Bob Melvin Fired, replaced with Daily Link Dump

Effective immediately.

Wait a second.  A.J. Hinch?  Late ’90s catcher-of-the-future A.J. Hinch?  The guy who put up a 328/420/568 minor league line in 1997 and was at one point a top-50 prospect?

Hey, is that Corey Koskie? (September 13, 2000 - Dave Ross/Oakland Tribune, via Flickr, without permission)

Hinch, you will recall, arrived in Oakland in 1998 in the same position-player bumper crop that yielded Eric Chavez, Miguel Tejada, Ben Grieve, Scott Spiezio, and Adam Piatt.  He’s best remembered for being packaged with Grieve and Angel Berroa for Cory Lidle, Johnny Damon, and Mark Ellis.

The incoming and outgoing talent in that trade looks a little silly eight years down the line, huh?

Hinch and Eric Byrnes were teammates on the 2000 squad.  While it’s not that strange to have a manager manage a former teammate – Joe Girardi is doing it in New York and Ozzie Guillen did it in Chicago – what is strange is that Hinch is only two years older than Byrnes.

{edited to remove universal strikethrough pervading the rest of Free Kraut, fsu}