Is anyone excited about this hire?  I’m slightly on the positive side on Mills.  I like his background, knowing that he’s been sitting on Red Sox bench during some of the storied franchises’ winningest years, and arguably one of the best teams of the past decade with 2 world series wins to their credit.

I also love how the Boston Red Sox play the game too, solid pitching, high average gap to gap hitters, and tough nosed defensive efforts night in and night out.  I’m not sure how much of an impact he had on those players or getting them on the team, but I hope he plans on getting some of them more like them here.  It will take time and money to get those players in here, but I think we have a decent nucleus to get started with Hunter Pence, Lance Berkman, &  Michael Bourn.  We still lack in the pitching column with young arms not panning out as expected and a diluted free agent market of over paid has beens.

On the negative side he’s never been a big league manager so that’s a bit of a red flag to me, but he’s been in the shadow of one of the best for the past 10 years.  We had a few former big league coaches in to interview, Bob Melvin and Phil Garner, both of whom I would’ve been happy with as skipper.

I’m going to give Mills the benefit of the doubt here, we’ve been under the proverbial rock the past 2 years with a coach that had a, “Why can’t you make it look as easy as I did mentality”, a attitude that really deteriorated the clubhouse to the point where the players started airing their displeasure with the manager to the media, and even mocked the manager after he was fired.  Agreeably, Cecil Cooper seemed to have a very shallow outlook on the game of baseball, a game that has such a depth and can never be evaluated from just one view point.

Hopefully Brad Mills will have the fresh prospective these Astros hunger for.