Vanity is a sin not because our self-approval hurts others, but ourselves. It blinds us to our own limited value, which is a particularly handicapping set of blinders to wear in the workplace. Many of us have fought the impulse to quit a job with which we have grown frustrated, thinking, “No one else does what I do here, or can do it as well as I do it even if they tried; let’s just see how they get along without me.”
Don’t ever let yourself think that; unless you’re the star of an eponymously-titled television program, the business might experience some temporary turbulence as the result of your absence, but chances are it’s going to be just fine in the long term. Most of us are, no matter how talented, dispensable. There might not be someone exactly like us ready to take our place, but Mr. or Miss Close-Enough is always right around the corner, and in most cases close enough will do just fine.
In baseball, there is the well-known tale of Charlie Dressen, best related by Bill James in his underappreciated Guide to Baseball Managers. Dressen, a former manager and longtime coach with undeniable baseball acumen, took over a successful Dodgers team in 1951 and won two pennants in three years, narrowly missing the third when he bollixed up the playoff game against the Giants that ended with Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard ‘round the world.” At this point, his Dodgers record was 298-166 (.642).
Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley liked to keep his managers on one-year contracts. Maybe he was thinking back to the early 1930s, when the team fired both Max Carey and Casey Stengel before their contracts were out, thereby paying them to take a year’s vacation. Dressen had a problem with the policy and insisted on a three-year deal. He was a good manager, or at least an intelligent one, and he knew it. No doubt, like Jim Riggleman, he felt that as a man in his 50s he was too old not to receive the respect implied by a long-term commitment. He likely felt he had played an important role in the team’s success, and didn’t want each new season to be an on-the-job audition for the following one. This is entirely understandable. It was also, in one important respect, wrong.
O’Malley said, “Hey, we’d love to have you back, but not on those terms, sorry.” The impasse was never resolved. O’Malley turned the team over to Walter Alston, the manager of his International League team. Dressen, shut out of the majors, headed off to the Pacific Coast League to manage the Oakland Oaks for a year, then resurfaced with the Washington Senators where, as good a manager as he might have been, he couldn’t rescue a team whose ownership wasn’t overly invested in having a farm system or African Americans (as either players or customers). James convincingly argues that this series of decisions likely kept Dressen out of the Hall of Fame.
Meanwhile, though Alston was, as one writer put it, “23 years of bad managing,” the Dodgers rolled on to seven pennants and four championships during his tenure. He in no way possessed the brilliance of Dressen (Jackie Robinson called him “a wooden Indian”), but it turned out the Dodgers didn’t require more than a steady hand. When he was hired, a sportswriter remarked, “The Dodgers do not need a manager, and that is why they got Alston.” To some degree, this was true; the team, with its strong farm, executives, and ownership (remember, we’re talking about the O’Malleys, not the McCourts) might have been better off with a more nimble tactician (particularly in 1962), but it was generally going to put a good product on the field that needed gentle guidance more than radical sculpting. As Leonard Koppet wrote, the Dodgers “let him… manage the team on the field and in the clubhouse, with no hint of larger responsibilities.”
After Alston had signed the last of his 23 one-year deals, the Dodgers switched to Tommy Lasorda and added another four pennants and two titles. Lasorda was a very different manager than Alston, but the strength of the organization remained consistent and that allowed the outcomes to remain consistent despite the change of emphasis brought by the new skipper. A manager can be the making of a team in small but important ways, but in most cases (with some notable exceptions), the team is the making of the manager.
Riggleman might have considered the way managers and teams interact before presenting Nationals GM, and thereby ownership, with an ultimatum. His career record doesn’t testify to his being a transformational figure, and the recent Nationals turnaround is potentially an ephemeral little soap bubble. Bob Brenly won 92 games and a World Series (two things Riggleman has yet to do), and it didn’t prove he was a good manager. A 15-6 June no more made Riggleman indispensible than the team’s 23-31 record over the previous two months was grounds for immediate dismissal. Note that the Nationals have gone 7-1 in one-run games this month. That’s not progress, that’s a series of lucky breaks disguised as real progress.
Like Dressen, Riggleman had a good thing going but overrated his advantage and destroyed himself. Only the future will tell if he did so more thoroughly than his predecessor, who did, after all, go on to manage in the majors for all or part of another nine seasons. Perhaps, like Billy Martin saying, “One’s a born liar and the other’s convicted” of Reggie Jackson and George Steinbrenner in 1978, he had an emotional need to get fired but, unable to push himself to jump, maneuvered so that his being pushed became an inevitability.
That kind of psychological explanation would be preferable to what might turn out to be the plain ol’ vanilla truth: that Riggleman believed the Nationals couldn’t get along without him. With the fruits of the farm system starting to fall into place now and in the future, he will have a long time to contemplate whether he mistook an evolution that should have been credited to the organization for his own handiwork. For Dressen, that moment came quickly: The Dodgers won their elusive first World Series title in 1955, as their former manager watched from the sidelines, having brought the Senators in at 53-101.
