The Orioles have agreed to terms with Dan Duquette on a three-year contract to be the team’s next President of Baseball Operations, industry sources and a high-ranking club official confirmed to various media outlets Sunday.
How’s that for nailing it down? You must admit it’s more certainty than we’ve seen recently. That’s how these things work. The official announcement is expected Tuesday, a club source told The Sun.
At any rate, that search is over, and now the search begins for a new director of scouting, the position Joe Jordan left recently to take a similar job with the Phillies.
As you’ve been reading lately, Duquette has been Montreal’s GM and Boston’s GM, before being fired in Boston in 2002, leading to Theo Epstein’s hiring.
Duquette’s list of accomplishments includes bringing Pedro Martinez to Montreal when he ran the Expos’ front office, and then trading for Martinez again while running the Red Sox. He also acquired Jason Varitek and Derek Lowe from the Mariners for Heathcliff Slocumb in the late ’90s, which we will call one of the less publicized heists in recent years.
A published report says a member of the Orioles called Duquette as well-connected to the Latin and Asian markets as anyone in baseball, two areas in which the team needs to step it up, to say the least. He has run the Dan Duquette Sports Academy in New England since leaving the Red Sox, and has a Twitter account, and by gosh, if that doesn’t qualify a man for a job, I don’t know what does.
The last Duquette family member to take part in the Orioles’ front office was Jim, Dan’s cousin, who served as the team’s vice president of baseball operations under the late Mike Flanagan in 2006 and ’07 before resigning. This was shortly before owner Peter Angelos brough in Andy MacPhail as club President.
Dan interviewed for the Angels’ GM job before it went to Jerry DiPoto, in whom the Orioles also had been interested.
We wouldn’t want to pass judgment on Dan before his first day at the office, other than to say most of his accomplishments that we know of are positive. To put it rather mildly, we hope he comes with some new ideas on how to put this team back on the map, and that he’s a man Buck Showalter can work with.
We’ll add more as details become available.
