Friday Rockpile: More Management Pondering In a Losing Season

I knew someone would point that out!

That if there’s a way to hit into a quadruple play, I’m pretty sure he’s going to find it.

(as I mentioned the other day in the Rockpile): in-game moves, lineup construction (which includes managing off-days and bullpen pitch-counts), and being the “head coach”. It’s fair to criticize the manager on any or all of them. I think Tracy does a good job on the first, a slightly below average job on the second, and it’s hard to say exactly where the problems are with the third without more access than we fans get, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating and this one doesn’t taste so good.

Street might hit the DL, Giambi is coming back.

Everything else that’s new and fresh is “Chacin pitched well! Bats didn’t hit!”

including moderation

I have four days of summer va-K left and if I have to think about the children I may come in punching them.

Lopez sucked, but he got the same treatment, never got a chance to get into a grove. Same thing with Iannetta last year. I also think Smith suffers from this somewhat, I don’t think he’s any worse than Hawpe and Brad was an everyday player.

   He’s been a mess mechanicaly with his swing in the past. His biggest problem is he seams incapable of reading pitches or pitchers.

From April 1 – April 18, Ian Stewart played in 12 of the team’s 16 games. He did have 1 PA in 7 of them, so he wasn’t a regular starter at that point. He posted a line of .077/.143/.077 during those 12 games and was optioned to AAA.

From May 3 to May 12, he played in all 9 of the team’s 9 games. He did have one pinch-hit appearance (1 PA) and one defensive replacement appearance (0 PA) in that time. He posted a jaw-dropping .048/.167/.095

From July 5 to July 21, he played in 12 of the team’s 13 games and had at least two PAs in every one of them. He posted a .227/.320/.341

From July 22 to August 8, he played in 14 of the team’s 17 games (1 PA in 5, 0 PA in one) and posted a .194/.265/.258

So what do we learn from this? First, he clearly did do better when he was playing regularly as his best line was during the mid-July 12/13 run when he was starting every game. But what he did at his “best” was still not what we need from our 3B to be a competitive team. Second, we learn that when he’s with the big league club, he’s playing. He’s getting regular at bats even if he’s not starting every day.

You can make an argument that in early April he couldn’t find a rhythm because it wasn’t clear who the everyday starting 3B was, and it’s a reasonable argument. But that was a long time ago and he’s had lots of steady playing time since. You can also make an argument (as many of us did at the time) that May 3 was too early to call him back. This, however, was due to an injury situation and the team was still very much in contention at the time. This would have been a great opportunity for him to step up and seal his place in the lineup for the rest of the year. He had regular playing time for 9 games straight, and squandered it completely.

I think the early April situation was a mistake. You should have a good idea of your starters by the end of spring training and stick with them, using platoons where you have to and with players capable of operating in a platoon. The May 3 situation was unfortunate, but it’s hard to blame the front office for handling it by giving Ian an opportunity. Other than that, I think the team’s been plenty patient with Ian. They were more patient with him than with Lopez, Paulino, Nelson, and Amezaga (as they should given his contract situation and ceiling). They gave him plenty of opportunities to prove himself going into arbitration and he just couldn’t or didn’t do it. Now it’s time to move on. Maybe Ian will find his groove with another team.

    That left the coaches free to observe the players at work and then give instruction. The tedium was broken up by pepper games we aren’t allowed to see anymore. Those games did a lot to improve hand eye coordination and a good way to stech out after a practice.

I don’t find any of this creepy at all.

was that he demanded that Solomon Torres and Jack Wilson return after only two days off for the birth of their children in September of a losing season. The two players proceeded to complain with upper management and were given more time off.

Was this a bad baseball decision, or was Jim Tracy (who would be fired a month later) trying to pad his win total in an effort to save his job by having two of his better players on the field as much as possible?

These are the kinds of ways in which he hurts his relationships with players, executives, and the press. He doesn’t do anything malicious, but he lacks a certain understanding and empathy. This deficiency often makes him seem like an ass. Not a mean person, but an ass.

I feel that this same lack of empathy is his greatest weakness when trying to coach and/or support struggling players. And it makes him a bad fit with this team.

were that he played favorites with players that led to a complete rift in the clubhouse. Part of this was his own personal battle with the new GM and ownership who had kept him on. I don’t really know as much about this though.

people from Dodger and Pirates blogs came over to tell us how crappy of a manager he was. We didn’t really pay them any mind, and then we had that great season. Now I know what they were talking about.

I really doubt O’dowd walked into Tracy’s office one day and announced “we released Brad” and it was the first time Tracy had heard of it.

A counter-example would be the Ubaldo trade. It really weakened the rotation and I’m sure Tracy didn’t like that very much from a playing-to-win-this-year perspective but understands the long-term baseball decision (he said just about those exact words in an interview). That’s one where O’dowd rightly made an organizational decision and Tracy just has to live with it.

He’s quoted as saying “if you play for one run that’s all you’re going to get” but in his book he says that if that one run will win the game for you, you play for it. It’s early in the game when he didn’t know how many runs it was going to take that he believed the object was to get the runners on base and give his hitters a chance to drive them in with hits (including, but not limited to, home runs). Like I said earlier, he also had a lineup that had a very good chance of doing just that over the course of 9 innings.

The problem with the hit and run is that it both forces a baserunner to run on a particular pitch, even if he gets a bad jump, and forces a batter to make contact with a given pitch, even if it’s unhittable, rather than wait for a better pitch. So you put both guys at a disadvantage. Sometimes it works and sometimes it’s called for but I think it’s used too much. At any rate, you have to have a very good contact hitter to be able to execute it.

Personally, I think the Rockies could do well with a variant on this philosophy (pitching, defense, and the 5-run rally). Get baserunners (they already do this), don’t sacrifice outs or baserunners early in the game, and then string a series of hits together in some inning when the pitcher shows weakness. What they don’t have is the philosophy of “I’m happy to take my single, walk, or double and hand the bat to the next guy in the lineup”. This gets back to the coaching aspect of a manager’s job. Tracy gives a lot of lip service to this concept but for whatever reason his players don’t live it.

And he says that lots of times, you don’t even think about winning a series. And that you don’t even try…so forget about the playoffs.

outstanding.

Because it was a day game.

Nevermind, we won’t need a closer this weekend.