Bite Me!

This is a good one. It wasn’t enough for two Cincinnati Reds coaches, Ron Oester and Tim Foli (both scrappers in their playing days), to go at it after a loss. They took their fighting back to the schoolyard. Oester “had Foli in a headlock and Foli bit Oester on the leg,” according to the article. Now Foli can truthfully tell manager Bob Boone that he has bad taste in 3rd Base Coaches.

Oester, it may be recalled, turned down the job as Reds’ manager because the Cincinnati organization lowballed him. Oddly enough, he did agree to stay on as a coach, presumably drawing even less salary. Boone, desperate to prove once again that he could over-manage, took the job. But he wasn’t even allowed to choose his own coaches, except for Foli. It always amazes me how penny-pinching teams would rather suffer through their own incompence of their own staff decisions rather than firing a guy and paying him NOT to do his job.

Oester wasn’t even the first guy to turn the job down because the money stank; Yanks coach Willie Randolph was. Randolph’s gotta be smiling right about now…