Coonelly is Major League Baseball's chief labor counsel, and draws high marks for his intelligence, with one executive describing him as a "phenomenal" choice." -Ken Rosenthal

If you're like me and you'd never heard of Coonelly, there's some interesting information on him here, here, and especially here.

From the look of things, this guy is a real heavy hitter, and there are some interesting (and also potentially disturbing) implications from his hiring. On the plus side, he's definitely a pro with some knowledge of the game and the financial end of things. As such, it'd probably be hard for a GM to sneak a bad idea past him, and he'll definitely be a step up from McClatchy in that regard. It's also unlikely that you'd rise to a position like his without being willing to get your knuckles dirty, which I view as a positive within this context. With an experienced guy like him at the helm, we might have more latitude to hire an inexperienced GM if one turns out to be the best candidate for the job, in the knowledge that Coonelly will be able to help handle things while the GM gets his feet wet.

Speaking as a paranoid fan (and what Pirate fan isn't, at this point?), I have two points of concern with this hiring. The first is that Coonelly has been intimately connected with the league office for some time now, and I worry a little bit about whether he would necessarily place our loyalties first in a situation where it's us against the league. This ties into the second concern, which is that Coonelly has basically been THE guy in charge of handling team compliance on bonus slotting and free agent deals. We have long lagged behind other clubs in both respects, and if he's not willing to alter his prior stances on such things, we could be at a further competitive disadvantage in the future.

Time will tell whether this was a good hire or a bad one. Right now, I'm just glad that we've got a set of hands on the steering wheel. It's an interesting time to be a Pirate fan.