Saturday, June 19, 2010

The Great Pierogie Purge of 2010: This Should Fix All The Pirates' Woes

We can't make this up. Nobody could make this stuff up. It's just too good, too rich with irony and too rife with, well, stupidity.

Capping a week in which the Pirates lost their 12th straight game, fell to a season-low 21 games under .500, DFA'd their highest-paid player
and announced the heretofore "hush-hush, secret-secret, double-secret probation" contract extensions for General Manager Neal Huntington and Manager John Russell, the Pirates addressed their problems by ... firing a Pirate Pierogie?

This should make everything all right. This should fix everything.

It's so stupid. The Pirates clearly have little common sense and zero sense for public relations. Granted, it's their prerogative (pierogative?) to fire any employee for "cause" (?), but they could have handled this better.

They could have been cooler about it. Why not just ask the young man to remove the Facebook posting? He's a 24-year-old pierogie, for crying out loud.

But, no-o-o-o. They had to go and fire him perfunctorily -- within just a few hours of the posting, no less, and during a game.

Clearly, management has nothing better to do than monitor Facebook postings, even those of relatively insignificant part-time employees.

That's reassuring.

Maybe they thought nobody was going to hear about the firing. Did they think they could keep it a secret? ... kinda like the "secret" contract extensions given to Huntington and Russell? ... who apparently were on double-secret probation, as if they were in "Animal House".

The Pirates deserve the bad PR they get with this sort of stupid maneuver. Yeah, management gets the big picture. Sure.

With stunts like this, management come across as petty, churlish, small-minded and stupid.

They just don't get it.

But they deserve what they get.