Personally in the work life I'm always weary of the smooth talker. While I don't think Atkins or Shapiro are bad at their jobs (I think they'll turn to be better than average), there hasn't been anything that has stood out to me that they're geniuses. From my personal experience with smooth talkers, I've found many of these guys who make it upward in organizations are a-types who don't take no as an answer, which leads to a lot of problems with surrounding themselves with yes-men. The good part of their approach is that they appear to have a committee approach to decision making after not wanting to give AA the reins, but if they're surrounding themselves with the just-get-it-done types, then it's just a committee by name. I don't know where I'm going with this but I've really been turned off with them simply not moving Donaldson earlier.
They moved on from Edwin, which most fans were fine with; then they moved on from arguably the biggest star, Jose, which after he wreaked himself, the fans were fine with moving on with, but the one guy who they couldn't have let go on a mediocre return was Donaldson. He was their money ticket to fast tracking this rebuild and they blew it. Certainly nobody can predict injuries, but you can't take that chance when you have that asset and it seems like the fans "knew" this wasn't going to be their year. It's entirely possible that ownership stepped in and gave instructions, but then again that's Shapiro's job to sell ownership on a vision and what the possibilities are. If he didn't accomplish that, either Rogers is meddling in baseball ops, or management drank their own Kool-aid. Knowing the way large corps work, I think it'd be a combination of the two where Rogers said they wanted a push for making the playoffs (though it wouldn't necessarily mean that they can't deal Donaldson), but that management probably said to themselves that they can try for the best of both worlds if the playoffs doesn't pan out and they can deal him. They probably didn't put much weight on the possibility of a year long injury with a guy who didn't have a terrible history, and when he got tightness at the start of the season, their plan went to crap and they put pressure on him to perform which made it worse. That's my theory of what happened, but it certainly to me sounds plausible.
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