Frank Thomas has been released after he complained about being benched in order to prevent his option kicking in (let's be adults here, it's obvious this is what is going on).
I have defended J.P. Ricciardi for an awfully long time, but it's become more and more obvious as time goes on that he is a very poor manager of risk. Just how getting rid of one of your highest-upside players is supposed to help you win the pennant, I haven't the faintest idea. Ricciardi has become more and more conservative in his decision-making the longer he's been in the job, and the results are the disheartening mess of an attempt at "contention" we've seen the last two years. The original contract to Thomas was an excellent piece of risk management in my view. This latest move, though, repudiates all the good work put into it.
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I would say that the decision to release Thomas was not conservative at all. The conservative thing to do would be to keep him in the lineup, or at least on the bench, and hope that he'll snap out of it.
My belief is that J.P. and the other people who pass judgment on these things believe that Thomas is done. And, from what I've seen of him lately, I think they might be right.
I guess you're right, the correctness of the label "conservative" here depends on what you're thinking of conserving. The move to release Thomas after three weeks is certainly an aggressive decision, and I can't deny that.
But it's conservative in terms of its approach to managing the team's offense, and it's conservative in terms of its approach to managing the team's budget.
Conservative over the offense because Ricciardi feels more comfortable giving at-bats to proven mediocrities like Barajas instead of the possibly-done-but-until-just-recently-quite-good Hurt.
Conservative over the offence because naturally it was the possibility of getting tripped up by the expensive option for a toasted player that led to the benching kerfuffle that caused the release.
One can make a lot of decisions aggresively that are nonetheless conservative. Ricciardi does that all the time - at the start of last year, for example, we saw endless recycling of low-upside veteran pitchers in an effort to keep from playing higher-risk youngsters. A lot of those decisions were aggressive but they were fundamentally conservative in their outlook.
I agree with half of your comment below - I think Ricciardi should have put the young pitchers in the rotation sooner. Though I suppose you can't blame him for giving Josh Towers one more shot - Towers did have one good year in the rotation.
And I don't think anybody could have confidently predicted that Marcum and Litsch would take the steps forward that they have; even McGowan was not anywhere near being a proven commodity.
But, as the saying goes, young pitchers often do break managers' (and GMs') hearts. In New York right now, Hughes has an ERA of 8.82, and Kennedy is at 9.64. Together, they are 0-5.
As for Barajas: he's only getting more at-bats because Stewart was nursing an injury and Lind is out for a few days. The longer-term plan (I think) is to give Lind most of the LF playing time, and use a Stairs/Stewart platoon at DH.
But I have to say this: I actually was kind of relieved to see Barajas in there than the Big Hurt. At this moment in time, a second-string catcher is more productive than Thomas. The moral: aging is cruel.
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