Riggleman’s comeuppance will probably be further off, but that’s all right. As the saying goes, act in haste, repent at leisure. Some lucky skipper will get to manage Wilson Ramos, Danny Espinosa, Ryan Zimmerman, Bryce Harper, and Stephen Strasburg to an NL East title or two—don’t scoff; the Phillies are aging, the Mets lost, the Braves always a player and a dollar short, and the Marlins just don’t care—and he’ll reap the rewards that could have gone to the man who thought he was so important that his reward couldn’t wait another day.
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Riggleman is no John Lennon in terms of his influence on the group. The strength of the Nats has been built upon the same foundation as the Tampa Bay Rays - extended futility alchemically transformed into first-pick gold.
Comparing Rigs to Dressen is way off base as well, their records and careers could hardly be less similar.
I'm a little confused as to why BP is all alone racing to attack Riggleman and defend Rizzo. Perrotto slammed Riggleman without the benefit of facts, Goldman comes up with a couple of "out of left field" comps that in no way further his argument .... this sort of stuff is reflective of BP's seeming editorial decision to place snark and opinionated blather over nuanced analysis.
Likewise, much of the Nats' bright future has been through hard scouting work and deft player analysis. Sure, Stras and Harper give the team a hope for the future that few other teams have; but the two Zimmermen(n), Espinosa, Ramos, Desmond, and some more arms on the way down at the farm have more than a minor role in that future as well, and all are the products of scouting and development, not lucking their way to draft gold.
The Rays have done an excellent job of restocking their farm system even after they no longer had a top-6 pick, something the Nats will be hard-pressed to do.
The larger point that you seem to be ignoring is that Mike Rizzo is simply not a competent baseball executive, and he was hired by one of the biggest scumbags baseball has seen recently.
You sound personally invested, you wouldn't be a plant by any chance, would you?
All of those guys-- Zimmerman, Longoria, Baldelli, and Niemann-- were far from slam-dunk sure things when they were drafted. They were all calculated risks that other teams passed on for whatever reason.
No plant, just a guy who should be getting back to his day job. TGIF.
Will do, boss.
But don't let that stop you from doing a bad job at two things at the same time.
*Sigh* My real problem in life: I can't stop arguing with monkeys.
"Extended futility makes that first pick higher." Nope. A team's draft position depends upon how they finished the previous year, not "extended futility."
"Higher picks come with higher probabilities of future success." Perhaps, but it's not always as much as you assume, as this article suggests-- http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=4368
What is clear is that teams that do pick higher still have to do work-- scout, develop, etc.-- if they want those picks to eventually become foundations of championship level teams. If it was just as easy as lucking into having the best amateur prospects fall into your lap, explain the Orioles and Pirates.
Your statement about MoGreen being something of a wang, however, is spot-on.
2. The Dressen comparison is a parallel in terms of a manager who confused his own importance in what is, as you actually point out, an organizational-level success that results in part from good drafting (or in the Dodgers' case, scouting and open-mindedness). That they are not identical figures in terms of what got them to this point doesn't matter at all. It's that they arrived at roughly the same place.
3. Look around the web, turn on your radio. I am not alone in being critical of Riggleman, I'm sorry. Even those defending him don't endorse how this was handled. And John's piece hardly qualified as a slam.
4. Finally, I get really, really bored of hearing "snark over analysis," which has been a favorite of some readers since I got here in 2003. There is no snark in this piece. There is a historical comp. We reject [anything] over analysis on the rare occasions we get it. While I respect and appreciate every reader who takes the time to read and comment, I have long since come to the conclusion that sometimes, to invoke another 60s songwriter, a man will hear what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. Sometimes a writer starts with a certain intention but doesn't execute, so his motives are not well understood by the readers. That's his fault. But you can carry through exactly as you meant to and still not be understood, because as with opinions on ex-Beatles, levels of comprehension vary. I have learned to be happy simply that people are galvanized enough to say something, so again, I thank you.
The snark comment was more directed at Perrotto, although I still do not feel you did a balanced or reasonable job in your analysis.
Mike Rizzo has done a horrendous job as GM, as one would expect from a Bowden hire. The Jayson Werth signing will hamstring that franchise financially for a long time. Announcing yourself as a major free agent player by dramatically overspending on a lukewarm talent is not a good strategy for a mid-market team in a contested market. Then simultaneously keeping his manager on a second one-year contract (for $600k, not a lot for an MLB manager at all) without even extending him on the cheap ... talk about pennywise and pound foolish. The contrast is just too glaring.
Would it have been that difficult to tell that side of the story as well?
"Paul was tied for the least talented in the group" ... and then you put on a blast on the writer for putting opinionated blather or nuanced analysis?
While he wasn't my favorite Beatle, to suggest that Paul McCartney is anything less than incredibly and immensely talented is either crazy or a lame attempt at trolling. Either way, you're a moron.
Yes, I was opinionated while criticizing the analysis. In ... the ... Comments ... section. Where opinionated blather belongs.
Paul McCartney was very much less than incredibly and immensely talented. If that makes me a crazy lame trolling moron, so be it.
If that makes you a crude, insulting ignoramus, well yes it does. It does.
