(670 The Score) 670 The Score midday host Dan Bernstein was astonished that a White Sox executive on Wednesday didn’t address manager Tony La Russa taking an indefinite leave of absence from the team as he undergoes additional testing for a medical issue.
Neither executive vice president Kenny Williams nor general manager Rick Hahn spoke to the media. Acting manager Miguel Cairo spoke about La Russa’s situation, as did the players. As a team, the White Sox released a brief statement about La Russa's plan to leave the team.
“Last night was a bad night for the White Sox organization,” Bernstein said to open his show with Laurence Holmes on Thursday. “That’s not how you do big league major-market sports business. It’s just not. I feel terrible for Miguel Cairo, who had to be the highest-ranking White Sox person on the record taking questions on a day when the owner’s hand-picked manager left the team for an indefinite period of time in a nominal divisional race. The fact that nobody spoke is inexcusable.”
“I could not believe it. And I sat and I waited and I said, ‘Are they really going to make Miguel Cairo do this?’ Say what you want about this, Theo Epstein would’ve been pushing people out of the way to get down there in front of microphones. Theo Epstein would’ve driven as fast as he could drive or rode his bike as fast as he could to get there, to run to the front, to run down into the dugout or get to a lectern and project sensitivity, awareness, strength and confidence and answer every question. And if he couldn’t answer a question, he would say so. You must, you must have a suit, you must have someone in your organization above your interim manager – whose first language isn’t even English – to tell people what you know about what’s going on, to give some semblance of responsibility, awareness and gravity. And they didn’t.
Why not?”
La Russa has returned to Arizona to undergo further testing with his personal physicians. Specifically, he’ll undergo heart tests, Bob Nightengale of USA Today reported.
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