Game 42, Mariners at Athletics
DMZ · May 18, 2006 at 11:58 am · Filed Under Game Threads
A 12:35 start, and no television!
RHP Joel Pineiro v RHP Kirk Saarloos. Two “a”s, two “o”s there.
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177 Responses to “Game 42, Mariners at Athletics”
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The idea that this is a bad team because Hargrove hasn’t “made them reach their potential” flies like Mt. Baldy, i.e. not at all. We’ve watch them Ms stink three years running because too many guys have no power, don’t get on base, give away at-bats, can’t get strikeouts, and can’t keep their pitches down in the zone. None of that is the manager. When he takes one guy out of the lineup, he has to put another guy in; if the problems is the same, who’s to blame? Grover’s idea to run the bases aggressively was designed to compensate for the fact that the Ms lack power, and their homepark holds down scoring. This was why Piniella went to bunting and using the stolen base a lot the first full year at Safeco. The Ms are _too_ aggressive on the bases, yes, and it’s an aggravation; the manager is at least trying to squeeze a few more runs out of an inadequately talented group. —If the aggressive baserunning even was his idea: he didn’t do this his first year when he was mostly in control of his own fate. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the FO braintrust told him that “Lou found a way to get more runs out of the park *hint, hint*.”
I’m no great fan of Grover, but let’s keep our disdain where it truly belongs: farther up the paygrade, please.
Ah, who says that Grover’s the only target….to me, it’s clear that there’s stuff to clean up wayyyyy above his head (and Bavasi’s, as well). I can tolerate ONE muddler like Armstrong et al….but not all of them.
Keep an eye on Tacoma tonight ….
 Nageotte has, shall we say, a zero in the second spot of his pitching line.
 The Cult of Willie Bloomquist may soon grow a malignant tumor known as The Cult of Michael Garciaparra. He’s 2-for-2 so far today, with an RBI. Mr. Good Genes is hitting .333 as a Rainier.
He’s approaching 100 pitches in the 5th though, so it won’t go anywhere. Good outing though! 🙂
You jinxed him btw 😉
The disillusioned followers of the Cult of Bucky Jacobsen need something to live for.
Crap, I double-posted about the Chang sauce
Yep, I made Nageotte give up that hit. Next time I’ll report that he’s given up a ton of hits … does that mean I’ll jinx him into several straight innings of no-hit ball?
Good outing, though … 9-3 groundball-to-flyball ratio. Although 43 strikes, 38 balls is not that hot.
I don’t blame Hargove at all for “not getting the most out of the players”. This isn’t football. If anything, for that I would look more at the hitting coach or pitching coach… but it still ain’t football.
But I do blame him for the aggressive baserunning… and it has nothing at all to do with whether or not we have power.
Running aggressively makes up for nothing… all it does is make a lack of power even worse for the club. It is a desperate gambit, destined to fail before it even began. It is definitionaly flawed – if you are running aggressively instead of intelligently, you are hurting, not helping.
Now, he either designed this idiocy or he is so powerless at this point that he had to not only adopt it but pretend it was his own… and the last thing this club needs is a manager too weak to fight battles with upper management and ownership.
I am not a member of the Cult of Lou, but there were areas were he was better, by far, than Hargrove… and a willingness to stand up to authority was one of them.
Baserunning is also not the only example of terrible managerial decisions. Utterly strange bullpen usage is another.
Bottom line is that I can’t fire the owners, or have a prayer of convincing them to fire Lincoln et al.
So firing Hargove is the best than can be expected at this point. It was widely considered, myself included, to be a dumb hire to begin with… and nothing that has happened since has changed my mind one bit.
All that said, I feel sorry for him, too. There are worse managers that have more success becuase they have better talent. I also think he has gotten a bit better, making fewer dumb decisions.
But he is not helping this club right now and they can find someone who will.
Here’s the point with all this Hargove talk: symbols matter in baseball.
And what that means is that irrespective of who’s at “fault”, there needs to be a move.
I don’t really care if Hargove is not the problem. He needs to go. There needs to be some symbolic action on the part of ownership that demonstates awareness of the situation.
That’s just how it works with any organization of this size. You assume the risk when you take the job that you’re gonna go if the organization doesn’t succeed.
So for god’s sake, Hargove needs to be removed quickly. Besides, there are plenty of instances of bad in-game decisions that he’s made to fully justify it.
And if you don’t think there are, I say it doesn’t matter. See above.
Jason Churchill is saying he is getting rumors that something is going down tomorrow morning in Seattle. Not sure what yet, some of the rumors include Hargrove being fired, Felix being sent to AAA, Lawton getting DFA’d, Doyle being called up.
He seems to think Doyle coming up is going to happen, whether it happens with the other moves or not who knows. That would make sense with Doyle being a game time scratch for the AAA game last night. With him not playing the day before (and it being scheduled off ahead of time), and no word of injury, you have to think him being called up is a possibility.
Gah, I’m anxious to find out what, if anything, occurs. Maybe my “I’m not watching another game start to finish till Hargrove is fired, or Doyle gets called up” thing won’t have to last as long as I thought.
Bringing Doyle up scares me a bit. They aren’t going to make him purely DH — Everett is currently the HR leader on the team, and until that changes it’s going to look bad to the fanbase if they sit him out of too many games, even if he comes in regularly to PH in late innings — and arguably, with the limp pasta that pass for bats currently in the middle of the order, it actually would be a bad idea. Which means Doyle has to run around in LF at least part of the time. And that scares me.
