Maybe trading Woody Williams to the St. Louis Cardinals for Ray Lankford finally caught up with him. Kevin Towers always used to say that was the one trade he would have loved to have back.
Wonder if new Padres owner Jeff Moorad will ever feel the same way about letting Towers go, which he did prior to Friday night’s season-ending series opener against the San Francisco Giants?
Maybe it has crossed your mind over the last couple of seasons, and maybe you even dreamed about it. After all, there are many in San Diego who have pointed the finger at Towers over the years every time the Friars have fallen.
But now that it has actually happened, now that baseball’s longest-tenured General Manager has actually been given the heave-ho, it really does feel like a shocker.
If nothing else, the timing of it seems puzzling. Sure the Padres are in the midst of finishing up a rather mediocre season in 4th-place in the National League West, and sure the club was basically eliminated from post-season consideration back in mid-June, but the last couple of months have provided a sense of hope for the future.
Young players drafted or acquired under Towers’ watch like Kyle Blanks, Will Venable and Everth Cabrera have blossomed during this season’s second-half and helped San Diego win 36 of its last 60 games.
Strong-armed pitchers such as Luke Gregerson, Adam Russell, Ryan Webb, Sean Gallagher, Aaron Poreda and Clayton Richard — all picked up in trades by Towers before or during the 2009 season — have given the Friars a solid foundation from which to build a staff.
Yet, now that Moorad has decided to go in a different direction, hope has given way to question marks. Why in the world would Towers be sent packing at this point?
Moorad said the organization’s “focus is on more of a strategic approach to drafting and development that has a chance to compete in the division year-in and year-out.”
He added: “I think we need to build a better baseball operations department, better skilled at the areas we’re committed to going forward.”
Sounds like a bunch of malarkey to me. Is Moorad really trying to tell us that Towers – whose skills as a baseball man he said he admired greatly — was let go because, although he does a great job getting players, its his organizational acumen that fell short?
If you want somebody to run your ballclub with a more concise vision, get somebody to sit in a big office with a three-piece suit and have them put together a bunch of graphs and charts and call a bunch of staff meetings so that everyone is on the same page.
But if you want to win ballgames, keep the guy who collects for you the players. Towers, during his reign, accumulated a lot of great ones — Adrian Gonzalez and Chris Young for Adam Eaton quickly come to mind — and he did so on a shoestring budget.
Even his most vicious critics have to agree that Towers had to do his job for 15 years with one arm tied behind his back.
If Moorad is going to follow up this move by continuing to slash payroll, it won’t matter what plan the new man — whoever he turns out to be — puts into place. All the organizational ideas — new and old — in the world can’t overcome a lack of funds.
Trade out Brian Cashman of the Yankees with the Royals’ Dayton Moore and see which GM succeeds.
Under Towers the Padres won four division championships and reached the World Series in 1998. Include 2007’s one-game playoff with Colorado and Towers guided his ballclub to five postseason appearances in 15 tries. Those aren’t Hall of Fame numbers, but considering the lack of front-office support he was given over the years, a .333 batting average wasn’t too shabby.
Nevertheless, every time the Friars found success it seemed that they had trouble sustaining it. Moorad’s thought is that a new regime with a new strategic approach can find a way to make the Padres contenders more often.
Perhaps. But unless more money is spent by ownership, my guess is that the day he let Kevin Towers go may turn out to be a day Jeff Moorad regrets for a long while.
– Ello –
