APRTW wrote:

Max wrote:

alz wrote:

Scott Rolen was special. He left because he could not get over Larussa benching him while he was playing badly in the playoffs.

thanks for reminding us that there are two sides to each instance of iron-balls tony running players out of town.

That situation was really sticky.  I felt Rolen should have stopped being an asshole and fell in line.  TLR made the right decision to play Spezio.  Then TLR started acting like an ass via the media and my opinion shifted.

FWIW, in my managerial experience, if you want to run a clean ship, but someone is running a gossip campaign against you, you need to air out dirty laundry in public.  Otherwise you are trying to fight fire with fire, and you will lose if you are the more or less clean honest guy going up against the dark legion of malcontent whispering rumor-mongers.  And the thing is, that dark legion is always present, but you need the institutional stars on your side to keep them quiet and in line.  If one of the institutional stars goes over to the dark side, the legion os whisper mongers suddenly becomes a dangerous force of bare-knived cutthroats.

So, again, even if Tony did behave like an ass in public, we don't know what kind of trouble he felt that Rolen was stirring up in the clubhouse.