GMs in the game, they would hire Josh as their GM.
Josh Byrnes is talented, and while Rizzo was passed over for the job in Arizona in favor of Byrnes, I hope there’s no hard feelings. I think it would be incredible if the Nats were the team that hired Byrnes as a consultant. I personally know one of Byrnes’ talented young staffers, their Director of Baseball Operations was a grad school classmate of mine, and he’s a really bright guy. If the other guys in that organization are like my friend, that’s a really strong group. I hope Rizzo and the Nats utilize his close relationship with the team and those people to get the best of the best from Arizona over here in DC.
Finally, the Walk Off
As for last night’s game, clutch hitting or whatever you want to call that was nice in the bottom of the 9th, especially after several failures earlier in the game. The Nats had their chances and blew them, thankfully the pitching was great so they were able to take 3 or 4 shots at scoring a run. Still, going to a walk off win was alot of fun, and I thought the crowd was great at the end of the game. Livan is pitching strongly again, despite a little bump in the road, he’s got an ERA under 3 after 16 starts. Nobody’s talking much about him in the All Star game, or as trade bait, but maybe both of those things should be discussed. Meanwhile, Nyjer Morgan has had a good week, batting .345/.387/.379 over his last 7 games, with 2 SB and ZERO CS!. Let’s see if he can extend that to 2 weeks or even a month, the Nats could use his help.