The Tim Purpura Hire, And The Sad Comedy Down In Houston

The Rangers hired former Astros farm director/general manager Tim Purpura today as their new farm director, effectively closing the book as far as Rangers front office comings and goings for the remainder of this winter (unless the Astros begin aggressively courting A.J. Preller, as a few media types have suggested could happen).

Purpura also has a long-standing relationship with Nolan Ryan, which could be interpreted to mean that this is more of a Nolan hire than it is a Jon Daniels hire ... but unless somebody in the front office willing to give up information indicates that was indeed the case, there's really no way of knowing that Daniels wasn't also on board with the Purpura hire, meaning that we're effectively throwing rocks down a dark alley if we try to emphatically pin the Purpura hire on Nolan and Nolan alone.

This also means that Thad Levine stayed in Texas even though he probably realized at the time he turned down the Astros' offer to interview that he wasn't going to be moving into the Rangers' farm director role. Put another way, he likely didn't turn down the Astros because of the promise of a shift in departmental responsibility. He turned down the Astros because he thought that situation simply wasn't a good situation for him to jump into.

And we're beginning to see further evidence of the distaste around baseball for the Astros' GM vacancy right now ... a day or two ago, Jon Heyman made some sort of snarky comment on Twitter about how he didn't see any evidence of the Astros attempting to interview a diverse pool of applicants for their GM position.

Well, it turns out that the Astros are broadening their horizons, and yet still coming up blank (via Twitter):

in addition to thad levine of texas, rick hahn of the white sox and kim ng of mlb turned down interview opps for astros gm

I guess the hot GM candidates right now really ARE that scared by the Houston situation right now, because that's the only explanation I can come up with for this many viable candidates not only turning down the Astros, but not even wanting to take the time to interview for the position.