McClendon on the hot seat?

In numerous preseason essays, Mac was named as the NL manager who is most likely to get fired this season. Joe Sheehan of BP suggested the same in a recent chat.

It's human nature to dump on teams you don't understand, don't care to study, or don't want to respect, but Mac was a puzzling consensus choice in this department. As Sheehan wrote, manager firings usually happen with "a bad team starting horribly."

Not in Pittsburgh, though. In other cities, owners may fire managers and sell more tickets, but something about Pittsburgh suggests this won't work here. The Bucs have had many bad teams and many horrible starts - but only four managers - since 1977. The last in-season firing was in 1973, when Bill Virdon was riffed in early September for losing the respect of his players in a series of heated disagreements with two of the team's best players, Dock Ellis and Richie Hebner. His replacement, Danny Murtaugh, had been the manager of the team, on and off, on and off, on and off, from 1957. He won two World Series with the team, and he came out of retirement and led the team to 285 wins over the next three years. The Virdon firing is hardly an example of the kind of public execution writers like Sheehan have predicted as somewhat likely in Pittsburgh this year.

There's no guaranteed continuity between the McClatchy ownership and the previous stewards of the team, but any student of baseball (and football) history should know that Pittsburgh is not a town where an owner can scapegoat the manager with the approval of the fans. Some of the most frequent talkers about the team are also some of the area's most frequent complainers, but your average fan of Pittsburgh sports knows that that a quick firing is rarely a quick fix.