Photo from Paul Toboni’s LinkedIn
At a Hot Stove event, former GM, Mike Rizzo, referred to a long-standing employee as part of the furniture. The same could have been said for Rizzo who was the first hire by the Lerner family when they purchased the Washington Nationals in 2006. Rizzo came to the team as an Assistant General Manager (AGM) under GM Jim Bowden. When Bowden departed a few years later, Rizzo was elevated to run the GM position until he was fired on July 6.
The team promoted long-time assistant GM, Mike DeBartolo, as the interim-GM simultaneous to the Rizzo firing, and for the past month the ownership group has been searching for a permanent GM with DeBartolo among the many candidates. The natural hunting grounds for a GM was to look at top AGMs with other teams. One of the obstacles, as a source told us, you must seek permission from a team to interview a current employee, and that has made this a situation where you might not get to interview everyone you hoped to get on the list. However, several of the Nats’ top targets were interviewed — and it led to a decision as first reported by Jeff Passan of ESPN that the Nationals have hired Boston Red Sox assistant general manager, Paul Toboni, as their head of baseball operations.
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