Wednesday, October 11, 2000
Reds manager
Piniella is in driver's seat
NEW YORK — Lou Piniella is the one-stop managerial search. The Cincinnati Reds need look no further. He is the best qualified and most popular candidate, the only active manager who has won a World Series in Cincinnati and the one who has coexisted longest with Ken Griffey Jr.
He's everything you could ask, but he might be more than the Reds can afford.
The free-agent manager of the Seattle Mariners finds himself in a plush negotiating position this fall. He has lost baseball's most dynamic player and nonetheless maneuvered his team to within one round of the World Series. He is leverage personified.
If the Mariners fail to keep him, they will lose face and probably also lose their splendid shortstop, Alex Rodriguez. If neither Seattle nor Cincinnati comes up with enough cash, Piniella would still have no shortage of suitors.
Piniella unsure
“Where do I expect to be?” Piniella mused Tuesday night. “I don't know that. I really don't. The way we left it (with Mariners management) is that we would sit down and talk after the season is over. . .
“Where do I want to be? Listen, we've had a lot of success here. I've enjoyed it here. I enjoyed my three years in Cincinnati. I'm going to be looking at some options.”
He was sitting in the visitors dugout at Yankee Stadium, his fists plunged into his jacket pockets, his body language unusually tight-lipped. Like a lot of baseball people with expiring contracts, Piniella is eager to stifle speculation about his future while his team is still very much in the moment.
“I have not given any situation any thought at all and that's the God's honest truth,” he said. “Whatever happens, happens.”
Privately, however, Piniella is telling friends he has wearied of the travel demands of baseball's most remote outpost. He wants to be closer to his family in Tampa. At 57, he's looking for one last, lucrative contract, and has hired an agent to make it happen.
“The financial considerations are important,” he said.
A Catch-22
The serious bidding is expected to begin around $2 million per year — nearly four times what the Reds paid Jack McKeon. To justify such a salary for a manager, the Reds might be forced to reduce their player payroll. That, of course, would make the Reds less attractive to prospective managers.
From a distance, it looks unworkable. Up close, it seems infeasible. One Reds source expressed doubt Tuesday that the club could afford Piniella. The caveat in the equation is Carl Lindner. The Reds' principal owner cut a deal with Barry Larkin that made little sense to his subordinates.
Asked last week about the search for a new skipper, Lindner said his mind was on larger matters — specifically, resuscitating Chiquita's sagging stock price. Lindner is hardly oblivious to public opinion, however, and he has to know Piniella left Cincinnati in 1992 through no fault of his own.
Piniella resigned because he tired of waiting for a commitment from Marge Schott. He was less patient then, and more prone to fits of pique. He is more mellow now, and was thrown out of only one game all season. “Every time I read stories of my old self, it really upsets me,” he said. “But then, at the same time, you make your bed and you have to lie in it.”
Lou Piniella's bed is pretty comfortable at present.
E-mail: sullivan@enquirer.com
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SULLIVAN: Reds manager