I think sitting Ibanez is probably less likely than sitting Everett down though. So who knows? The only way I really see Doyle playing the OF a ton is if they *gasp* move Ichiro to CF. I don’t think thats likely to happen, but what do I know?
I see it much more likely he DHs some with Everett on the pine, or he’ll be the new never used PH option. Guess we’ll see.
TNT today (Fri) says Doyle was scratched because of stiffness in his knee.
Times today (Finnegan) says no rumors about Hargrove being fired, but plenty about Bavasi being canned.
I LOVE Doyle, but he shouldn’t be up. Yet. He’s _re-habbing_. He had an ACL less than 9 months ago. He’s going to have stiffness, yeah. Play him in Tacky-town, for sure, but give him time to build up his knee to game conditions. Those accelerations out of the box [which blew his knee last year]; those deccelerations holding up a turn on the bases [which blew his knee to begin with]. I think he can make it, but. Please. Don’t. Rush. Him.
Actually, I’d love to see Chuck Armstrong step down. His statement a few weeks back that he saw the ’06 Ms as a contender, he “really did” was either totally disingenuous, or unbelievably thick-headed. Lincoln and the owners may love him, but his position is the one with the deadest of wood sitting in the armchair by the fire. Throw him in.
It doesn’t make sense to bring Doyle up until his knee is 100% or close to it. Would only increase the chances of a re-injury at this point.
Moves that would make sense at this point would be to axe Hargrove and move Rohn in as the interim for the remainder of the season. Sends a “symbolic” message, as someone noted and removes a manager that just doesn’t seem to be doing well making the in-game decisions.
Another thing they could do at this point would be to make a trade to either “shake things up” or just a minor deal to balance out the flawed bench.
They could axe Bavasi at this point in order to send a message, as well, but that one would surprise me a bit more, at this point.
Axe Bavasi before the draft? That’d be stupid.
But that would fit this organization….
Who else could stand to have a change of scenery? Frank Mattox, for sure. Chuck Armstrong. [Lincoln, yes, but fat chance of that happening].
Honestly, I don’t see what good firing anyone would do, because look at who’s doing the hiring. Howard Lincoln ran off Lou Piniella (no one can convince me otherwise)and he and Chuck Armstrong have now hired two managers and a GM who have been unmitigated disasters, at least in terms of wins and losses. Until Lincoln places more value on winning baseball games then he does on “organizational fit” then the losing will continue. His main hires – Melvin, Bavasi, and Hargrove were all brought here more because they fit Lincoln’s mantra of being good fits for the organization (translation: they won’t challenge Howard’s authority) then because of their baseball resumes. How can you search for a manager without even interviewing Dusty Baker, especially when he wanted to come here? Does that not speak volumes about the top brass?
The change in the Mariners that needs to occur is at the top. Howard Lincoln is not evil and he is not cheap. He is, however, inflexible and arrogant. Everything must be done his way and on his terms. He ran off the only manager who has been able to win here because he didn’t like the way he questioned authority. I’m not pining to bring Lou back; he is simply a symbol of what is wrong with this organization. Lincoln will not be challenged and that scares me more than anything else about this organization.
so what do you think Dusty would have done here?
We will never know.
Uh, in what way does Dusty Baker have more accomplishments than Mike Hargrove…unless it’s “pitchers used for 140+ pitch counts”?
Melvin and Hargrove are basically managerial no-ops- I don;t think they add value nor do they detract. Firing the manager is basically irrelevant in the long term, which is where the M’s are right now, except for symbolic purposes…unless they are convinced Rohn or whoever replaces him is MORE than Generic Manager.
I am down with a “symbolic” gesture at this point. I mean, yeah, it’s definately gonna hurt us a lot losing Hargrove and his wisdom and instincts, but I say give Rohn the job. The word is … desperation.
It’s hard to say what Dusty would have done in Seattle. He certainly wouldn’t have done any worse than Melvin and Hargrove. My point was simply: M’s looking for a manager, unquestionably one of the best is available and wanting to come here, and the M’s don’t even interview him let alone hire him. Why would they not even talk to him, get his ideas, his feedback, his perceptions about the team and the organization? How could that have hurt? The arrogance of that alone just floors me.
At that time, at the end of the 2002 season, Dusty had had 6 consecutive winning seasons, including 3 playoff appearances and was coming off a World Series appearance, and had been a 3 time NL Manager of the Year. Compare that to Bob Melvin, who had no record as a manager, and Mike Hargrove, who had had 4 consecutive losing seasons and had been fired from his past two managerial jobs. If not even considering Baker doesn’t wreak of incredible arrogance and rigidness I don’t know what does.
At the time, I wanted Dusty too. But Dusty was gonna come with a price tag of over 5 mil a season. The team was automatic that year (in theory). Melvin managed to do an uninspiring, mediocre job and still won 93 games.
You just hit the nail on the head. “The team was automatic that year”. Exactly what Howie and his cronies thought. Again, arrogance. So automatic they could hire a rookie manager. So automatic they could once again not act at the trade deadline. So automatic they could trade away Jeff Nelson because he complained to the media that no moves were made.
Let’s couple arrogance with “no clue on how to run a baseball team.” Being arrogant and knowing how to build a baseball team would be a whole lot less problem with me.