Speaking of moribund... Orioles VP Jim Duquette has resigned. Victor Zambrano waits in the wings for his newest assignment.

On the "Who's next?" part of the question, one guy I hope is safe is Cincy's Pete Mackanin. Jerry Narron was fired at 31-51, then Mack too the Reds to 41-39 in the second half, and he's still got the "interim" tag next to his name.

Ironically enough, Mack used to manage the Pirates; he was 12-14 to finish 2005, before being replaced by ... Jim Tracy. Managing those two clubs and being 53-53, maybe he should be nicknamed Pete "Connie" Mackanin!

Completely off topic, but I just read something in Keith Law's chat on ESPN.com that will be of enormous interest to Jays fans interested in the inner workings of our past few drafts:

I was with Toronto at the time Tulo was in the draft. I saw him a couple of games with Team USA and thought he was the second-best college player in the draft, after Alex Gordon and ahead of Zimmerman, Braun, and the guy we took when Ricciardi overruled the draft room, Ricky Romero. I saw plus range, a 70 arm, plus power (projected), but maybe average hitting because he had length in his swing and didn't adjust well to breaking stuff from RHP. If you'd done a poll in our draft room, it would have been about 2:1 in favor of Tulo over Romero, but like I said, the GM decided he knew better after seeing each guy play one game.

Link to chat is here:

http://myespn.go.com/s/conversations/show/story/3050320

I'm sure this won't surprise a lot of people, because I think it was the general feeling at the time that more than anything else, Romero was J.P's guy, but I'm extremely surprised at both the candidness of Keith Law and the division within the draft room. 2 out of 3 people in that room were completely against J.P.'s gut and wanted Tulowitzki, and he overruled them after having only watched one game of each? I mean, Keith Law doesn't seem like an overly bitter guy looking to get back at his old boss so I'm willing to take him at his word. And I'm certainly not suggesting this says something overly negative about Ricciardi, because as the GM he has to make the pick and live with it. But to know that 2 out of 3 guys in that room wanted Tulo....Very very interesting to think about.

Two out of three against Ricciardi means that one out of three were in favour of him.  Obviously, a GM is going to listen to everybody, but be convinced by certain people.  In this case, it likely was the wrong people.

Secondly, we should take anything Law says with a grain of salt because he is seemingly always grinding an Axe for JP...which is odd for someone who apparently left on his own accord.

JP likely blew it on this one, and probably lost some faith in those that he listened to, however, Law is an immature ass for the way he keeps going on publicly about how bad JP is.

Yeah, you might be right ayjackson, here is his response to a followup question:

Ricciardi tends to listen to his underlings when they agree with him. I can't put it any more plainly than that.

Rough!

For the sake of speculation, let's say for the moment that JP did listen to bad advice in taking Romero (and I am by no means convinced Romero is a bust) and that led to him changing what advice he took...given the last two drafts, I'm inclined to thing that might be a net gain that more than makes up for not having Tulo in the long run. Assuming he's getting his advice from someone else since the Romero draft.

RE: Travis Snider... some interesting reading at BaseballAmerica...( http://www.baseballamerica.com/today/minors/features/264994.html )  ...as they reveal their minor league AllStar selections... 1st Team DH and some very complementary comparisons and company...Travis Snider