DaytonDailyNews.com

DAYTON —

He could be short-tempered and occasionally volatile, but Donnie Scott did the best he could with what the parent Reds sent him.

I never heard him curse about a ballplayer, and Donnie Scott cursed quite a bit.

He saw his job as nurturing the young hopefuls along as manager of the Class A Dayton Dragons, and that meant leaving a starter in when he was in trouble, allowing a left-handed hitter to bat against a left-handed flame-thrower and not pinch-hitting a .220 hitter with the bases loaded, trailing by a run with two out in the bottom of the ninth.

The idea was, find out if a guy can do it in the minors before he gets a chance to do it in the majors.

Still, I can't say the Reds did the wrong thing by letting him go, as they did this week following Scott's 19 years with the club in various minor league duties.

I can't tell you he did a bad job, either. I can tell you the Reds did — have done — a bad job.

Their minor league teams seldom win. When the teams are good, they move players before they win anything, teaching them individual development is much more important than winning as a team — a trait those players seem to carry with them to the major league level.

A minor league manager can't do much about this. He takes the players he is handed — and the Reds have handed Dayton managers some fairly bad players over the years — and must work with them to develop them into what they can become.

Over the last two years, the talent pool has deepened, mostly because Terry Reynolds was the head of scouting, until Reynolds was moved to farm director under the guidance of then general manager Wayne Krivsky. Reynolds is the fourth farm director in nine years of Dragons teams, and organizations that change farm directors that many times usually don't have much of a farm system.

Yet much of the blame for what happens in the minors falls on the manager. He must play the guys he's told to play, which means that's great if it's Todd Frazier, but not so wonderful if it's Tiago Campos.

There have been four managers of the Dragons, starting with Freddie Benavides in 2000. Scott managed the next three seasons, followed by two Alonzo Powell (he was done in by GM Dan O'Brien's piggy-back pitching rotation and the insistence his batters each take a strike) years, followed by a year of Billy Gardner. Scott returned for the last two seasons.

Powell was laid back and every position player on the team gravitated to him on hitting. Gardner basically stayed in his office. Scott let the players play, but when they didn't give their best, he was in the clubhouse with a bullhorn voice and eyes flaming.

I often tried to get him to rip the Reds for doing something stupid — forcing him to play a guy who obviously couldn't perform, wondering why a guy was promoted and leaving the Dragons to figuring out how to replace him or asking why a player was drafted in the first place.

He always — always — told me he didn't have the master plan, that the Reds did, that they were doing what they thought was right.

He was a company man, and now he'll have to find a new company. That's too bad. Then again, maybe the Reds did him a favor. The rookie teams supported by the Reds this year didn't have any top 20 prospects as selected by Baseball America. Those are teams that feed the Dragons next season.

I know how Scott would have reacted. He would have cursed at a question questioning the Reds. He would have said the Reds have a plan. And he would have tried his best to make it work.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2157 or mkatz@DaytonDailyNews.com.