Report: Yankees targeted Bob Melvin as potential manager

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As the New York Yankees cast their net to find their next manager, they apparently had a legitimate interest in A’s skipper Bob Melvin.

Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic tweeted that New York reached out to the A’s about interviewing Melvin for their vacancy but that Oakland denied the request. A team must be granted permission to interview any manager or coach who’s currently under contract with another team, and Melvin received a contract extension in September that will keep him in the A’s dugout through the 2019 season.

Though nothing obviously will happen on this front, it does bring up an interesting point: Three consecutive last-place finishes for the A’s, and a combined 212-274 record since the start of 2015, haven’t damaged Melvin’s reputation in the eyes of those around the major leagues.

He’s always been highly respected by not only his players but his peers for his baseball acumen, leadership and communication skills. Surely there’s a view around the bigs that the A’s struggles in recent seasons are due, in part at least, to all of the roster turnover that began following the Wild Card season of 2014.

A’s general manager David Forst, currently in Orlando, Fla., for the annual GM meetings, declined any comment on Rosenthal’s report.

Would Melvin have been interested in the New York job?

It stands to reason he would have. Who wouldn’t be?

Not only do the Yankees have a capability, and willingness, to spend that dwarfs that of the A’s, but in recent years they’ve also built one of the game’s deepest farm systems from which to draw on.

Melvin spent a tiny slice of his final big league season in 1994 with the Yankees. And at the time he was hired as the A’s manager in 2011, he and his family were living in Manhattan, so there’s a level of comfort for him on the East Coast.

Understand that Melvin’s one-year extension was no long-term commitment from the A’s, more a move to avoid him managing as a lame duck in 2018 had that remained the final year of his contract (though it’s worth nothing that neither Forst nor executive VP of baseball operations Billy Beane are signed past 2019 either).

So it’s easy to envision that the Yankees job would have been attractive to Melvin. However, he’s also a Palo Alto native who grew up in the Bay Area and wears his passion for the A’s franchise on his sleeve.

And Melvin doesn’t hide his enthusiasm for the A’s young crop of talent that began establishing itself this past season and that looks to be the backbone of the franchise moving forward.

The main takeaway here: Though the A’s have scuffled big-time in the standings over the past three years, their manager remains quite the well-regarded and sought-after figure, at least in the eyes of one very high-profile franchise.

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