Four former major league general managers, including Ned Colletti and Omar Minaya, could be in the running for a front office job with the Baltimore Orioles if current executive vice president Dan Duquette leaves for a position with the Toronto Blue Jays, according to Dan Connolly of the Baltimore Sun.
Ned Colletti, Omar Minaya among potential replacements for Dan Duquette
Reports about whether Duquette is on his way out of Baltimore are conflicting, but if he is, four former MLB general managers could be in the running for his job. Not one would be a good idea.
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Conflicting reports have recently surfaced about the chances of Duquette taking over as the Blue Jays’ chief executive officer. A deal between the AL East rivals that would send compensation to Baltimore in exchange for Duquette was said to be “almost done,“ but Orioles owner Peter Angelos reportedly said the deal was ”not going to happen” later in the day.
It appears the Orioles are already doing their due diligence in the event that a deal for Duquette ends up going through. Baltimore has looked at Colletti, Minaya, Kevin Towers and Kevin Malone to potentially work alongside manager Buck Showalter and vice president of baseball operations Brady Anderson, per Connolly.
The problem is, the O’s might be better off allowing Showalter and Anderson, both of whom have been involved in building the team’s current contending club, to run the show.
Malone's long list of failures includes a tumultuous stint with the Los Angeles Dodgers that included signing Kevin Brown, Shawn Green and Gary Sheffield to bad contracts and ended with a strange argument with a fan in San Diego. Among Malone's many other miscues as a GM was a public feud with none other than Towers.
Towers, the longtime Padres GM who most recently held that role with the Arizona Diamondbacks, hasn't done himself any favors over the last few years, either. After helping build a team that reached the playoffs in 2011, Towers became enraged with the Diamondbacks' .500 finish a year later and, among many other head-scratching moves, traded the club's franchise player, Justin Upton, to the Atlanta Braves for a relatively weak package. Towers was ousted from the D-backs' front office in September.
Minaya brought not one, but two organizations down. While with the Montreal Expos in the early 2000s, he made one of the worst trades in recent memory, sending future All-Stars Cliff Lee, Brandon Phillips and Grady Sizemore to the Cleveland Indians for veteran pitcher Bartolo Colon. Though he pitched well in Montreal, Colon's presence wasn't nearly enough to get a .500-level team over the hump and into the postseason. Minaya also traded away a young Jason Bay, Carl Pavano and Chris Young while at the helm of the Expos. He remained in that position until the team was moved to Washington, D.C. after the 2004 season.
His time with the Mets wasn't much better. Minaya built a championship-caliber club in 2006, but the same one blew a huge lead late in the 2007 season and continued on a downhill trend after that. Though he didn't trade away quite as many promising prospects as he did in Montreal, Minaya made mistakes in other areas. He signed a much older Bay, Francisco Rodriguez and Johan Santana to lucrative contracts. The latter, first acquired in a trade that cost the Mets future star Carlos Gomez, was effective when healthy, but that was only for a couple of seasons. Bay, meanwhile, was never the same player he was in Pittsburgh and Boston and was out of baseball three years after signing the contract.
It's possible Colletti, who is still in the Dodgers organization after being removed from his GM duties after the Dodgers' Division Series loss to the St. Louis Cardinals, is the best of the four candidates.
That says a lot.
Colletti took over an underachieving team in 2006 and got them to the playoffs five times during his nine-year tenure. Under his leadership, the Dodgers used a strong farm system that included the likes of Clayton Kershaw, Matt Kemp, Andre Ethier and Chad Billingsley to post a winning record in eight of those nine seasons. Colletti engineered successful free-agent contracts and trades that netted the Dodgers Adrian Gonzalez, Zack Greinke, Hyun-jin Ryu, Manny Ramirez, Yasiel Puig, Hanley Ramirez and others.
But Colletti certainly wasn't without his faults. This is the guy who signed Juan Pierre, Andruw Jones and Jason Schmidt to inexplicable contracts. And when there were moves to be made to improve the team, such as when the Dodgers could have landed Howie Kendrick two years ago, Colletti failed to part with prospects. Holding on to solid minor leaguers isn't always a bad thing, but when a team with World Series aspirations has a chance to upgrade from an aging and ineffective Mark Ellis as the Dodgers did in 2013, it probably needs to pull the trigger.
The Orioles have a good team with a solid chance at returning to the postseason in 2015, but bringing aboard one of these guys could have a negative effect if history is any indication. Allowing Showalter and Anderson to continue their momentum rather than placing too much value on front office experience is the route Baltimore should take in the event Duquette heads north of the border.
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