A few days after firing General Mangaer Dan Duquette, the new Red Sox owners disposed of Manager Joe Kerrigan on Tuesday. Kerrigan's dismissal was generally expected considering his overall lack of experience, losing record last season, and new ownership's desire to start fresh.

Like Duquette's replacement Mike Port, Kerrigan's replacement Mike Cubbage only has the position on an interim basis. The team plans to conclude their search for a permanent manager quickly as they want to have him in place sometime before Opening Day.

While everyone expected this move, I still found myself slightly surprised by the timing. I felt that since they hadn't fired Kerrigan immediately after they let Duquette go, they were likely to hold on to him at least until they had appointed a permanent GM. By waiting, they could have insured that the new GM would be happy with the team manager and that the two would be compatible.

Ownership could still decide to select a GM before a manager, but if that's their plan then it seems a waste of time and energy to have Mike Port looking for a new manager.

Additionally, while Kerrigan had his share of flaws during his time as manager, using almost as many lineups as Jimy Williams after espousing a desire to see more consistency, I think that given the circumstances surrounding his ascension into the role, this season would have been a better illustration of his skills as a manager. Now it's entirely possible and even likely that he would have shown little improvement. However with a full season including Spring Training under his belt, there would have been a complete picture to analyze. He was raw, and while he certainly wasn't the best candidate for the job last year, he might have been able to pull things together after an off-season of preparation and planning.

As far as how this will affect the team, without knowing the man who will ultimately manage the team during the season, it is hard to tell. Kerrigan had expressed a desire to have the entire team be more aggressive in stealing bases and had them working on that in the off-season and Spring Training. However, until we know the identity and tendencies of the new manager, we don't know if those efforts will be put to use.

Cubbage was the team's third base coach before his promotion and will likely revert to that position if he is replaced. Kerrigan was the team's pitching coach before his promotion and may be given the opportunity to return to that role again. The rest of the coaching staff is expected to stay the same regardless of who is chosen as manager. This decision also strikes me as rather odd, as it normally seems as though a new manager wants his own people on the coaching staff. Holding onto a predecessor's staff usually only gives the team scapegoats to fire if they are unsuccessful in the following season.

In terms of leading managerial candidates, almost a dozen names are currently being batted around. Former managers Felipe Alou, Jim Fregosi, and Buck Showalter are all reportedly being considered. Potential first time managers Cleveland bench coach Grady Little and Oakland bench coach Ken Macha are also in the mix. Other names have been mentioned less frequently; in situations like these, you can pretty much count on anyone who has managed a major league team in the last 5 years having their name dropped at least once.

I'll wait until a decision is made rather than review the options now as there are just too many. For now, everyone seems to be contenting themselves with rumors and focusing on the karmic justice of Cubbage, fired following five years on the Houston coaching staff by Jimy Williams after Williams was named as the manager of the Astros last fall, becoming for even a short while Williams' successor in Boston.

Before I conclude with this topic for today, I do have some comments on a related matter. The Commissioner's office has made a point in the last few years of insisting that clubs include minority candidates in their searches for managers and other important positions. Beyond looking at minority candidates, I think that organizations would vastly benefit from merely examining some part of the vast talent pool that has never managed at the major league level.

Far too many poor to down right bad managers are continually recycled while less experienced candidates are overlooked. There is occasionally something to be said for the evil you know over that with which you are unfamiliar but upside should be a concept with which the baseball world is already familiar.

They shouldn't necessarily go with candidates, such as Kerrigan, who have never managed at any level. However the minor leagues are a veritable breeding ground for managerial experience. Candidates with both minor league managing and major league coaching experience seem extremely qualified, while even those without major league coaching time are solid options.

These people at least have the potential to make good managers, whereas the others have proven that they aren't good choices for the jobs. I'm not saying that they deserve overly extended shots at the positions. One year from start to finish should give an organization enough data to evaluate their performance. After that, unless they were very inexperienced when selected (and if that was the case, just like a struggling prospect, they should have been given more development time in the first place), there's no need to repeatedly give them more chances.

An important point for teams to make note of when analyzing the performance is to make sure that they don't just look at the win/loss record, which can be deceiving. If a manager is a few games under .500 but had numerous injuries to combat during the season or was in the first season of a rebuilding period, they don't automatically deserve to be fired. The counterpoint to that is the manager with a winning record at the expense of abusing his pitchers or other gross mismanagement of the team; that person should be released.

That concludes this tangent and today's article. I will continue to keep you posted as the search progresses.