This is not the sort of thing that would normally get its own post, but I couldn’t resist the Garden-hired thing. Sorry. Anyway, the Minnesota Twins just announced they hired Ron Gardenhire as a special assistant to GM Terry Ryan.
Gardenhire was one of those managerial firings that no one really wanted to make but everyone sort of felt like they had to because, heck, the team wasn’t going anyplace. The Twins still liked him. He never lost his clubhouse that we know of. Sometimes you just gotta make a change. In fact, I’m kind of surprised that he wasn’t already employed with the team someplace. Part of me thought that he just kept showing up like Milton from “Office Space” and this hiring announcement was someone “fixing the glitch” as it were, only this time in Milton’s favor.
All of this reminds me of one of my favorite baseball stories. In 1981 the Braves finished fifth and owner Ted Turner fired Bobby Cox. At the post-firing press conference, a reporter asked Turner who his top candidate was to replace Cox. Turner said, “It would be Bobby Cox if I hadn’t just fired him. We need someone like him around here.” Life just works like that sometimes.
Welcome back, Ron.