Fire Gardy

In a bit of unexpected and horrible news this week, Pat Neshek had his first setback in his rehab from an elbow injury — and as a result will have Tommy John surgery and miss the 2009 season. I’d been banking pretty heavily on his return, and without him the bullpen problems of 2008 will almost certainly bleed into 2009 and keep the team’s chances of winning pretty weak.

Many expect this news to force the organization to redouble their efforts to acquire bullpen via trade or free agency; I’m not confident they’ll do that though. The Twins are really high on their homegrown pitching talent, and as a result we might see a whole lot of AAA players shuffling through the bullpen to see who sticks. Hopefully we figure it out by June or July so we can start to make up the ground we’ll surely sacrifice to the Indians, Tigers and White Sox by letting Boof and Guerrier repeatedly blow games for the first few months before handing more duties to Korecky, Breslow, Humber, Mulvey, Delaney, Duensing, et cetera, in the hopes that a few of them prove as effective as Mijares has.

In another bit of less-than-encouraging news, a dream of FireGardy has been dashed. Around here we’ve been secretly hoping that the Mariners try to steal Ullger away from us to be their new manager; after all, they’re just about incompetent enough to do something like that. Alas, it appears that it’s not to be. From Baseball Prospectus:

A sure sign that the Mariners are likely to begin a youth movement under new general manager Jack Zduriencik is that none of the seven managerial candidates he will interview have ever managed in the major leagues: Red Sox bench coach Brad Mills, Red Sox third-base coach DeMarlo Hale, Diamondbacks third-base coach Chip Hale, White Sox bench coach Joey Cora, Cardinals third-base coach Jose Oquendo, Athletics bench coach Dan Wakamatsu, and Randy Ready, the manager of the Padres‘ Triple-A Las Vegas farm club.

It was encouraging that they were looking for someone who hadn’t been a major league manager before, but even they aren’t foolish enough to court Ullger’s services, apparently.

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