Firing a manager is easy, and there are lots of ways to do it.
Dusty Baker, for example. He worked this year on the last year of a contract, which usually means there won't be another one, and he relied on his players to deliver the goods.
Which, as we remember from our reading, they didn't do. Again.
But Baker was marked for the chop unless those players did deliver, and when they didn't, general manager Mike Rizzo did the expedient thing.
He fired one person rather than several. And changed exactly nothing.
Baker's managerial career is probably over now, as most teams don't look at 68-year-olds to fix their teams. He will never manage a World Series champion, something he ached for, and he was always be caricatured in part as the guy who didn't speak metric, and who believed in players as men whenever in doubt.
And the Nats didn't betray him, either. They were always not as good in the big moments because someone else was, and they became part of Washington's new fetish – Why Can't We Win One? It's as if having a cringeworthy President isn't good enough for them.
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So the time came, and he will be replaced by someone who will either win and get credit for work that was largely his, or he won't win and the town can continue to wallow in its tedious We're-The-New-Cubs pity. It is the circle of life.
At least it is for groups of people. For individuals, the circle of life is actually nothing more than a straight line that ends abruptly. For Dusty Baker, as it did for Tony La Russa in Phoenix two days earlier, that day came today. He deserves to be remembered as a very good manager who won a lot more than he lost, made more friends than enemies, and was honest from Day One until the end.
Which, as we also know, doesn't matter a whole lot on days like this.