The Buscher

All of the writers on the Mets beat helped to perpetuate this. Scumbags.

This all could’ve been avoided if they had just made the lay-up hire of Girardi, who WANTED to manage the Mets. But nope, the Wilpons were too cheap to pay top dollar for a manager and they didn’t want someone who wouldn’t be okay with the front office stepping on his toes.

Time to find a new user name. This franchise is a fucking joke. MLB gave all the players immunity. The players still respected Beltran. The Mets fans didn’t care. But the media got their torches and pitchforks out and that was that. They were not going to drop this story unless and until they fired him.

Though it's a posthumous induction, I'm so glad to see George Young finally get his due. The Giants were horrific pretty much all through the '70s and he build them into a team that contended for a decade and won two Super Bowls.

I get the sense that the Mets don't want to fire him because MLB isn't suspending him. But the media and the talking heads on TV are largely calling on the Mets to fire him anyway. If it happens, it's a new level of LOL METS. Cheap out on Girardi who was the fans' clear #1 choice and who WANTED to manage the team only to see him go to a division rival. Save some face with the Beltran hire only to possibly have to fire him before he ever manages a game. I don't even know what they'd do at this point. Hensley Meulens is their new bench coach but he was never interviewed for the managerial job. Eduardo Perez was the runner up but who knows if he'd take the job now especially with a coaching staff in place. Honestly their best bet might just be to ask Terry Collins if he'd be willing to interim for a year.

Good for him to get out now before injuries caught up too much. The question now is whether or not his eight years were enough to get him into Canton. The HOF monitor has him well short of the average inductee for the ILB position, but Lewis and Butkus really drive the averages up. His closest comp is Patrick Willis who also retired after eight years - most people think he'll go in eventually but he didn't get past the semi-finals in his first year and he's still 14 points higher than Kuechly. If he ever goes in he's going to have a very long wait. With Gates retiring, I also looked at the TE HOF monitor and it's spot on. Everyone at the top is in and Gates, Gronk, and Witten will all go in. As it stands now, Gates and Gronk are eligible to go into the Hall together, but Gonzalez was the only first-ballot TE and his number blew everyone else's out of the water. Find it interesting that Sharpe's number is higher than Gates' despite Gates having 54 more TDs. But Sharpe put his numbers up in an era where TE's weren't reliable pass catchers, plus he won rings, and he had to wait a few years.

Josh Donaldson to the Twins. 4 years, $92 million with a 5th year option.

Someone who had nothing better to do dove into Aaron Judge's Instagram archives and found that he deleted his previous post congratulating Altuve on winning the 2017 MVP.

The problem is I don't know any realistic way the NFL can change its system at this point. You can't force teams to hire minority head coaches. But the owners are going to continue to have their biases. If you want a fair process, they need to be taken out of the decision. But again, that's never going to happen. And Goodell works for the owners so he'll never push for it. The biggest change I could see is maybe an independent party is required to sit in on head coaching interviews or hold their own round of interviews with candidates for each job, and they'd make their own recommendation to ownership. If nothing else it would get another voice in the room. If you have someone like Eric Bieniemy being recommended for every job and getting none of them, it'll at least force the owners to publicly justify their decisions and be held to account.

LSU were just head and shoulders above everyone this season.

Cora might get even more than that. Reports are that he was the primary mastermind behind both the Astros 2017 and Red Sox 2018 scandals. It actually wouldn't surprise me if he got slapped with a lifetime ban.

Carlos Beltran will not face punishment as he was a player at the time, only the coaching staff and front office are being punished. That said, the media is almost certainly going to ask him a million questions about it once camps open, not the best thing for a brand new manager to have to deal with in his first year.

The Astros also fired them both. Joe Espada will manage the team in 2020 and possibly beyond. Also, the Astros forfeit their first and second round picks in both 2020 and 2021 and the organization is fined $5 million.

“They fought for sixty minutes” was said in literally every single Shurmur post-game conference.

Covino and Rich on Sirius played Judge’s introductory press conference with a bell that would ding every time he said a cliche. The bell dinged nonstop.

Antoine Winfield Jr. declares for the NFL draft.

