Geren's job performance: Walking dead

The Oakland A’s should not fire manager Bob Geren right away.

Firing him in the next two weeks isn’t necessary. It’s not clear they should fire him in a month or any time soon. They can wait until the end of this season, already a dead loss, and then send him on his way.

In case you haven’t noticed, Geren adds almost nothing as manager. He does manager-like things — removes pitchers, argues with umpires, adjusts his cap — but he doesn’t really manage like, say, Bobby Cox manages.

Take what happened Friday night. The A’s trailed Arizona 2-1 with two out in the ninth. Nomar Garciaparra hit a single and Geren replaced him with Rajai Davis. OK, so Geren did one thing, replaced a slow guy with a fast guy.

Davis is on the A’s for one reason only. He is there to steal a base when everyone in the ballpark knows he is going to steal. He needed to steal second on Friday night to get into scoring position so the A’s could tie the game. A 10-year-old knows this.

Geren doesn’t. Ray Fosse was announcing on TV and before the first and second pitch to Adam Kennedy, who was batting, Fosse said this would be a good pitch for Davis to steal on. Fosse was almost begging for Geren to call the steal.

Of course, Geren didn’t. He got saved because Kennedy walked, sending Davis to second — and then Ryan Sweeney made the final out. But you get the point. Geren seems uninvolved in running the team or he seems frightened or unimaginative or just plain bereft of ideas.,

You wonder how players can respect a manager who doesn’t do much managing. You wonder how Geren holds onto his job, although this is his third season and he’s never had a winning record and his predecessor at the A’s, Ken Macha, is tearing up the National League with the Brewers.

A Press Democrat reader named Shane Buettner wrote me an e-mail with this analysis of Geren: “He’s vaporware. A stuffed uniform. In my humble opinion the single biggest reason Billy Beane’s Moneyball scheming hasn’t resulted in a championship is his failure to recognize the value of the manager position. Geren is quite simply a Warriors/Raiders/49ers hire. A guy who couldn’t get a sniff at that job anywhere else in the league. A walking white flag of surrender that says this team is as exciting as this guy.”

Hey, Shane, if you ever get bored in your current career, try being a sports columnist.

In fairness to Geren, it’s hard to lead the current group, a team going nowhere. Beane admitted before this season he’s caught in the middle of a building process. His pitchers are too young and his position players are too old. Back to Beane in a minute.

None of this excuses Geren, who seems like the walking dead. Ask about his team and Geren acts like he just won the World Series. He smiles. Everything is hunky dory with him. Forget that at the start of play Saturday, the A’s were third from the bottom in runs scored in the American League. They finished last in 2008.

No problem. Geren happily will tell you the team is trying. It is making progress. A manager with his record should look concerned, should be more insistent with his players, should manage more.

After the A’s let Geren go at season’s end, they need to hire the opposite kind of manager. They need to find a Billy Martin-kind of guy to put creative tension — or just plain tension — back into the clubhouse. They need someone demanding, maybe even a little crazy. And mostly they need to restore the focus to the manager and players.

The A’s have become a general manager-oriented team, a front-office team. They need an active, smart, ornery manager who stands up to Beane and puts the emphasis where it belongs — in the clubhouse.

Let’s give Shane Buettner the last word. And remember, this is how a fan looks at the A’s.

Buettner on Beane: “A very good general manager for a small-town team, but not a guy who deserves to have books and movies made (about him). You have to bring home championships to earn that.”

For more on the world of sports in general and the Bay Area in particular go to the Cohn Zohn at blog.pressdemocrat.com/cohn. You can reach Staff Columnist Lowell Cohn at 521-5486 or lowell.cohn@pressdemocrat.com.