Rookie Manager is Talk of the TownWhen the Nine front office announced they were hiring Bill Inkster as the field manager of their baseball club, the primary response was a big question mark. The Nine had just let successful long-term Manager Bret Richards run out this contract and sign with Huntsville, and Inkster was so far off the list of people that pundits were talking about that the press conference saw most journalists getting out their web browsers and searching.
Fans were angry, too. They wanted a name. A guy who could take the debris of the club’s last 80-win season and turn it on a dime to get back to the 95-100 win franchise they so well deserved. The choice of Inkster spoke to them and, it seemed, said the team was settling in for a more extended rebuild.
“We knew we wanted to change the dynamics in our clubhouse,” said GM Ron Collins in a recent interview. “This is a different gang than the years of Crash and Dogface. We knew it was coming, and we knew we needed a new vibe—which is why we essentially turned the entire coaching staff over in a two season span. We’ve got a lot of kids now, you know? We’re a young team. My entire staff thought we needed to show the kids that we need them to make their own identity.”
Inkster has definitely done that. At 41 years of age, he’s a closer fit than the nearly 70-year-old Richards could have been. Like Richards, though, he’s seen as a player’s guy. “I just want to get them into situations where they can use the tools they have,” Inkster said. “Success breeds success.”
If that’s true, the Nine are in line for good things, because even after being swept in three games in Minnesota, the Nine have truly turned on a dime, sitting at 48-28, and 11 games up on the rest of the Heartland. If you believe in the high-faluting, fancy-assed measures put out by the BBA StatsPlus gang, the Nine are expected to win 95 games this year, but that could go as high as 111 (or as low as 83). They are a 98% lock to win the division—which is in the same camp as Jacksonville.
It’s enough that the whispers that say Bill Inkster could be the FL Manager of the Year are growing into a full-blown conversation. It’s a fair conversation, too. Of all the teams in this stratosphere, only Inkster’s Yellow Springs and arguably Valencia’s Anthony Light weren’t in the conversation. There were no pundits talking about the Nine. Not even fans of the team were horribly enthused about the club, taking suggestions from owner Bo Jordan that the Nine should win it all this year as if it were some kind of sadistic satire.
And yet, here we are. Bill Inkster, with a roster that looks a whole lot like the roster Bret Richards went 80-82 with last year is sitting at 48-28.
“It’s a great joy to have that kind of thing being discussed,” said Inkster. “But there’s a lot of baseball to be played.”
