Whiff! Rockies PR strikes out looking once again
“But even if he turns out to be the next Billy Bean the Rockies will have screwed up royally by making the hire as quickly as they did.”
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Colorado is a beautiful place to watch and to play the game of baseball. Sadly the organization that oversees the MLB franchise here has absolutely no idea what it’s doing. This was demonstrated for the hundred-thousandth time this morning when news leaked that the club had on the one hand accepted the resignations of both GM Dan O’Dowd and co-GM Bill Geivett and on the other hand replaced the two of them with an in-house candidate without first conducting a national search.
Your new GM? Jeff Bridich. Never heard of him? You’re not alone. The news of Bridich’s promotion had beat writers and radio hosts alike hitting the Goggle machine this morning looking for details on the man. It turns out that Bridich was the club’s farm director. The Denver Post describes him as having been “Dan O’Dowd’s right hand man”.
Maybe the 37 year-old Harvard-educated Bridich is the ideal candidate to take the Rockies into a new era. Time will tell. But even if he turns out to be the next Billy Bean the Rockies will have screwed up royally by making the hire as quickly as they did.
During a time of the year with the MLB playoffs in full swing and the NFL grabbing its usual headlines from week to week the Rockies should have used the termination of their front office as an opportunity to garner some much-needed positive PR of their own. Additionally, they should have conducted a very public weeks-long search for a new head man. Doing so would have kept the club in the headlines during a period when fans are mostly ready to ignore it until springtime.
The Rockies could have leaked details about Bridich to the media in nibbles as they made an effort to at least trick the public into thinking they were actually doing due diligence in attempting to insure that they were making the best baseball move for the long term. This process could have lasted for a month at least and kept optimistic baseball fans on the edges of their seats. Instead, the hiring has already been announced and the perception among fans is that there’s nothing to look forward to but more of the same from the Rockies.
Anybody in the business of PR knows that perception is reality. Even if the new Rockies GM is bright, creative and capable of moving the team in an entirely new direction the hire has the look of a lazy, change-nothing approach on the part of the Brothers Monfort. They have simply moved on from two loyalists to one who nobody has ever heard of.
Rockies fans have been clamoring to see the Monforts can O’Dowd and Geivett. Now the day has finally come. But what should have been huge news was almost completely swallowed up in negativity due to the lack of any kind of external search for a new GM. There is nowhere for the Rockies to go from here other than to give their new man the green light to go ahead and trade Tulo and / or Cargo. The weeks of buzz they could have generated is as dead as their hopes in 2015 and beyond.
