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Letters to the Editors

What they're saying

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 19, 2001

Well, the Devil Rays solved their problems by firing Larry. That's going to do about as much good as the Bucs firing Mike Shula. When he has a pitcher who throws three wild pitches in a row and a multimillion-dollar player who gets his feelings hurt when he gets benched, what is the manager supposed to do? When Vinny Castilla starts playing like they are paying him to do, and someone tells LaMar that pitching is an important part of professional baseball, maybe the Rays will get somewhere.

Until then I suggest Chuck take this team to Triple A until these guys learn how to play at the major-league level. He seems to be doing a good job of stocking Durham.
-- Cecil Ruckart, Oldsmar

Hooray! The Devil Rays finally did something right. Well, at least half-right.

Larry Rothschild was lame from the start. He had no fire, no intensity and obviously no sense of determining a players' talent level.

Now that Rothschild has gotten his due, it's only fitting that LaMar, his double-talking boss, be granted the same fate before he gets the team in a deeper rut.

Now get out on that field, Vince Naimoli, and turn that double play.
-- Mark Dawson, Palm Harbor

Another dumb, incompetent general manager wins out. Fire the manager. What a stupid solution. They should fire the GM and the high-salaried malcontents.
-- Dom DiGeronimo, Largo

Like all teams that get themselves messed up enough to fire their manager 14 games into the season, they still have to address two questions far bigger than where to forward Larry Rothschild's checks.

1. How the heck did they get themselves into this mess?

2. Now what?

How did they get here? To 4-10, to a .223 team batting average, to 24 unearned runs in 14 games? That answer isn't so hard.

This is just a team caught in that never-never land between the past and the future. They run a lot of players out there who used to be good. They also have a lot of players, either hanging around the Trop or burning their way up the ladder, who are going to be good.

But they're not good players right now. And that's trouble.
-- Jayson Stark, ESPN.com

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