Theo Epstein Lands New Job With Major League Baseball
It's a move that a lot of people think will lead to him eventually being the commissioner of baseball.
Theo Epstein did two seemingly impossible things in the world of baseball. He brought a World Series to the Boston Red Sox and then he brought a World Series to the Chicago Cubs.
Now it seems that Epstein is being tasked with one more impossible job: make baseball more interesting to the masses.
Theo hinted at this kind of thing during his exit press conference with the Cubs. National baseball writer Jared Diamond pointed this out on Twitter:
He starts with placing the blame of making baseball boring squarely on his, and other forward-thinking general managers:
The executives like me...had a negative impact on the aesthitic value of the game and the entertainment value of the game in some respects.
Translation: Sorry I found all the "loopholes" in the game and exploited them to build a winning franchise.
This is almost like when the police catch a super hacker and then hire them to protect their computer systems. It takes a crook to catch a crook.
Maybe there's a way to do that through changes over time and put the game back in the hands of the players and let them do their thing on the field.... Maybe there's a way to get that under control a little bit.
You can tell that Theo has been thinking about how to make baseball better for a while now. It was like he was asking someone to ask him to fix it.
Everything Theo has touched in baseball has eventually gotten better. Will baseball? I'll be tuned in next year to see.