Sportsfrog.com

Don’t get me wrong, he had to go. For a variety of managing sins, including:

1. Horrific misuse of his roster (like pinch-hitting Juan Castro for Jerry Hamilton, finding at-bats for Norris Hopper and leading him off while doing it etc. Trust me, the list goes on and on)

2. Abusing the assets on the pitching staff (in a season that has been lost from almost the outset, there was no reason for Bronson Arroyo and Aaron Harang, both under favorable long-term deals, to rack up the kind of pitch counts and abuse they have. You cannot endanger assets because of short-comings elsewhere).

3. Horriffic management of the bullpen. And it’s a bad bullpen. But at least, for fuckssake, try a manager who will not burn out arms with six-appearance-in-seven days usage patterns and then appears confused why, at the end of such a run of appearances, said pitcher is not effective. Go figure.

Yeah, he wasn’t good. But he also was simply the icing on the deeper cake of Reds’ troubles. A cake baked by Wayne Krivsky, the General Manager who saw fit to saddle the Reds with Juan Castro (at the expense of Brenden Harris, now tearing up the American League in Tampa), saddle the Reds with three catchers (meaning of five reserve spots on the bench, two are taken up by Javier Valentin and Chad Moeller), waste what little available money the Reds had to spend in the off-season on “talents” like Mike Stanton, Rheal Cormier, Jeff Conine, and Alex Gonzalez.

In short, Krivsky has sucked. And he still has his job. So Jerry Narron is gone? Good. That will lay bare Krivsky in the spotlight. And he best start getting better at his job immediately. Or he needs to join Narron in unemployment shortly.