I don't know a whole lot about basketball. I never played it when I was a kid, it wasn't on the television, it never came within my radar range. But in 1995 the Raptors came to town, and naturally enough I began to at least pay a bit of attention. And with what seems to me to be the general decline and fall into irrelevance of the NHL (alas, the one sport I could actually play with something resembling competence) I've come to follow the Raptors fairly closely.
Plato has Socrates say that the beginning of wisdom is knowing that you don't know anything. It was the Yogi (who else?) who gave this insight its baseball formulation: "In baseball, you don't know nothing." And knowing, as I do, that I know nothing about basketball, I went to the fan sites for insight, support, understanding. Now 2009-10 was, I realize, a very disappointing season. What looked so promising just a couple of months ago went swirling down the drain, leaving a nasty smell in its wake. There is some unhappiness out there in Raptor Land. I understand that. Nevertheless, when I read the denunciations of the character and competence of the coach and general manager, the thought that went through my head was "Do we sound like that?"
That arrogant? That presumptuous? That full of ourselves?
Sometimes.
Those of you who weren't around in 1992 and 1993 have probably been startled at the way some of us respond to criticism of Cito Gaston as a manager. A tad defensive, from time to time. No doubt about it. But Cito Gaston makes people go crazy. Stark raving nuts. He always has.
Many of us who were around in 1992 and 1993 were baffled by it at the time. The team was in first place, they were winning the World Series. What, you think that happens all the time? I remember someone (it was Mike Hogan, to be precise) suggesting that the Blue Jays should have won their division by at least 20 games, and probably would have done so if not for their strategically-challenged skipper. This was truly silly and stupid stuff, but you heard it everywhere and you heard it all the time. While they were winning. It drove me crazy.
It strikes me as exactly the same as complaining that sure, Jeff Bagwell hit all those home runs, but he wasn't using a proper batting stance. He should have hit many, many more.
And the undercurrent to all of this?
No, not race - at least, I've never thought so. Not then and not now. I have worried that could be an issue. I'm always going to be suspicious when a 66 year old black man is universally called by a nickname rather than his surname. I'm old enough to be paranoid and self-questioning about these things and so I don't do that. I also like to be contrary. I'm sure no one noticed, but I always referred to the former general manager as "Ricciardi", and never as "J.P."
Well, he wasn't my buddy.
But no - I honestly have never thought racism was the issue here. I could be wrong - it's happened once or twice - and I certainly don't blame Gaston himself for suspecting such a thing. He grew up in the segregated south, you may recall - he turned pro when major league teams still used segregated facilities in spring training. Later in his career he got to room with Henry Aaron, who has a tale or two of his own about racism to share with everyone. Gaston knows first-hand things most of us are very fortunate not to know. But I always thought people were saying something else about him.
I always thought they were saying that he was too stupid for the job, that the wondrous subtleties of the game were beyond him.
Here's something from ths very site:
Scott Downs has always been an effective situational lefty... Cito doesn't seem to grasp this concept.
It's not the fact that this is completely wrong about Downs that is so irritating. (Although, come to think of it, that is pretty irritating.) It's the glancing, almost unconscious insult to the manager's intelligence, the insinuation that when confronted with something as mind-bogglingly complex as platoon splits, this poor fool from Texas with his high school education is out of his depth.
Well, give me a god damn break. Does anybody seriously think Cito Gaston does not understand platoon splits? That he's not aware that Randy Ruiz is a better hitter than John McDonald? And that given, does it not follow that he's basing his decisions on some other factor? How difficult is that? Really - if you do not understand that, just who is it that's having trouble grasping basic concepts around here anyway?
We generally do better than that around here. Bauxite 92-93 has made some very trenchant criticisms of specific game moves, and despite his (I'm assuming!) considerable irritation at times (in all fairness, I may have provoked him a time or two), has done so without implying that the manager is too dumb to understand what's at issue. Naturally, that's why I want to pick on him again. He wrote the other day that:
I don't judge moves by their outcome; I judge the decision with all the accessible information at the time it was made.
I don't really have a problem with that - is it Paul DePodesta who would say "trust the process?" - so long as we recognize one basic truth. We have but a portion of the information that is available to the guy who actually has to make the decision. Even worse, the part we don't have resists being reduced to numbers anyway. Whereas the manager, most assuredly, has access to everything we have. Everything I have, anyway.
