Saved by Bell? K.C.'s new manager can't do it alone
Buddy Bell will succeed as Kansas City's skipper only if John Buck and Mark Teahen grow into the players general manager Allard Baird believed they would become when he traded Carlos Beltran last July.
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| Buddy Bell takes over the Royals just in time for the Yankees. (Getty Images) |
Bell will succeed only if he finesses the white players and the Latin players through an apparent rift, just one of many issues bubbling below the surface that threaten to make the Royals season worse than it already is, as detailed in the Kansas City Star by Bob Dutton on Tuesday morning.
Bell will succeed only if owner David Glass sells. Or, failing that, only if Glass takes more responsibility for the organization and figures out that baseball is different than retail. Just because you gobble up the local Mom and Pop shops with Wal-Mart doesn't mean you can gobble up the Yankees and Red Sox -- or even the Devil Rays and Athletics -- with the same blue-light specials and thrift-store prices.
Yes, for Bell to succeed, it is going to take a whole lot more than Glass scribbling "Buddy Bell will succeed" 500 times on the chalkboard and then waltzing back to Wal-Mart corporate headquarters in Arkansas.
The Royals are a mess, and Bell is a talented baseball man who is smart and experienced -- and still couldn't win in Detroit or Colorado. Why? Lots of similar reasons to those facing him now.
A contract that runs only through 2007 will give Bell only enough time to toss a few shovelfuls into a Grand Canyon-sized hole. Glass surely knows -- and understands -- that. Right?
If he evaluates Bell on wins and losses over the next two seasons, he is entranced in a dreamland even deeper than anybody knew.
The assumption is that, with a blink-of-an-eye contract, the bottom line will be progress, not wins, in the near future.
From Bell's perspective, looking up the Kansas City food chain, the hope is that he has convinced ownership to understand this.
