Baseball season will be here before you know it. Pitchers and catchers will be reporting at the end of this month. And before you know it, you'll be cranking up some Dire Straits in preparation for the 2010 year. AZ Snakepit secured an early treat for Diamondbacks fans by running an interview with Arizona Diamondbacks general manager Josh Byrnes.
Josh got into the Bob Melvin firing:
AZ: It wasn't long into the season before Bob Melvin was fired. Does this tie into what you said about us underachieving in 2008? Or what changed between Opening Day and 29 games in, that led to the release of Bob Melvin? JB: Certainly Bob deserves a lot of credit for all the success we had here in 2007 - our success that year probably took people by surprise. And how we won, it's ironic, because some of those attributes that lead to winning close games, one of which you could argue is luck, just didn't repeat in 2008 and 2009. I think 2008 was disappointing. Internally, both with Bob and me, and with others, we had a lot of discussion, what went wrong and why. Not only was the division more winnable than we would have expected, but to win 82 and play the way we did was disappointing. There were no ultimatums going into 2009, but there was certainly an expectation that we needed to reverse this trend of how we were playing. And I didn't sense that it was reversing, so felt that it was necessary to make a change.
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