Accountability

While reading Greg Cohen's blog this morning I found a quote that I think sums up a lot of the problems in baseball. And I'm not talking about steroids, I'm talking about the financial and lack of a business model kind of problems that have not and will not change in the foreseeable future. Here is the quote from Wallace Matthews in Newsday;

"(Torre) wasn't the problem with this team last year any more than Girardi is the problem with it this year."

That should not be any sort of surprise to anyone who really follows and knows the game of baseball.

Now before I start this rant I would like to emphasize that I am not trivializing the position of manager, rather defending it. Think about the manager's role on a baseball team and where his value is most important. Is it in baseball knowledge, is it in player rotation, it is in evaluating and assessing skill levels? Yes somewhat to all of those, but almost more than any other sport in baseball a manager's role is to be a leader, and to fire his team up when they need a boost, and to be someone the players want to succeed for, because they feel bad failing in front of him.

Football, hockey, basketball all have coaches, baseball has managers. A baseball fanatic and your above average observer knows when is the right time to hit and run, when to run on a pitch, when to steal and when not to steal third, when to bring in the lefty, when to walk a batter. Hell, John Sterling tells the fans every night what the runners will be doing, who Joe will bring in next, who is going to pinch hit before it happens, because it's a game of statistics and if you follow the stats and know the situations you're in, you make the logical moves. Of course there are some exceptions and questionable moves, but generally baseball managers can go by the numbers. Whereas in basketball and hockey, you need a coach to constantly and on the fly change players to optimize player match ups, who can afford to foul, to bring an enforcer in and to actually hold practices to go over pick and roll plays, or penalty killing scenarios. In baseball, players have been practicing and know what to do in a bunting situation since they were in junior high, and God forbid they go out before a game and take some grounders, you know the announcers will bring it up later on and praise them as if they were working overtime at the local mining plant.

Yet when a team is struggling or in a rut where does the blame fall? Sure a player may be ridiculed for silly injuries, heckled for being an idiot, or booed for poor performance. But when it comes to earning your pay, that's where baseball fails. In all those aforementioned scenarios the next season you don't see the team getting rid of the left fielder hitting .220 they just signed for 5 years and $50 million unless they trade him, you see the manager getting the ax. Unlike any real job or business in the U.S.A., baseball has NO accountability.

So Wallace Matthews is right, Torre wasn't the problem with the team the past few years just like Girardi isn't the problem with this years team. Firing Torre doesn't undo the incredible decline in Giambi's numbers since he got here, firing Girardi isn't going to undo the slump Melky had this season. Yet they will take the brunt of the blame, and sure I know that these guys get booed and talked about, but where and when it matters, in the paycheck, who really takes the hit? No matter that Pavano has played in 19 games and lost more games than he's won on the Yankees for 4 years, he's still collecting $40 million dollars for it. In football a player like that is cut in a heartbeat.

So while managers come and go, as long as baseball doesn't catch up with what we do here in the real world, your Carl Pavanos will stay and suck.