Gerry Hunsicker. Remember the name. No, make that remember the name?
It has been six years since Hunsicker was a general manager. In Major League Baseball, six years is a lifetime, and as teams have changed general managers in that time lists of candidates have omitted the name Hunsicker.
“I haven’t heard his name,” said a high-ranking major league official, who is attuned to club developments.
Talking to a baseball executive recently, I expressed the thought that David Samson, the president of the Florida Marlins, was probably the most disliked executive in baseball. I was thinking about Samson because I had just written about the Marlins’ questionable treatment of their rookie left fielder, Logan Morrison, in demoting him to the minors.
However, my executive friend disagreed. If not Samson, I asked, who? Jeff Wilpon, he said.
Wilpon is the New York Mets’ chief operating officer and son of Fred Wilpon, the team’s principal owner. Jeff Wilpon is the first of those descriptions because of the second. He did not studiously work his way up to his executive position, but he has earned his reputation of most disliked executive.
They should be erecting a statue of Terry Francona in front of Fenway Park, not shoving him out the back door. Francona, after all, won two World Series with a franchise the World Series had forgotten, two, in fact, only three years apart, the first in 2004 that ended an 86-year drought.
The Red Sox deny that they fired Francona, but skeptics abound among fans and writers. Many of the same fans and writers were skeptical when the Red Sox fired Grady Little as their manager in 2003.