How many months ago was he lamenting the excessive contract given to Jayson Werth? Are there guarantees that Desmond, Espinosa and Ramos will all continue to progress? Would any GM in baseball have passed on Stephen Strasburg or Bryce Harper or did Rizzo take a pair of "gimme" putts earned by finishing at the back of the pack repeatedly? By the way, is Tommy John surgery always successful? Will Bryce Harper's act play in The Show? Is there any historical reason to believe that fans in Washington will start to show up in serious numbers?
With no players stepping up in his defense, it appears more and more likely that Riggleman felt that he NEEDED that management backing to maintain control in the clubhouse. As a contractor I like to have my next gig lined up before I leave an existing one, but there have been jobs where being out-of-work was better than the situation I was in.
He was getting an annual salary that, while low for baseball standards, is more than 99% of this site's readership. In a job that only 30 men out of the world's six-plus billion people can hold.
I think it's pretty slimy that Rizzo held him on one year contracts for so long, but the reality is, he just walked away from most fans' dream job.
Talk about cutting off his nose to spite his face.
Maybe Jim Riggleman just doesn't need managing that badly.
W/r/t Rizzo's arguments, I'm a bit skeptical as well. I'm not sure where Riggleman's managerial salary falls when it comes to the salaries of his peers. Perhaps $600K is well below market value, perhaps not. But Rizzo's argument-- that it would unfairly saddle the Nats to extend him for three years-- is a common one GMs (probably rightfully) use in player evaluation and strategic use of a team's limited resources. But applying that argument to managerial evaluation seems like it could be somewhat misleading. Is $600K *that* much to spend on a manager? Will that money/duration really be essentially a sunk cost that unfairly saddles a team when it attempts to acquire the talent it needs to be competitive? Because that is essentially what Rizzo is arguing here.
Coupled with the polite and less-than-vigorous farewells given by his players in the post-game quotes, it's apparent that Riggleman's authority in the dugout was every bit as tenuous as he thought.
I wonder if the Florida managerial situation impacted the Nationals' front office (i.e. Rizzo's) decision making process, perhaps pushing Riggleman so that he would clear out and allow Washington to go hard after Valentine before the Fish could make a play.
And the thing is Riggleman had to know this. If Rizzo wishes to be intractable on the option year he rides out the season and becomes a free agent with something to talk about (assuming the Nats finish around .500). Now nobody will touch him because he walked off the job in mid-season. He will be lucky to be making $100K next year.
It's not like Rizzo is held in the highest regard among other GM's. After the Edwin Jackson/Adam Dunn bait-and-switch with Kenny Williams last year, and the crazy Werth contract, I'd think that Riggleman's agent is having a lot of very friendly conversations today.
A very brief period of semi-fame cannot hide the suck that lies beneath.
I just wanted to toss out the idea that there'll likely be several front-offices predisposed to taking the opposite side of any disagreement involving Mike Rizzo.
Secondly --- something I didn't realize until the Johnson signing --- Davey was already on board as the dreaded "special consultant".
Doesn't it seem clear now that it was this that Riggleman was responding to? Saying, essentially, "Am I really the man here, or am I just a placeholder for this star-power guy you've got lurking around the clubhouse?" He forced Rizzo's hand. That's all.
And didn't Rizzo show his true colors, criticizing Riggleman for his "lack of loyalty" to the team when it was exactly the team's lack of loyalty to its manager that sparked all of this?
I think he's shot his wad as far as MLB is concerned, but would be a great "get" for an ambitious NCAA squad.
All Riggleman really did was stiff himself out of about $300K and minimized the possibility of future major league jobs.
So yeah, I agree, but the only person harmed here is Riggleman.
But I agree with the first poster, kmbart. This is clearly an act by a guy that's fed up with not being the guy in control by some clubhouse situation.
In USAToday's edition - Sports 4C - Riggleman is quoted as saying: "In today's sports, it's not a good environment to work in. You have to send a message to professional ballplayers (that) this man's the manager."
It's all well and good to call this overplaying your hand but I think it smacks more of somebody that's had enough.
“23 years of bad managing,â€, "seven pennants and four championships during his tenure". Aren't those two items t a little contradictory. Just try to tell me that someone who won a WS with Sweet Lou Johnson as his cleanup was that bad a skipper - skeptical response may be presumed.
The abrupt timing of his announcement would make me more apt to accuse Riggleman of insensitivity than of hubris, but I'd be most apt to admit that very few of us know the full details of his relationship with the club.
In fact, I'm on board with this whole article right up to the point where the Nats win the division in the near-future. I just can't see that happening any time soon. It's not like the team suddenly declined between Montreal and Washington; this team hasn't been competitive in quite some time. Valid points are made in the last paragraph, but the Phils have the fans and the money to replace the aging vets (assuming Ryan Howard's $25 mil a year doesn't turn out to be an anchor of a contract), the Mets seem to be more competently run right now, and the Marlins are always capable of buying a World Series then immediately dismantling the championship team (1997, 2003).
The "dollar short" analysis of the Braves (despite them being my favorite team) is, unfortunately, pretty dead on...