JJO: Let the bodies hit the floor

JJO brings the pain:

Cooper wasn't the best manager. Heck, he wasn't even a decent manager. A decent man, but not a decent manager.

Yet, there's no way the people who fired Cooper can honestly tell the fans they put out a winning product. Pitching wins in baseball, yet Drayton McLane, Tal Smith and Ed Wade have failed to bring a quality pitcher to help Roy Oswalt and Wandy Rodriguez carry the burden.

The fans were suckered into paying quality prices for a horrible team.
I think very highly of McLane, but unfortunately he hasn't provided a quality product for the fans. If I were McLane, I wouldn't just fire the manager of this horrible team.

I'd ask serious questions and ask why the heck he's paying $107 million for such a bad team.

If Drayton really wants to gain the fans' confidence, Cooper and his coaches won't be the only one fired for this mess.

We do get some good insight as to how this all went down. Let's let Drayton fill us in:
"We waited until he arrived at the clubhouse early this afternoon and Drayton, Tal and I went down and informed him of our decision. Then I met with Dave and made him aware of what was going on and met with the coaches, and then we just finished a team meeting with the players a couple minutes ago."

When will the Astros make a decision?
"I would like to go ahead and spend the next couple of weeks or several weeks trying to really lock down a list of candidates that makes a lot of sense. From a time constraint, we're going to be probably looking at post-World Series before we get this thing done. And that's why we felt it was important to talk to our coaching staff today to make them aware of where this thing was, because I don't want them to get caught short at the back end if we decide to make changes on the coaching staff. So there are a lot of decisions to be made; we had one decision to move on today, and that was relieving Coop of his duties as manager of the Astros. We've got a lot of other decisions to make going forward, and we're going to use every amount of time to make sure we're evaluating candidates and to make sure what we're doing is not for cosmetic purposes, but for the betterment of the Houston Astros."