There's just over a week left in the Major League Baseball season and things are finally heating up in the divisional races. The Tampa Bay Rays and Boston Red Sox are in a dead heat for the American League East title, the White Sox and Twins are trading punches in the AL Central, the Angels have already locked up their division and the Dodgers and Chicago Cubs are looking to do the same.
The real drama, however, is mired in the interlocking battles for supremacy in the National League East and Central divisions, not to mention a hasty decision made by the Milwaukee Brewers.
On Monday, Milwaukee fired manager Ned Yost in a panic. With the Brewers tail-spinning with an 11-14 in September, they showed Yost the door, despite remaining tied for the National League Wild Card with the Philadelphia Phillies.
Dale Sveum has taken over for Yost for the rest of the season. Sveum was the third base coach for Boston when they won the World Series in 2004 but has no other big league managerial experience.
The Brewers haven't made the playoffs since 1982 and this year may have been their best chance yet, with a slew of big hitters like Ryan Braun, Prince Fielder and Corey Hart and electric arms in the forms of Ben Sheets, Salomon Torres and Cy Young frontrunner C.C. Sabathia leading the way.
Once looking primed to take the baseball world by storm if they could make it into the postseason, now one has to wonder if this drastic change will cost the Brewers that opportunity.
According to the Elias Sports Bureau, it marks the first time, outside of the strike-split 1981 season, that a big league manager has been fired in August or later with his team in a playoff spot.
Firing a coach with only a handful of games left isn't exactly a novel idea, though.
Most recently, New Jersey Devils General Manager Lou Lamoriello canned coach Claude Julien with just three games left in the hockey season. Lamoriello didn't feel the team was prepared enough to win the Stanley Cup under Julien so he took over the team himself.
The Devils had already secured a comfortable postseason berth, finishing in second place in the Eastern Conference. Lamoriello apparently couldn't get them prepared either, as the Devils fell in five games to the Ottawa Senators in the Conference Semifinals.
In 2005, the Cleveland Cavaliers fired Paul Silas with only 18 games to go in the season and the team fighting for the eighth and final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference. The Cavs would go 4-6 in their last 10 games under interim coach Brendan Malone and finish in ninth place, just out of the playoff picture.
At the time of Yost's firing, the Phillies were only a half-game behind New York in the NL East race. The Mets are in the midst of what seems to be their now-annual September Slump, leaving the door open for Philadelphia to win the East and for Milwaukee to make the postseason as the Wild Card. Crazier things have happened, including the one-game playoffs we saw last year.
In the coming days and months, the entire baseball world will look at the firing and wonder if the right decision was made, Brewers General Manager Doug Melvin included.
"[Yost] didn't have all the answers for what is going on the last two weeks and I'm not sure I have all the answers," Melvin told the media on Monday. "I'm not sure this is the right one, either."
If the move is successful and the Brewers end up reaching the World Series no one will second-guess Melvin's decision. If the Brewers choke in the next two weeks or even in the Division Series of the postseason, everyone's hindsight will be better than 20/20.
The next few weeks will tell the rest of the story.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
