With the World Series scheduled to start tomorrow night, there’s a very good chance that the Pirates won’t hire John Russell’s successor until sometime in November. As a general rule, the World Series means a moratorium on all non-World Series news (remember the fuss over A-Rod declaring his free agency hours before the Red Sox swept the Rockies in 2007?) and that means that the Pirates won’t be making any announcements in the next ten days or so.
So what does the lack of decision mean? My dad sent me an e-mail today wondering if it meant we should assume that the Pirates’ next manager is on the Rangers’ or Giants’ coaching staff. There are some possibilities there (Clint Hurdle and Ron Wotus come to mind), but I’m not sure I’d jump to that conclusion yet. The Yankees and Phillies were just eliminated over the weekend; it’s always possible that they want to interview someone from one of those two clubs and the potential interviewee asked for a couple days to unwind after the season ended. It’s possible that they already have someone in mind, but wanted to put a couple more feelers out before making a final decision. That might make sense if they were going the Jeff Banister route, as no one else is interviewing Banister.
I will say that I think that the long wait probably makes Banister the favorite among the three candidates left from the first wave of interviews, because he seems to me like the only guy that definitely won’t be considered for someone else’s job. We already know the Marlins are interested in Bo Porter and while Tosca hasn’t been interviewed by Milwaukee or New York yet, that doesn’t mean that he definitely won’t be. In any case, there probably won’t be a whole lot of news out of Pittsburgh except to maybe acknowledge an interview over the next ten days, but I’m guessing there will be news coming pretty quickly out of the World Series.
