Astros name Mills new manager

[Guest Ranger83]

[size=12pt]Astros name Mills new manager[/size]

Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
Oct. 27, 2009, 12:48PM

Brad Mills was hired Tuesday by the Astros, taking over as manager of a team that has missed the postseason four straight seasons despite having one of baseball's highest payrolls.

The hiring ends a month-long search to replace Cecil Cooper, who was fired Sept. 21.

The Astros chose Mills, who has no previous major league managerial experience, after a third round of interviews over former Astros manager Phil Garner and Dave Clark, who served as interim manager for the final 13 games.

The Astros offered the job during the weekend to Manny Acta, who turned it down to take the manager's job in Cleveland.

Mills becomes the Astros' fifth manager since 2002. Houston has not made the postseason since reaching the World Series in 2005.

Mills, 52, has coached 11 seasons on the major-league level, the last six as the Boston Red Sox's bench coach. He spent 11 seasons as a manager in the minor leagues with the Chicago Cubs, Colorado Rockies and Los Angeles Dodgers.

[BOSoxfan4life]

Good pick.

Unfortunately they will not get any talent around him and he will have a sub-par year

[KDOSullivan]

[quote name="BOSoxfan4life" post="687759" timestamp="1256666901"]
Good pick.

Unfortunately they will not get any talent around him and he will have a sub-par year
[/quote]

I agree, good pick, but we need players.

[BOSoxfan4life]

I give him until August and Astros Fans will be calling for his head.

[shovel]

Naw, nobody will be calling for his head. You cant blame the coach for what the owner and GM do, although I guess Cooper just got a dose of blame. Mills is about to find out that you cant make chicken salad from chicke sh!t.

[BOSoxfan4life]

and so did Garner and so forth. 

I give it till August

[spoonbill]

i guess i'm one of a few that think wade has things going better than they were in the past. we did sign most of our picks last year unlike in the few years before. purpura killed us in the few years he ran the team. they shoulda never let hunsicker go. i think we are headed in the right direction as good as is possible with drayton as the owner. he just can't understand that sometimes when you make bad decisions (purpura) and deplete your farm system to try and win at all costs for one year, that you may need to take some lumps until your farm system recovers. he keeps trying to reload with overpaid older players. i know roy has his ear and probably threatens to go somewhere else if he rebuilds, but it is what it is. i say try to get a couple of pitchers, go with what you got, and if it doesn't work out, trade him for younger kids. the astros will HAVE to replenish their farm system at some point to turn the corner.

[BOSoxfan4life]

Rob Neyer of ESPN.com said this

Manny Acta was the guy they wanted. The Astros liked everything about him. His presence and personality. How he forged relationships with players. His ability to run a game.I said from the beginning that there was no right answer in this search for a new manager. Manny Acta would have been terrific, but then so would Phil Garner, Bob Melvin, Tim Bogar, Jim Fregosi and a dozen or so others.

But the Astros settled on Manny Acta. Ed Wade and Tal Smith went through the list and the interviews and decided he should be the guy to lead the Astros through an important period in their history.

There's no use surgarcoating what happened these last 48 hours. Drayton McLane refused to offer Acta a three-year contract. He offered two, and even when the Cleveland Indians offered three, he held firm.

--snip--

He operated the Astros that way when they made the playoffs six times in nine years, and he's operating them this way now. I believe in my heart of hearts that his heart is in the right place, but he has some odd thoughts about putting a team together.

He'll allow his people overspend on some has-been player, but veto spending on draft picks and managers.

Now the Astros will move on. They've got some tough spinning to do when a manager finally is hired.

It's not just that the new manager won't be their first choice. It's that the Astros lost their first choice for a relatively small amount of money.
If you don't trust your baseball people to choose your manager, you should get new baseball people.

If you think it's silly to give a manager a three-year contract but don't mind throwing $100 million of your ill-gotten gains at Carlos Lee, you probably need to have your head examined (though of course something similar might be said of half the owners in the majors).

It's not likely that failing to hire Manny Acta is debilitating, because it's not likely that Manny Acta is a great manager. I mean, it's certainly possible. It's just that there aren't many great managers -- to the questionable extent such a beast might be identified, anyway -- and so the odds of any particular manager being great are small indeed.

What's debilitating is a sense of the organization, both within and without, that the owner and his top lieutenants aren't on the same page. Whether that characterization is fair or not, often the perception becomes the reality.

[BOSoxfan4life]

This is so true

"If you think it's silly to give a manager a three-year contract but don't mind throwing $100 million of your ill-gotten gains at Carlos Lee, you probably need to have your head examined (though of course something similar might be said of half the owners in the majors)."

[ya_know]

Good pick.  Hopefully he gets to stick around for a while because I believe he can get us moving in the right direction.  It is just going to take some time.