I didn’t get the sense that cutting Sullivan was a cost saving measure. His salary is probably quite small anyway. Like a few hundred grand. Army makes 1 mil by comparison. And cutting salary doesn’t equal termination with cause. You’d still have to pay him.
I think it’s fully Sullivan did something to break Army’s trust as indicated in the article and thus they feel they have grounds to fire him with cause.
I guess I see this in a different light. Did Sullivan truly break Armstrong's trust outright? Because there can be a lot of interpretations behind what breaking someone's trust can mean. That's one of those things where the "breaking of trust" can only be interpreted by the individual who feels that trust was broken.
So, in essence, it becomes whatever the person with the higher title says it is.
I just look at what we know. We have an owner who comes in, and has less hockey experience than most. The guy was built off of finding ways to incorporate cost savings into methodologies, so that was my first thought. Combine that with the idea that Armstrong seems less apt to Chayka's concepts of having group think, and you arrive at the concept that Armstrong is following a page from Meruelo's book. Since Armstrong trusts himself (as evidenced by the concepts shown in the article, which I was unaware of and speculated that BA was less prone to inclusion of others in decisions), this explains the how and why of BA managing both AZ and Tucson rosters, why there is no backfill for Sullivan, and why the move was likely made, even though one can disagree as to how that bridge of distrust was crossed.
I use the same thought processes with regard to Chayka and the scouting issue. There is a belief that Chayka was the leader of a way to get data that was against the rules. Why wouldn't this have started in 2016 or 2017, when he joined? The guy ate the same lunch, brought everyone together to try and get on the same page. Then, he randomly decides this is the year we are going to test differently and see if we can get away with it, but not have every scout be aware of the plan? In my eyes, Chayka decided to put our strength and conditioning coach on these visits. For the past few years, our strength and conditioning coach would make offseason visits to the players whom we had under contract, and conduct similar measurements. So, he probably had the idea in his head that the same thing could be done with prospects, to some degree. Now, does Chayka deserve blame for that? Absolutely. But it is possible that Chayka and scouts were aware of the rules much more than this individual was. Maybe he was asked if he understood what could or could not be done, and lied about his study of what was prohibited. Maybe he had been on some scouting visits prior, and was not directly told what not to do (again, doesn't excuse Chayka or other scouts), but if we were planning on doing something illegal to gain an advantage, why would it have started this past season, when Chayka was already in the org for a few years, and to that point, I hadn't seen a bunch of picks that underwhelmed to the point where we had to re-think the way things are done. I think that if people just put the base knowledge together of what you know about the individuals being dealt with, there is a logic to what happened. As opposed to Chayka saying that 3 years down the line after being hired, we are going to try and create a huge advantage by doing something illegal.