Get that avalanche rolling, and you know where it ends up crashing.

In the end, in this economic climate, it comes down to this: Teams can't afford to send their fans the message that they've given up on the season with 140 games left to play and a whole lot of tickets left to sell. So they need to demonstrate they're doing something about this mess.

And you don't need to memorize Total Baseball to know that when in doubt, that something is almost always firing the manager.

"If you look at them (the four managers fired in April), they were all in similar markets," said one NL general manager. "Expectations around their teams were not realistic. They were playing noncompetitive baseball. They had to put the blame somewhere. So they put it on the manager. It's the same old thing. You want fans to know you care and you want to win. So you fire the manager."

It's hard to believe that just two years ago, no managers were fired during the season. Now, five have gotten whacked, and it isn't out of the question that four or five more could be in trouble if their teams don't turn it around.

We live in an age where everybody is allowed to have an excuse for losing -- except the manager. GMs and owners can blame "the system." Players can blame the manager, the GM, the owners, their teammates, their injuries, their crummy farm system or the clubhouse guy who forgot to supply the grilled-sirloin fajitas for the postgame spread. It's always something nowadays.

	“	The biggest problem is that players today have no accountability. When teams go bad, not one guy wants to look in the mirror and say, 'I've been horrible.' The guys who believe they're accountable, too, are few and far between. ”
		— A GM who fired his manager within the last year

"The biggest problem," says one GM who fired his manager within the last year, "is that players today have no accountability. When teams go bad, not one guy wants to look in the mirror and say, 'I've been horrible.' The guys who believe they're accountable, too, are few and far between."

Even if that's an exaggeration, we still wonder: How fair is it for GMs to blame their manager when the teams they've given the manager can't win without a miracle?

"When I pick up the paper opening day and look at all the prognostications and forecasts," says a third GM, "did any of the prognosticators think Kansas City had a chance to win? Did anybody think Detroit had a chance? Did Milwaukee? They had no chance to win.

"I just think the expectations get out of whack sometimes. And just because the public wants you to fire the guy, should you go with what the public thinks or what you think is the right thing to do?"

Well, it's still the entertainment business, and you have to pay attention to your customers, whether they're 100 percent right or 100 percent misguided. But that's no consolation to a manager who winds up embarrassed and jobless.

"You know what?" said one GM. "It almost doesn't matter what the reason is for something like this, for this many managers getting fired. It's not a good sign, whatever the reason is. It's not a good sign for our sport."

Miscellaneous Rumblings

O'Dowd told Rumblings and Grumblings he knows the next guy people will blame for the Rockies' troubles is him. He also sounds like a man who doesn't exactly expect to be GM in Denver for life.

"I can't control the outcome to every deal," O'Dowd said. "I can just control the process that leads to the deal. I've tried to do that. If it doesn't work, it's not because I didn't try hard and it's not because I didn't have the guys to make decisions. It will just be because it didn't work, period."

Mysteriously, O'Dowd offered Donnelly only a non-guaranteed contract for this year. And when Donnelly read in the Rocky Mountain News last weekend that he might be the next one fired, he went to O'Dowd and asked for some assurance he would be there the rest of the season. When the GM said he couldn't offer that assurance, Donnelly resigned on Monday.

Donnelly was just featured by ESPN's Buck Showalter in a piece on the top five third-base coaches in the major leagues. He could also easily be a part of any list of the top five funniest men in the major leagues. He won't be out of work long.

"I can't believe how hard some of these guys are throwing in high school," says one scouting director. "We're talking 96, 97, 98 miles per hour."

Best of that high-octane group: 6-foot-6 Canadian left-hander Adam Loewen, 6-foot-5 North Carolina smokeballer Jason Neighborgall and two power pitchers off the annual Texas assembly line -- Houston left-hander Scott Kazmir and a right-hander from the Houston area, Mark McCormick.

Fielder, a first baseman, has been described as having "tremendous power, good swing." Not to mention a mammoth build. "He's at 260 now," says one scouting director. "And he lost 60 pounds."

Mayberry, an outfielder-first baseman from Kansas whose stock has rocketed lately, was described by one scout as "special. He's 6-6, and he can really move. He's like another Dave Winfield."

	Bowa

The Phillies are coming off their losingest April ever (18 losses). But the only move they've made all season was to disable Dave Hollins and call up Jason Michaels.

They've got hot prospects Marlon Byrd and Brett Myers playing and pitching well in Scranton right now. And they have a reliever at Scranton (Elio Serrano) who wasn't scored on in April. But Wade, who made the rounds in the clubhouse last weekend to reassure players that the organization wasn't panicking, still isn't ready to do something, anything, just to say he did.

The Phillies start a nine-game homestand this weekend against Colorado, Houston and Arizona, and Wade says: "I want to see how we play on this homestand and try to get a better handle on where we are overall by the end of it."

If the Phillies haven't turned it around by then, you can expect some action. Wade has made a bunch of calls looking for bullpen reinforcements. Clubs he has talked to say the Phillies have shown a willingness to deal prospects like outfielder Eric Valent, reliever Doug Nickle and/or smokeballer Franklin Nunez in the right deal. But for now, Wade is sticking to his belief that "we're a good team playing bad baseball."

"They should have good pitching. But the thing that puzzles me is that all their pitchers seem to wear out at around 80 pitches. Makes you wonder.

"And offensively, they're just not that well-rounded anymore. For one thing, they can't run. In the past, they had Lofton, Vizquel and Alomar at the top of the lineup. They could all steal a base, and then the big bangers could knock them in. Now, unless Matt Lawton has a real good year, they're going to struggle to score. Burks is a hell of a hitter. But there's not enough behind Thome that you'd ever want to throw him a strike."

	Shaw

Ironically, Shaw's retirement party was only three weeks ago and was attended by more than 250 people. But Bick says Shaw "has been throwing with his son (Travis) every day. That's not like throwing off a mound, getting ready to pitch. But his son's in sixth grade. And believe me, Jeff can throw just as hard to his son as he could to Jason LaRue. His son can handle it."

Speaking of LaRue, one of the teams known to have called is the Reds, who were interested last winter but couldn't afford Shaw's reported asking price of two years, $9 million.

The Reds, of course, already have Danny Graves, who is tied for the league lead in saves. But the Dayton Daily News' Hal McCoy reported this week that the Indians had talked to the Reds about a deal that would send Graves and Juan Encarnacion to Cleveland for Bartolo Colon.

Because that deal would result in the Indians actually taking on about $1.5 million in payroll, it wouldn't seem to compute. But with the emergence of Encarnacion and Austin Kearns, the Reds will have too many outfielders when Junior Griffey returns. So GM Jim Bowden is working on numerous deals. And Shaw could loom as one of his contingency plans. Stay tuned.