Dan Duquette: Man of Desperation

A great post at Et Tu, Mr. Destructo that goes into great detail about the recent hiring of new Orioles GM Dan Duquette and puts it all in context.

I haven't commented on Dan Duquette or the entire GM search for Baltimore but this passage pretty much sums up my cautious optimism:

Duquette, though, is playing with house money. He's not like LaCava. He doesn't have a reputation to lose. His last job was running a sports camp for kids. If he fails, he returns to obscurity, just another good baseball man chewed up and spit out by an out-of-touch organization. No one would blame him for not being the guy who could turn the Orioles around. But if he succeeds, then the bitter, honorable failure of an owner's last desperate gamble for a pennant-winning team came to rest on the shoulders of an outcast who was kicked to the curb and stayed there for 10 years, achieved in the face of the league's two highest payrolls and its two best front offices.


Duquette is a desperate man. He is desperate for this job and is desperate for success. Desperate men will do damn near anything to succeed and are far more willing to do unorthodox things to make it happen. Like Jonathan Bernhardt states, he really has nothing to lose. And that could be really interesting to watch.