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| The Sports Monkey |
| McCourt’s Bitter Harvest |
| by Alex LaGory |
LA Dodger's Owner Continues to Confuse at a Major League Level
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I’ve been waiting. I expected outrage, disbelief, consternation. Hell, I would have taken confusion. Yet for some odd reason, the normally virulent LA press seems to be giving their favorite Bostonian target a break on his latest decision; that is the hiring of Grady Little as the new manager of LA’s hometown baseball club, the Dodgers (no the Angels are not from LA – I don’t care what they change the name to).
If you follow baseball at all, you remember Grady Little. His brain freeze during the 2003 playoffs cost the Red Sox a trip to the World Series. With his team up by three runs against the rival Yankees in New York, and his clearly fatigued ace Pedro Martinez on the mound in the 8th inning of Game 7 of the ALCS, Little sat glued to the bench as the Evil Empire strung together hit after hit, tying the game. By the time he finally lifted Pedro, momentum had shifted, and the Yanks would go on to win in the 11th inning on Aaron Boone’s moonshot. Less than a month later, it was exit stage left for Little.
Subsequently banished from the sport’s inner circle for two years, he has been filling his time as a “Roving Catching Instructor” for the Chicago Cubs farm system, a job title that inspires quizzical looks at best. Now he’s been given a second chance in LA, which seems a touch overgenerous to me considering he hasn’t made the short list for any team since his Boston debacle. Frank McCourt’s new GM, Ned Colletti, calls Little “a man of integrity and honesty.” Fantastic if you’re hiring an accountant or maybe a vice-presidential aide, but for my money the first words I would want to hear describing my new manager would be something like “brilliant baseball mind and proven champion at the major league level.”
Little managed 16 seasons in the minor leagues, mostly in the Braves organization, before getting his shot in Boston for two years. For me, that says it all. In 16 years, no one offered Little a better job than coaching “has been's” and “never will be's?” Many have raised his years as a cotton farmer in central Texas in the 80’s, a brief break from managing minor leaguers, as a folksy anecdote that shows he’s down to earth. To me it says he gave up on baseball until he realized that farming cotton might require getting up off his butt and making tough decisions. Little’s brand of baseball seems to have no such prerequisites.
I’m sure Grady Little is a decent man, and I would no doubt enjoy carving up a steak with him and listening to him weave his raspy Texas drawl around the good old days. I’d bet he’s got more tall stories than the Sears Tower. But his mistake will brand him forever, because it is not the mistake of an athlete, occurring in a split second under intense pressure, a physical tick that allowed the ball to slip under his glove (yes I’m talking about Bill Buckner). His mistake was methodical and glaring, amplified by the millions in Boston, New York and around the country who watched in disbelief. After Pedro relinquished 5 hits to 6 batters in that fateful 8th inning, Little finally peeled himself off the bench and strolled to the mound to yank his beleaguered starter, only he didn’t take Pedro out. He asked Pedro, a man who had already thrown 115 pitches, a man famous for tossing beach balls to the plate once his pitch count passes 100, “Do you want to come out of the game?” What did he think Pedro was going to say? It’s like asking your 7 year old if he wants ice cream before dinner. This wasn’t June, it was October. It wasn’t Game 1, it was Game 7. Pedro was on the verge of being roughed up in the 7th inning (gave up a run – stranded runners), so he should have been on a tighter leash than the gimp in Pulp Fiction.
What else do you need to know about a man? Instead of managing the most important moment of the season, he passed the buck. Little says he doesn’t regret the “decision,” that if things had worked out with Pedro, nobody would have remembered, and he’s right, kind of (real baseball fans always remember). But he would have gotten away with a bad decision, and the baseball gods never forget that. What about the next time he felt the pressure? Here in LA, we’re going to get the front row seat, and considering Little claims his decision was not a mistake but just didn’t play out the right way for him, something tells me we’ll see a couple of trainwrecks next summer. He’s part of that most dangerous group of potential leaders – the ALMOST competent.
So why select a clearly flawed candidate to manage in the second largest market and take the reins of one of the most storied franchises in all of sports? The simple answer is nobody else wanted the job. Or more precisely, nobody else wanted the boss. Bud Black, the revered pitching coach from Anaheim who is on everyone’s short list for promotion to the top job, declined to even sit down for an interview. Lou Pinella, with two World Series rings, did the same. Bobby Valentine preferred to remain in exile in Japan over having his checks signed by McCourt. Anybody who was anybody ran screaming the other direction because organizational chaos simply doesn’t inspire trust. Finally, after an uber-embarrassing 2 months since firing Jim Tracy (and DePodesta 3 weeks later – the clearest sign yet that McCourt’s left hand has no idea what the right hand is about to do), and with winter meetings already in full swing, the Dodgers chose Little, or rather settled for him. As a former farmer, maybe he can teach Frank McCourt about the whole “reaping what you sow” thing.
Detailing all the curious (read: what the f---?) decisions McCourt has made would be like shooting dead fish in a bucket, and they’ve been rehashed over and over. But the most glaring choice, hiring Paul DePodesta to a 5-year contract to rebuild the ball club, then firing him after only two years, reinforces three impressions of Frank McCourt: 1. He has no idea what he’s doing. 2. He knows it. 3. He has no loyalty. And in a fitting demonstration of complete tone-deafness, Little was introduced as manager and assigned former great Steve Garvey’s number.
Clearly happy to make decisions based on however the wind is blowing that day, it’s only a matter of time before the McCourts decide to cut and run on the entire organization. Colletti has said the Dodgers of the last couple seasons haven’t had the same competitive fire that the organization used to display, and he should know, working for the division rival Giants all those years. It’s funny though that the lack of fire in the Dodgers’ collective belly coincides directly with McCourt’s purchase of the team. McCourt, in a thinly disguised dig at his outgoing GM, recently declared that he only wants “quality people” who contribute to great chemistry to be associated with the organization from now on. It seems clear that the best way to start is by firing himself.
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