Joe Maddon To Cubs?

So the free agent manager, Joe Maddon, appears to be ready to sign a contract to manage the Cubs for 2015. This signing will be the Cubs third manager in the three years that Theo Epstein has been the General Manager.

Unfortunately, Rick Renteria, the current manager of the Cubs hasn't been fired yet.

Assuming the paperwork gets signed, the unfortunate casualty is Renteria, the baseball soul who’d been hired not even a year ago, and who in the absence of public support from Cubs management was compelled this week to release a statement of his own.

It was so sad. Humiliating, you’d imagine. So humiliating, were the final negotiations with Maddon to go sideways Epstein would have had to fire Renteria anyway, because you can’t have an employee kicked to the curb and then dragged back into the clubhouse and reinstalled as team leader and organizational conscience.

Tim Brown of yahoo Sports has a good article here. I think the timing was poor and Renteria should have been fired or at least reassigned before any leak of negotiations, but baseball is a business and a team must act in their best interests.