Valid criticisms of Gaston are almost always based on some specific tactical decision he has made. Which may be indeed valid on that one level, but it's not the only level Gaston (or any major league manager for that matter) is required to operate on. All managers place a higher priority on some things than they do on others. Gaston manages as if he believes that maintaining his player' personal comfort zones is more important than specific tactical issues. I don't know if that's a strength or a weakness because I don't know if it's true or false. And neither do you. It's probably true for some players, not true for others. But we certainly don't know. And therefore it's utterly impossible to measure the consequences. We don't, and we never will, have any way to do that properly - we can only measure a part - and only a part - of the tactical import. And while the tactical import may be the only part of the job that we can reasonably assess, it does not exist in splendid theoretical isolation. Tactical decisions do not take place in a vacuum.
Which is more or less special pleading. I recognize that, I'm not very happy about it. But it is what it is.
So last Wednesday afternoon, the Blue Jays lost 4-3 to the Royals in ten innings. The game ended with notorious non-hitter John McDonald, representing (sort of!) the tying run, making the final out. But you wouldn't have known that if you missed the game and were reading the AP summary on ESPN, or the game stories submitted by Mark Zwolinski of the Star or Mike Rutsey of the Sun. That little tidbit didn't escape Jordan Bastian's notice, but he contented himself with explaining the situation:
Should the Jays have used pinch hitter Randy Ruiz in the 10th, going for a shot at tying the game with a solo homer rather than use McDonald? Sure, there's an argument to be made. But then who plays second in the 11th? Ruiz? Overbay?
On the other hand, there was this:
Of course there’s no guarantee that Ruiz does something positive, but there’s a FAR greater chance that he does. A home run to tie the game, a hit or a walk just to keep things going. Sure, if he gets on you can’t pinch-run for him, and he’s not especially fast, BUT YOU HAVEN’T LOST THE GAME YET! Yes, you have to worry about your defense, and had the game gone to an 11th inning, it would have been awfully ugly - BUT YOU’D BE PLAYING IN THE 11TH INNING WITHOUT HAVING LOST THE GAME YET
Uh-oh. I think we may have a case of Cito Derangement Syndrome on our hands. It's never a good sign (and on the Internets, I believe it is universally regarded as Bad Form) when you start submitting posts with the CapLock key engaged. You may also have noticed that earlier in the same week Wilner had speculated that Gaston was running Overbay out there every day despite his horiffic early season slump, as a way to punish him for his role in last season's "mutiny."
Quod erat demonstradum - this is an idea so bizarre, so thoroughly loopy, that one hardly knows how to respond except to shake one's head and say "Cito Derangement Syndrome. How sad." Wilner himself recovered his bearings and did his best to walk it back the following day, but we know the nature of his affliction. We have seen it for ourselves.
We can all disagree about specific tactical decisions. We can sometimes even identify the correct tactical course of action, though not nearly as often as we like to think. I myself would have had Randy Ruiz bat in that situation. This is not because I believe in approaching an April game against the freaking Kansas City Royals as if it were GAME SEVEN OF THE WORLD SERIES (hey, that was fun.) Nor because it measurably improves my chances of prolonging the game, which range all the way from Very Unlikely (McDonald has made an out in 72% of his career plate appearances) to Pretty Unlikely (Ruiz has mades out in 64% of his career plate appearances.) However, I think the chances of prolonging the game are so remote (even if Ruiz gets on base, you're almost certainly going to need at least two more hits to bring him in to score) that there's really nothing to lose by letting Ruiz hit. He can use the at bats.
But one of Gaston's basic principles in this type of situation is his extreme reluctance to send a player out to fill a defensive position he's not familiar with. He simply won't do it, and didn't even do it in the World Series (his big move was playing Paul Molitor at third base, a position he had previously played in almost 800 games.) Gaston worries about a) the player getting hurt, and b) the player getting embarassed. He worries about it far too much, I think. But we can disagree about this stuff. Many people honestly think Gaston should have chosen to make whatever tactical decision can best be measured in terms of being a positive percentage move.
No manager in the history of the game has ever done that, of course - but it's the only thing we can speak about with any kind of knowledge at all. It's all we got. No wonder it often sounds as if we think it's the only thing that matters, even as we grudgingly recognize that it's not the only thing that actually... you know, exists.
