Everyone's favorite former GM has a little profile in his local paper and he says a couple of things I thought were interesting:
"As soon as a trade is made," Ricciardi said, "there are 50,000 people blogging about how the general manager did a bad job, and they don't understand what he was up against from a standpoint of what the ownership wanted to do, what kind of money he had to work with, how he was putting his team together based on a four- or five-year deal, what the player wanted."
So first I think "hey, JP reads me". I mean I must be one of the 50,000 idiot bloggers he's speaking of, right? But second, what he is really telling us here is 'any bad deals I made really weren't my fault'. Just because a person is GM of a team, it doesn't mean he should be judged by what he does as GM. Fair enough. I'd also like to say any stupid posts I put up really aren't my fault, I was forced to do them by the ownership team of SB Nation. Because, of course, no one is at fault for anything they do.
Later he says:
"I'm not saying you have to have money to be successful," Ricciardi said, "but if you don't have money you'd better be willing to go seven or eight years of bad baseball before you start seeing the fruits of those No. 1 picks getting up to the majors. I'd go into another job with my eyes a lot more open and probably do a little more homework on who the ownership group is and what their expectations were because that's what ultimately controls everything."
Now this is the guy that got the job by telling ownership he could win while reducing payroll. Then when he didn't win after letting Carlos Delgado go, he told management that they had to spend money and he signed a few high priced free agents. That didn't work and he's surprised that management wanted to bring salaries down again?
He says we could have won if we went 7 or 8 years of bad baseball first. Or maybe he is telling us we are in for that many years of bad baseball. I know ownership didn't do great for him, that last year but they had allowed him to ramp up payroll in the years before and it didn't workout.
All in all I'll feel sorry for the guy another time.