Currently viewing the tag: "Kevin Towers"

GM Dave Stewart and Manager Chip Hale were fired today, about two weeks after cutting ties with Senior VP De Jon Watson. As of this writing, Chief Baseball Officer Tony La Russa‘s role was still up in the air, but as expected, the D-backs have made a loud statement about moving in a different direction. The team finished …

Continue Reading

When J.J. Putz came to Arizona from Chicago, New York and Seattle, he’d already been through a lot as a major league reliever. Five campaigns as a Mariner, then one as a Met and one with the White Sox had left Putz with a lot of mileage on his right arm. But he still threw kinda hard and had a …

Continue Reading

We can officially close the books on Kevin Towers as a D-backs employee; Nick Piecoro has reported that Towers will leave to seek a position with another team. According to the article, Tony La Russa said “Towers told him he felt remaining with the team presented a sort of ‘awkwardness'” under the new regime.

I think there’s a good chance …

Continue Reading

As I’m sure you’re aware, Kevin Towers was fired last week. Then he wasn’t fired. In a somewhat confusing set of events, Towers was relieved of his GM duties, then offered a different position within the organization. So his firing may just be a demotion, or it might be a firing. Everyone’s confused, but then again, this is the Arizona …

Continue Reading

This is an urgent time for the Diamondbacks organization, which could be set on any kind of path within the next month or so. Yet, the club and Chief Baseball Officer Tony La Russa have been moving deliberately through the process—as well they should. When Jeff Wiser and I talked D-backs on Saturday, he used the word “pragmatic,” and that’s …

Continue Reading

It’s finally happened: Nick Piecoro has reported that Diamondbacks General Manager Kevin Towers is General Manager no more. While the move could usher in a better future for the organization, its next moves will be even more critical than the firing itself.

It wasn’t all bad with Towers; his front office made a number of excellent minor moves, like the …

Continue Reading

There are a few new faces with the Diamondbacks within the last week; Cody Ross is back from the 15-day DL, and Daniel Hudson in on the roster and ready to take the mound again for the first time in over two years. But there was another curious development: a successful waiver claim that brought Nolan Reimold to Arizona from …

Continue Reading

Who’s Steering This Ship?

On August 19, 2014 By

It’s no secret, Tony La Russa came into a unique situation when he joined the Diamondbacks in May. Brought in to oversee several elements of the organization, including the alignment of the minor leagues, approving major league deals and presumably evaluating the job done by General Manager Kevin Towers and Manager Kirk Gibson. That’s a pretty tall order considering …

Continue Reading

This season has been disappointing in plenty of ways. From the get-go, there was nothing but bad news. Ryan recapped a bunch of that yesterday, and it’s so frustrating that I sure don’t feel like re-hashing it all over again. Honestly, we’ve been over this a hundred times already and you know the story: everything has gone terribly wrong …

Continue Reading

If there’s one pervasive description for the Arizona Diamondbacks, it’s that they’re an old school organization. The fan base has resonated with this in the past and the franchise is run with a unique, albeit perhaps outdated style. The question is whether or not this is working, and it’s something that deserves to be discussed. Taking a break from the …

Continue Reading

Johnny Cueto has been, arguably, the most dominant pitcher in baseball so far this season. On Saturday, he showed his stuff in Phoenix, taking a game from the D-backs with a seven plus inning performance. Unfortunately, he also took something much more valuable to the D-backs: the structural integrity of the fourth metacarpal in A.J. Pollock‘s right hand.

Pollock …

Continue Reading

Scour the listing of D-backs front office personnel, and you’ll find exactly 90 people listed under “baseball operations.” That’s not counting GM Kevin Towers or new Chief Baseball Officer Tony La Russa — and that’s a lot of guys (very few of whom work out of the D-backs’ main offices). Many of those guys are employed by the D-backs in …

Continue Reading

What is a Chief Baseball Officer? We’re due to find out, after the D-backs hired Tony La Russa to fill that newly-created role with the team. In a site editorial, we noted that while the hiring comes as a welcome change, there are still many questions about La Russa’s actual role.

La Russa will report to CEO Derrick Hall and …

Continue Reading

Since becoming GM of the Diamondbacks about 43 months ago (September 22, 2010), Kevin Towers has completed 32 trades with 22 different teams. What would the current roster look like if we reversed each and every one of them?

Understand, I’m asking you to suspend disbelief for a purely academic exercise. It’s not so simple, of course, and Towers would …

Continue Reading

Maybe it’s all about little victories now, and while a couple of the games could easily have gone either way, the D-backs managed to go 4-2 in the last week, with series victories over the Brewers and the White Sox. Tack that onto the series win against the Padres, and you’ve got a 6-3 record for the month.

Despite the …

Continue Reading

The D-backs floated back up to 28th in ESPN’s Power Rankings this week, but as noted there, the team is still in free fall. The team scratched out a win against the Dodgers on Friday in what was a great game to watch, but still lost that series after getting swept by the Mets. Something about the sweep by New …

Continue Reading