Judge still wouldn't have been my choice, but it's done now and I just gotta hope for the best. Between the Barkley and Jones picks and now the Judge hire, Gettleman won't be around much longer if this team doesn't start winning some games. While I've been listening to the Giants get killed on WFAN all morning, while there's an obvious systematic problem with NFL hiring practices, I'm not sure how fair it is to say that about the Giants in this case given that they interviewed Bieniemy as well as Kris Richard. They also had Jerry Reese as their GM for over ten years and interviewed two black candidates for his replacement. I don't think they hired Judge because they're racists - they hired him because he surprised them in their interview and they came out of it impressed enough to make him the fallback option once the Panthers blindsided them with a crazy offer for Rhule. If there's anything that intrigues me about Judge...special teams coordinators have to work with players on both sides of the ball already, and their job is different in that other than the kicker, punter, and long snapper, they have no real say in roster construction and have to take whatever pieces they're given and mold them into a functional special teams unit. It's a unique perspective if nothing else. And hey John Harbaugh was one of the few special teams coordinators to get a head coaching gig and that worked out well.

What's funny is that Brees' contract voids at the beginning of the 2020 league year just like Brady's does, and the Saints went 5-0 with a 27-year old backup QB. Despite this, absolutely nobody in the media is even remotely considering Brees playing elsewhere as an option, yet they can't help but pencil Brady in for other destinations.

What also didn’t work in Bieniemy’s favor is that there were a lot fewer jobs open this year. It’s not unusual to see a quarter of the league looking for a new coach and this time there were only five vacancies, and two of those jobs basically weren’t open since they were targeted hires for guys with legit experience, one of whom is a minority himself. That left only three openings and one of them was always going to go to Matt Rhule who had all three remaining teams calling for him and he basically got to take his pick. Of course, the list of coaches who jumped from NCAA straight into NFL head coaching is almost exclusively white, would Rhule have gotten the same amount of hype if he was black? A guy like David Shaw only seems to get mentioned for NFL coaching gigs in passing...I wonder if he’s even been interested in making the jump. Nowadays he might feel that NCAA is a better place for him because he sees how black head coaches are treated in the NFL. And I wonder if Bieniemy and other black coordinators will try to leave for the NCAA due to the systematic biases hindering their upward mobility.

About a third of the balloting has been revealed with the Hall of Fame announcement two weeks away. Larry Walker and Curt Schilling are still ahead of the 75% threshold at 83.9% and 80.3%, respectively. Both guys have seen huge jumps in their totals from a year ago. That said the voters that don't unveil their ballots tend to be traditionalists who simply won't examine anyone's case - if the name doesn't immediately make them think HOFer, they're out...so these guys' numbers will drop, possibly very steeply in Larry's case. I could see him only missing out by a few votes and having to wait for the Veterans Committee. Jeter is still polling at 100% which is no surprise, I could easily see him being unanimous now that the seal has been broken for that. A couple of voters have admitted to considering leaving him off strategically because they see more than 10 worthy candidates on the ballot and don't want to risk seeing someone drop off...but at the end of the day none of them could justify the backlash. If someone doesn't vote for Jeter it'll be someone who doesn't publicly reveal their ballot.

The Giants are getting mostly reamed in the media for this hire, specifically that they passed on Eric Bieniemy who once again has been shut out of a head coaching job in favor of some random white assistant. Bieniemy seemingly gets no credit for the Chiefs offense, it all gets credited to Reid. I'd have much rather had Bieniemy than Joe Judge. That said of all the takes on it, there's still this eye-rolling shit from Chuck Modiano: "Whiteness at Work"...proceeds to immediately list a black coach. Not to mention of all the white Belichick assistants listed he conveniently omits Bill O'Brien who has made the playoffs four times.

So the Giants identified Rhule as their clear #1 candidate, yet didn't make a strong enough push to get him in the door first. In the NFL, if you let your guy interview somewhere else first you're putting yourself at risk that the other team won't let the guy leave without signing his name on the dotted line...and that's pretty much what happened here. Rhule wanted the Giants to match the huge offer he got from Carolina without even meeting with them. So instead they hire a guy who coached the Pats' awful WR group this season and will now bring in Garrett as OC. Fuck this team and double fuck Dave Gettleman.

McCarthy somehow got the Packers job after a season in which his Niners had the 30th ranked offense in the league.