Something stinks in Kansai.

It's been less than four full seasons since the merger of the Orix Blue Wave and Kintetsu Buffaloes led to the formation of the Orix Buffaloes, who began play in 2005, and the team is already on it's fourth manager.

Interim manager Daijiro Oishi became the fourth man to take the reins in Kobe last night, following the abrupt resignation of Terry Collins.

Collins said in a press conference on Wednesday that he was unable to continue to give the organization and its fans the dedication the job deserved.

That may well be true, but it just seems a bit out of character. Collins is a passionate manager with a fiery temper that knows what it takes to get the job done.

He understood the challenges that came with the Orix job and was fond of saying that he was "a hard worker not a miracle worker."

It begs the question as to whether the skipper finally decided he couldn't deal with something that was going on behind the scenes.

Collins, who did not name the organization as the reason for his departure during his news conference, was constantly trying to get the point across that winning doesn't happen overnight. Maybe Collins lost his fire or maybe the club just began to push too much.

Even if you give the team a mulligan on former manager Akira Ogi, who left his post due to illness in 2005, having three different managers in less than three full seasons doesn't paint a rosy front-office picture.

It doesn't help that outside of the numbers Tuffy Rhodes and Greg LaRocca put up last season, the Orix front office, headed by director of baseball operations, Katsuhiro Nakamura, doesn't exactly have a glowing track record these days.

After all this is the organization that was mostly (though not fully) responsible for the Jeremy Powell fiasco in the offseason.

The Buffaloes reportedly agreed to a contract with the pitcher then failed to do due diligence and began trying to change things, which led Powell to sign with the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks, which caused a major scandal for Japanese baseball.

It's also the front office that gave up on slugger Takeshi Yamasaki in 2004 and Norihiro Nakamura in 2006.

Yamasaki has 95 home runs and 270 RBI's for the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles since then.

Nakamura batted .293 with 20 home runs and 79 RBIs and was named the Japan Series MVP for the Chunichi Dragons in 2007.

Daisuke Hayakawa and Yoshitomo Tani are also former Buffaloes that have had good seasons after being traded to the Chiba Lotte Marines and Yomiuri Giants, respectively.

Those are a few in a laundry list of not-so-bright moves. If decisions like these are being made about players, imagine what Collins must have been dealing with during his own interactions with the front office.

It must also be disheartening for Orix fans to have to watch Rakuten, also a result of the Orix-Kintetsu merger, continue to improve, with Yamasaki leading the way.

It seems like decades ago that Ogi worked his "Ogi magic" in Kobe in 2005. The late manager, who died Dec. 15, 2005, had led Orix to a fourth-place finish before his health began to fade.

The Buffaloes finished fifth during Katsuhiro Nakamura's one season in charge in 2006 and were in the Pacific League cellar last year in Collins' first season.

Now it's Oishi's job, for the foreseeable future at least, to to deal with an organization that recently has excelled at tripping over it's own feet.

"Now I have to put the team together," Oishi told the media. "It's difficult to mold the team but we will do it gradually."

Difficult may not even begin to describe the task the Buffaloes face.