The long-time minor league manager Rocky Bridges once quipped that there are three things every man thinks "he can do better than any other man: build a fire, run a hotel, and manage a baseball team." And by manage a baseball team, no one is thinking of coping with the daily media horde trying to squeeze something damaging but newsworthy out of you every day. No one's thinking about arguing with your GM about the useless reliever taking up space in your bullpen. They're thinking about making moves - changing pitchers, calling for the hit and run, juggling the lineup. The cool stuff. The stuff Tony LaRussa does. They're certainly not imagining just sitting in the dugout watching, while a bunch of guys who are half your age and make ten times the money hold your professional future in their hands. Which must be pretty well unbearable, when you think about it.
Most managers are desperately trying to exert some kind of control over the action, someway, somehow - precisely because so much of what goes on is out of their control. This may be why so many of them are alcoholics as well, but that's another story. Tony LaRussa may be the patron saint of over-managing, as Joe Posnanski writes so brilliantly in his look at LaRussa's work last week in the Cardials' marathon affair with the Mets. Cito Gaston is the other thing, the polar opposite. The very part of the job that people think of as a manager's central role is the very part of the job that Gaston places the least value on. He is not a control freak - he doesn't expect that the game is going to revolve around him, that he is going to have to be the star. So he's not particularly worried. He is not going to pace up and down, wheels turning away, sneaking cigarettes between innings, telling his boys to "keep it close and I'll think of something." He's just going to sit there and watch. Maybe make a pitching change or two.
It's like he's deliberately rejected and turned his back on every popular notion we have of The Manager. No wonder he makes people crazy.
The strangest thing of all, of course, is this - tactically, the game as a whole is coming around to embrace principles Gaston has followed all along. Not because he was a visionary, not because of his profound influence. Sometimes his basic positions as a big-inning manager in the Earl Weaver tradition have simply become more widespread. Gaston never liked bunting very much. He always hated giving away outs on the base paths. He never had much use for the hit and run, although he was never exactly Earl ("I don't have even have a sign for the hit and run") Weaver about it.
More often though it's just that the weird cycles of the game have turned his way. Gaston never liked pinch hitting, mainly (I think) because he always liked to have his best hitters in the starting to lineup to begin with. Well, in the modern game, no one likes pinch hitting. It's disappearing. There were barely half as many pinch hit appearances in the AL last year as there were just ten years ago. And once again platooning is disappearing from the game, after a second vogue that lasted almost sixty years - and for much the same reason pinch hitters are vanishing. If you carry a seven man bullpen, you don't have those bats on the bench to use as pinch hitters or as parts of a platoon. This fits Gaston's managerial preferences to a tee - like the young Sparky Anderson, he always had a very strong preference for a set lineup, with a bench consisting of veteran guys who know they're bench players and won't raise a fuss about not playing. Gaston appreciates that from his bench guys, and will reward it when he can.
And the new stuff? Like a lot of modern managers, Gaston appears to believe in batter-pitcher matchups. Granted, this is generally frowned upon by modern statistical analysts. Of course, Earl Weaver and I think the analysts are full of hooey in this case. I don't think very much of the seven man bullpen either, which swept over the game in Gaston's absence, He has taken to it like a long-lost friend, and probably wonders how he ever got along without one. Which figures - you may recall that in his very first full season as a major league manager, Gaston's Blue Jays set a major league record for fewest complete games by a pitching staff.
Silly me. I had actually wondered what Gaston would make of the seven man bullpen when he was rehired in June 2008, right after I described the move as "something the Leafs would do."
Only a handful of the hundreds of men who have managed in the majors have accomplished what Gaston and LaRussa have as managers. Which doesn't make either of them a good manager: it only means that they've been succesful. They've both been extremely unsuccessful as well, which didn't necessarily make them bad managers. I think it's pretty clear by now that in his third managerial post LaRussa has actually learned how to extend his shelf life beyond the normal five year limit that applies to almost every manager in the game's history. This is extremely uncommon; LaRussa himself was extended well beyond his useful shelf life in Oakland, but he's having a very good extended run in St. Louis. Even the most successful managers have trouble doing that - Dick Williams never lasted five seasons anywhere. Billy Martin made it through three seasons exactly once. Gaston couldn't do that either, despite a very impressive five year run, and for all the usual reasons (the needs of the team had changed, he grew too attached to players who had helped him win earlier.) He couldn't in his first tour, anyway, and at this point in his career he'll never get a second chance.
