From the New York Times’ Murray Chass :
People on the minority watch are not impressed with developments in the managerial ranks in the first two weeks of postseason hiring. They have no reason to be impressed. A handful of minority candidates have been interviewed for vacancies, but there’s a sense that the interviews were intended simply to adhere to Commissioner Bud Selig’s six-and-a-half-year-old directive.
Frank Robinson, a veteran manager, is one of the closest watchers, and when he was asked about the Detroit Tigers’ hiring of Jim Leyland, he said: “They say they followed the commissioner’s guidelines. To me, the words of Dave Dombrowski, saying what he did about Leyland, shows Leyland was his guy all along. You have to draw your own conclusions.”
“They’re getting around it,” Robinson added, speaking not specifically of the Tigers but of teams in general. “They know who they want and they bring in a minority or two and interview them. They’re circumventing the policy. The commissioner’s office has to look at this and tighten the guidelines. They have to get more involved in the interview process, maybe have a representative from the commissioner’s office at the interviews.”
Robinson cited another way teams evade the policy. “They’re promoting from within without interviewing anybody, and that’s how they get around it,” he said.
Not that any of the three will have managerial jobs anytime soon, necessarily, but we do seem to read about Terry Collins and Jeff Torborg being under consideration far more often than say, Tony Perez.