Trey Hillman No Longer Has To Bear a Royal Weight On His Shoulders

...because he has been fired as Royals manager.

I honestly haven't been following the MLB in the last few years, so I truly have no clue how the Royals were doing, other than that they were still generally losing games. I'm still guessing that the Royals lost a lot of games not because of Trey per se, but more because they just aren't very good at baseball. Still, a manager is always a convenient person to fire when a team sucks, I suppose.

(Hillman managed the Nippon Ham Fighters from 2003-2007. I basically became a Fighters fan about the same time he became the manager, though these things were coincidental.)

I don't know a lot about the situations involved with the Royals, though, obviously, so here are a few articles I read to find out more:

Royals send Hillman off as a winner - apparently he was given the choice whether to manage Thursday night's game, and went ahead and did it -- and Greinke got his first win of the year as such, and Trey didn't have to finish on a 7-game losing streak.

GM’s firing of a friend could be a positive sign for the Royals - only three days ago Dayton Moore said at a press conference that Hillman was "exactly what our organization needs at this point in time." But I guess there is some backstory going on here, including them blaming Hillman for screwing up Gil Meche. (Naturally, many Mariners fans would be happy to point out that Gil Meche was already kinda screwed up.)

Hillman's genius lost in translation - as always, a unique perspective from Joe Posnanski. I remember him writing about the Fighters in 2007 during the Japan Series, too.


I dunno. I got to talk to Trey a little back in April 2008, but at the time he had just started his job with the Royals, so I didn't really get a lot of insight on that. I will say that he was an extremely nice guy, and I really had a lot of respect for him when he was in Japan, and he was very popular with the Fighters fans. (One of my friends still wears a Hillman #88 jersey to Fighters games now.) I think it sucks that he got fired from the Royals, but I'm sure he'll find something else to do in baseball. Maybe he can even come back here to Japan!