Bob Bruchey in as Hagerstown Suns GM

It's been a long day at the home office.
Make that a Looooong day,but one piece of news bumped the Devils 2-1 shootout loss to Ottawa off our page for the day.
If time permits,I'll have a look at the loss later.

The big news is with the Hagerstown Suns as Bill Farley has resigned as the Hagerstown Suns general manager and the replacement on an "interim" tag of 2013 is former Hagerstown Mayor Bob Bruchey.
This is somewhat of a surprise this late in the winter as Farley resigned " to seek other opportunities",which basically is PR for he had a better offer somewhere else.

I never had any issues with Bill Farley,who always went out of his way to be nice to me,but I always got the feeling that this was just another job.
Nothing wrong with that and baseball is a business,but I believe things usually are better when we do a job that we are passionate about and that was just a perception that I had.

Bob Bruchey is a person that I have never met,unless you count my appearance before him at a city council meeting last year,so I do not have a preconceived notion of him as so many do after his terms as the mayor of the city.
However,this does look bad.
I don't think that the hiring of Bruchey was a prid quo pro for his support for a new stadium,but many will believe just that.
Such an arrangement might make sense from Bruchey's point,but makes little from the Suns point of view.
Bruchey's pull with a new city council is very limited with one member in particular more likely to vote against anything the team needs with Bruchey involved.
Bruce Quinn public statement that Bruchey will not be involved any way with stadium negotiations and any other issues that need to be worked on with the city was a smart one.
If the Suns are able to keep Bruchey as the GM and not as the main negotiator that will go a long way in showing that this was not a repayment for services rendered and any controversy could slowly die off.

I am interested in seeing what changes the team has in store for the year and I do not have anything against Bob Bruchey,who I give credit for working hard to keep baseball in Hagerstown,albeit having a flawed plan for a stadium location in an almost universally hated location might have been the arrow that doomed the entire project as well Bruchey's re-election bid,but there are still questions about how draw fans to a crumbling facility and fight off a perception of why should fans come to support a team that many believe (not I) that is aching to leave town.

2013 just got a whole lot more interesting......