Would You Rehire This Guy?

Imagine, if you will, that you are the owner of a major league baseball team.  It could happen.  Eleven years ago, your team had a winning percentage of .750.  Your manager at the time retired, so you hired a replacement.

Ten years later, your team's winning percentage is .250 and attendance has fallen off by half.  Your manager, burned out and needing a break, resigns to take a self-actualizing job with a concern unrelated to baseball.  You hire his replacement.

The replacement is on the job barely one season when he leaves for "family reasons."  You've just begun your search for a new manager when you get a call from the one who left your club two years ago.  He says he's refreshed, revitalized, and ready to come back to the bigs.

Will you hire him or laugh him off the phone?

Of course you wouldn't rehire someone who took your organization from top-tier to bottom-feeder...would you?  You'd think this was a no-brainer...wouldn't you?  Well, you would be wrong, jock strap-breath.

For all of the millennium's first decade, Bob Ashley was editor of Durham's main daily newspaper, The Herald-Sun.  When he first came aboard, he fired a fourth of the staff.  As a result, coverage fell off.  Between 2001 and 2010 the number of subscribers to both the weekday and Sunday editions dropped by 50 percent.  Ashley left the paper in 2010 to take a position with Preservation of Durham.

Not only did Ashley gut his paper's manpower, not only did he lose half of his subscribers, he also destroyed any reputation for journalistic objectivity and integrity his paper might have enjoyed by his egregious handling of the Duke lacrosse scandal.  Presented with the opportunity to simply report events as they unfolded, caution restraint and urge an inflamed community to let the justice system process play itself out, he instead spun the fraudulent rape claim of a drug-crazed stripper/hooker into a full-out assault on every buzz word in his liberal agenda.  He bought into the scam in toto not because of any evidence--there was none--but because it fit his world view.  Proof?  He didn't need any proof to know that Duke students are elitist, athletes feel entitled, males are sexist, and whites are racists.

His replacement lasted a year or so before taking another job somewhere else.  By now Ashley, apparently frustrated at not having a platform from which to spout his liberal drivel and believing the world deprived as a result, expressed an interest in reclaiming his old job as Herald-Sun editor.  And as insane as it seems given the destruction he wrought during his first term at the helm, he was rehired.

Now I know what you're thinking.  You're thinking, "Dave, what does running a newspaper have to do with managing a baseball team?  You're comparing apples with oranges."

Well, excuse me, but are they not both fruit?  Do they not both grow on trees, have seeds, produce juice, and are they not both protected by peels?

Business is business.  All businesses, whether sports franchises, newspapers, or whatever, have but one purpose--to make a profit.  When a business begins to lose money, there's a sickness.  When it continues to lose money, there's a fatality.

When the care of a patient on life support is given over to the quack whose malpractice is responsible for him being there, one ought not to be surprised if the plug somehow gets pulled.  Or maybe that's been the plan all along.