The Nationals, according to multiple industry sources, are strongly considering firing general manager Jim Bowden and replacing him with Blue Jays assistant GM Tony LaCava.
Bowden has been implicated in a bonus skimming scandal in the Dominican Republic and is reportedly being investigated by the FBI. Jose Rijo, the former major-league pitcher and a special assistant to Bowden, has taken a leave of absence in wake of the allegations.
LaCava is highly regarded inside the game and has interviewed for GM jobs with the Pirates and Mariners in the last year-and-a-half. Commissioner Bud Selig reportedly has given Nationals president Stan Kasten permission to hire LaCava without interviewing minority candidates because of the special circumstances of a change of GMs being necessitated after spring training has started.
Actually, given the circumstances, the exception seems reasonable enough. The Nats have little recourse but to fire Bowden considering the extent of the skimming scandal on top of throwing away 1.6 million on a fake ID. It doesn't help his cause that he's awful at his job.
He is implicated, in that the ChiSox scout who was skimming and got canned was once upon a time a Reds scout working for Bowden. That's the extent of the information that is public.
What is Bowden guilty of? How about 11 losing seasons out of 15 as a GM? Or just simply being the GM of the worst team in baseball.
He doesn't need to be implicated in the skimming scandal to justify losing his job.
Maybe I'm the only one who thinks it a bit odd that nobody is spilling ink over one of the biggest names in management getting busted for bonus skimming, yet everyone is freaking out over the revelations that a player was breaking a rule to improve his play.
Bud might need to release some more names if this thing with Bowden blows up.
no offense Will, but out of the entire write up, only one sentence suggests how LaCava might be as a GM:
"With a scouting background, La Cava is known as one of the most savvy talent evaluators in the game, making him a perfect candidate for a team that needs to build through development."
The rest is just about how nice he is. Being nice<>being good at running a team. Hopefully he's got some good ideas for what to do with the Nationals. if he ends up getting picked, er, "hired."
Don't discount the value of sociability in a job like GM. If LaCava is pleasant to work around, more GMs will want to keep in touch with him. His nature is going to put him in situations where people are going to want to deal with him, rather than someone who gets on their nerves, and his background in development is going to mean that when he DOES get called on deals, he'll likely have a good eye for which players in the opposing guy's system are good fits for his club.
As far as his background, he comes out of player development under guys like Bavasi, Schuerholz and Shapiro, so he's learned from strong traditional GMs. At the same time, his most recent work under Ricciardi exposed him to a lot of cutting edge analysis. How much of that exposure he added to his own arsenal of knowledge versus rejecting it as the refuge of a foundering GM tenure in Toronto is open for debate, but he would have likely moved on earlier if he wasn't somewhat comfortable with the process.
It might also be worth noting that he was with the team as Director of Player Personnel back in 2001 when they were still in Montreal. While I don't know how total the turnover was, it seems to me there might still be members of the team that remember him from that go-around.
I think you're mistakenly conflating being a fantasy baseball GM with being an actual general manager. In baseball today there's a lot more to being a successful GM than just palling around at the winter meetings and having others willing to consider trading with you.
I'm not saying sociability isn't unimportant, just that there is so much more to being a good general manager. Ol' Snakeskin Boots Colletti seems like a pretty friendly guy--unless you're a snake--and look how he's done.
My point is that I share John Jung and lurgee's interest in what sort of chops this cat has.
My question is what in the world took so long? This scandal broke last July. Had upper management responded then, you might be looking at the Strasburg-Crow 1-2 punch in a couple of years. It's not like his peformance in and out of the office had earned him any semblance of a benefit of the doubt at that point.
It isn't yet clear that Bowden is guilty of anything. Also, I rather disagree with the idea that he's done such a bad job lately with the Nats. He's added Milledge and Dukes almost for free, and that team isn't as bad as it once was.
Peeling away two malingerers whose employers had tired of them pales in comparison to all the awful contracts Bowden has handed out, one of which was, as the article mentions, has provided less utility than simply lighting $1,600,000 on fire. That's just the most embarrassing example, as Kearns, Nick the Stick, The D Cab, Mighty Mouse, and Da Meathook II: Electric Boogaloo were all horrible signings. Meanwhile, Ed Wade is the only thing keeping the Nats from having the worst farm system in baseball.
Firing Jim Bowden is like placing Rich Harden on the DL: foreseeable. If you're going to have a minority-interview rule, stick to it. How exactly do the Nats know this LaCava guy they've supposedly never interviewed is the best man for the job? Old boy network, right? Isn't that what a minority-interview rule is for? Paging Joe Sheehan.
Really. What's so "special" about firing a GM after Spring training's started? GM's can only be fired during the off-season?
On a related note: I assume there's a similar minority-interview rule for managers. If so, did the Brewers get an exemption last September when they fired Yost?
If the firing of Jim Bowden is a fait accompli, isn't the timing just about the money? I assume the Nats could simply fire Bowden for whatever reason--he hadn't acquired enough corner OFs/1Bs, they didn't like the color of his socks, whatever--however, if they did so, they would have to pay him for the rest of his contract. It they fired him for cause, perhaps they would not have to.
No replacement named yet, but I'm wondering why Mike Rizzo's name didn't come up in the discussion here, since he's already on staff in DC as assistant GM?
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Typical Bud Selig: The rules matter, unless they don't.