Oh how it must burn Steve Phillips, but not like in the way things usually burn Steve Phillips
So Steve Phillips has been replaced as ESPN’s resident GM-turned-analyst by former Blue Jays honcho J.P. Ricciardi.
I don’t know exactly how it’ll shake out — from the news stories I’ve read, it sounds as though Ricciardi’s destined for Baseball Tonight and not necessarily replacing Phillips in his star turn as the third member of the Joe Morgan/Jon Miller Sunday Night Baseball booth.
I read speculation earlier this offseason that Bobby Valentine could be ticketed for that role, but I can’t find anything concrete online. Either way, the good news is that this pretty much confirms Steve Phillips will be nowhere near our TV screens anytime soon, unless he’s on the Today show apologizing again or breaking into our homes to steal our TVs.
I don’t know how Ricciardi will fare on-screen. By most accounts, he had a reputation as an accessible and charismatic GM, but he did have a strange proclivity for saying really weird things. And at least one time, just straight-up lies.
So that should be interesting. Plus Ricciardi, as a former Billy Beane protege, is lumped in with Moneyball and sabermetrics even if many of the moves he made with the Blue Jays don’t exactly speak to those philosophies. So if Ricciardi goes off on some misguided tangent like Phillips used to, it will be amusing — or perhaps maddening — to watch the Murray Chasses of the world point to his words as why stats-based analysis has led baseball astray or whatever.
But while I don’t watch a whole lot of Baseball Tonight anyway now that the MLB Network has launched, here’s hoping Ricciardi turns out better as his new job than he was at his old one, and he can use the platform to bring a better understanding of advanced metrics to a wider audience.
