Successor Would Be Perfectly Claire

Right you are, Fox. That thing in front of your face? Yep, that’s a nose.

It took Fox officials two years, but finally they saw it Tuesday, saw what others had seen for months, saw something they should have known for two years.

Finally, they realized that Bob Graziano, a nice and decent man who would make a fine president of a bank, was overmatched as president of a baseball team.

His firing, unfortunate as it may be, represented a solid and dramatic hit, a ninth-inning single by an ownership group mired in a no-hitter.

But the hit will be worthless if it’s not followed by something along the lines of, say, a home run.

And the new Dodger president is. . . .

Knowing the people in Century City, it will probably be Alicia Silverstone.

Who better to star in a real-life version of “Clueless”?

Or maybe they’ll try to convince us that they care about tradition by hiring an O’Malley, first name Susan, current president of the Washington Wizards.

(Uh, guys, hate to blow a revenue opportunity for you, but she’s not related).

Heck, maybe they will give the job to Raul Mondesi. Isn’t he already their boss?

As heartening as it might be to see Fox admitting it has spent the last two years walking around with a batting helmet on backward, we still don’t know if it gets it.

In hiring the new president, we’ll find out.

Rick Welts, Fox’s new no-nonsense liaison hired to clean up the mess it both inherited and created, talked Tuesday about two criteria.

“Number one, we want a person who’s been involved with a winning team,” he said. “Second, we want somebody who understands the history and heritage of the organization.”

While admired by many, Graziano was neither.

When weeping over the loss of Dodger tradition, waste no tears here, because this otherwise solid man was not it.

In Graziano’s two years as Peter O’Malley’s hand-picked successor, the team was a combined 37 games out of first place. So much for the winning.

As far as understanding history and heritage, well, it was Graziano who fired Fred Claire and Bill Russell the same day Al Campanis died last summer, then later referred to Campanis’ passing as a “peripheral event.”

And it was Graziano who hired Kevin Malone, the general manager who has struggled with the issues of tradition while his team has laid an old-fashioned egg.

“It’s important for the character, integrity and morality of an organization to stay intact,” Graziano said Tuesday. “But that’s hard with so many new faces.”

Especially when the team president is so busy erasing all the old faces.

Check the history books before turning Graziano into a symbol of Fox’s evil empire.

This is not about that.

This is about whether Fox has learned from those mistakes.

Judging from Welts’ comments, one would say yes.

But judging from Fox’s past actions, how can anybody believe him?

If Fox were truly interested in stopping the dramatic bleeding of tradition and victories, the search for a new president would start and stop with one man.

In an irony appreciated by anybody who witnessed the bloodletting two Junes ago, that man would be Fred Claire.

Who else understands both Dodger baseball and business as he does?

Although he made some bad trades, who else in the front office had the guts to stand up and say he disagreed with the Mike Piazza deal?

Although he made some silly signings, is there a better deal in baseball right now than Eric Karros?

In Claire’s last four full years with the Dodgers, the team played only one game while not being involved in a pennant race.

They have not been involved in a pennant race since.

You thought that in the end, he was doing a lousy job evaluating players? In this new position, that wouldn’t be his job.

He wouldn’t be building the Dodgers, he would be running them, restoring their credibility in the community while helping restore their position in the standings.

Although Claire was criticized then, those days don’t look so bad from where we sit now.

It makes great sense.

Which means Claire probably has no chance.,

The guess here is Fox is looking for a very different type of winning and tradition.

It wants to win approval to build a new stadium somewhere.

It wants to carry on the Fox tradition of making money.

It wants to hire a suit who can do both.

Sorry, but you can’t spend two years peddling Spam and suddenly expect us to believe it’s steak.

The guess here is, Welts will dip into the Rolodex that accompanied him from the NBA league offices and pick out a hotshot team official who just finished supervising the construction of a new arena.

He will hire that person to do the same thing here.

The $50-million off-season renovation of Dodger Stadium is considered little more than a tourniquet by officials who increasingly view their investment as an open wound.

Fox wants a new stadium, and it needs somebody to do the heavy lifting, and this is the chance.

Baseball?

This is also Fox’s chance to truly show the community that it still cares about something as small and slow-moving and unsexy as baseball.

This is its chance to bring in someone who cares about the field as much as the cash box, somebody to fix the problems that began that April day when Rupert Murdoch sat in Peter O’Malley’s box and asked him to explain the hit-and-run.

Fox has had those chances before and blown them.

This is its best opportunity yet.

This is not about a pitcher who works every five days or a manager who probably will be gone in a couple of seasons.

This is about a leader who can link the past to the future, whose legacy can live for years.

A ninth-inning home run, indeed.

If only we could believe that Fox has that kind of strength, or those kind of guts.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.