[EricLindros]

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By most accounts, the players love Manuel and he will be back. Hopefully, they bring in someone to whisper in his ear what to do tactically.

And agreed with Bremen, it's not Manuel's fault that his bullpen sucks. It's not like he has three stud relievers and he stubbornly uses Gordon anyway.

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I agree that the players play for him, and have shown quite a bit of fight despite all the injuries. That being said, he makes some awful decisions during the course of games, including some of the worst bullpen and bench management skills I've seen outside of little league. I had hoped that Jimmy Williams would have been able to assist Charlie with some of that this year, but that doesn't appear to have happened.

I'm torn. While I like the attitude Charlie brings to the team, I can't stand some of the actual managerial decisions he makes, which undoubtedly have cost the team games over the past few seasons.

Ideally, he'd be a great bench coach with a good tactical guy as the manager, in the mold of a Zimmer type guy, but you obviously can't do that when he's already been the manager.