Baseball Hour - Mazz on Sam Kennedy Comments - video Dailymotion

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00:00How they go from here will tell us a lot about how they intend to run the franchise and whether

00:05or not they really want to be championship caliber sooner rather than later. If this team shows up at

00:12spring training and we don't feel like it's capable of contending for a World Series, and I

00:17admit that's a bit of a subjective term, a great term, but if they are not at a point where we all

00:23feel like they are ready to contend for a World Series, I think that's a bad sign. It means that

00:28they're still putting more emphasis on the long term and on the business model than they are on

00:34the short term. Now look, at the end of the day, we want them to do both. The idea is you want to

00:40contend for championships and not completely leave your system barren. But here is Sam Kennedy.

00:45What was rewarding to see this year was these two guys, again, to my right, acting with urgency,

00:52starting with our trip to Dallas and then all the way through. We didn't get there where we wanted

00:57to go. We all know that, but we acted with urgency and certainty and aggression. We plan to continue

01:03to do that as we go forward. Okay, so Kennedy uses the word urgency there a fair amount of the time,

01:11and you notice he said to these guys to my right, talking about Cora and Breslow as if he had nothing

01:18to do with it. And I think that this has to be called out for this reason. Three years ago,

01:24at the end of 2022, Alex Cora sat in this very same press conference and said, as an organization,

01:31we have to have more urgency. Alex Cora has never been the issue in terms of putting a team on the

01:37field. Cora wants to compete yesterday, let alone now. So this is not a Cora issue. Now there's two

01:43ways to interpret what Sam Kennedy said. Number one is that he is empowering the baseball people and

01:50trying to give the impression that ownership and management doesn't have anything to do with the

01:55level of urgency, which we all know is not realistic. The ownership and upper management

02:01decides how much money they're going to spend and ultimately whether or not they've gone too far in

02:05terms of spending and what have you. So they ultimately have veto power on everything and

02:11anything. Urgency ultimately has to come on some level from ownership first. That's where it has to

02:17begin. Now, the other way to look at the comment that Sam made is that he's really crediting Craig

02:24Breslow versus high and bloom.