Ken Rosenthal reported last night that John Russell’s job may be in immediate danger. Frank Coonelly quickly refuted that report to both DK and Buster Olney, but Craig Calcaterra fairly wonders why we should just accept Coonelly’s word on something like this.
Meanwhile, DK runs through the sequence of events last night that made Alvarez’s promotion seemingly come out of the blue. Something changed, he says. Thinking aloud here, but a corresponding move hasn’t been announced yet and Andy LaRoche did leave last night’s game early. Perhaps Huntington was waiting on a trade rather than cutting Iwamura or Crosby or demoting LaRoche. That would make some sense; in this case his public comments would have been made to try and avoid the perception that the Pirates had to do something to make room for Alvarez, thus forcing their hand on the corresponding move. I guess we’ll know for sure in a few hours. UPDATE: Nope. Iwamura’s been DFA’d and the team will try to trade him in the next ten days. We can talk more about him later, but today is PedroDay.
Finally, interesting interview with Charlie Morton by Colin Dunlap. I’m curious; does this make people feel like Morton’s a flake? Generally, when a guy has interests outside of baseball, that’s what people think about him. But what’s technically wrong about having interests outside of baseball? Am I a worse grad student because I’m a baseball fan? I sure hope not.
