For nine baseball teams (soon to be eight), it’s the start of the postseason. For a bunch of others, it’s the start of the firing season. As usual, it’s the managers who are on the hottest seats, largely because fans, for reasons directly related to the root of the term “fan,’’ tend to lose all sense of perspective and rationale when their teams circle the drain. Lose enough, and no matter the circumstances, the manager gets all the rifles pointing his way.
When this happens, you end up with – just to pull a random example out of thin air, that has nothing to do with the author’s location or the team he once regularly followed – the Baltimore Orioles catching 11 different brands of hell for retaining Dave Trembley after a 98-loss season.
Now, this is far from a singular phenomenon, even in the Baltimore-Washington area, in which Eddie Jordan was fired early last season by the Wizards because he was failing to win without Gilbert Arenas, and where Jim Zorn is being dragged over the coals for having been unprepared for and undeserving of the job capriciously handed him by Dan Snyder.
But it has reached new levels of insane and illogical behavior in and around Camden Yards. On a team that proclaimed – a day or so before Trembley was promoted to the position in June 2007 – that it was time to clean house, get rid of the old ways of doing things, tear it down and build it up from the bottom, Trembley is now being blamed for the team having an awful record three seasons later.
A 98-loss season was unavoidable. It was unavoidable for a reason. The man put in charge to do the cleaning, getting rid of, tearing down and building up decided that there was simply no other choice. The long-suffering Orioles fan base – witnesses to the decimation of the glory years of the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s and the early Camden Yards years in the ‘90s – practically danced in the streets when that man, Andy MacPhail, was handed the reins.
Even more revelry ensued when the man handing them over, owner Peter Angelos, kept his words and completely removed his own hands from them. No more baseball decisions being controlled by the man who had proven over and over again how uniquely unqualified he was to do it.
A real baseball man, storied and successful and with an unimpeachable lineage, was finally being allowed to do what he did best, and MacPhail decided that what was best for this team was to re-build the crippled farm system, re-stock the arsenal of pitching arms, quit the ridiculous habit of overpaying for a player on his last legs to either nudge an overestimated team into contention or to build a bridge from one wrongheaded rebuilding plan to another.
Good plan.
Good manager to handle it, too, because Trembley had been a career minor-league manager and coach, and there was no need to find a big name to steer a shop that wasn’t ready to really sail yet. Besides, going marquee on the manager was as ineffectual and pointless as the marquee player-signings had been over the years.
The Orioles were going to stink for a while, and stink bad. Trying to stink only a little had gotten them to this place. Stripping everything bare – including all pretensions that what took a couple of decades to destroy could take only a couple of seasons to restore – was the only path.
Great! Orioles fans exclaimed.
Until they actually started to stink as bad as MacPhail had said.
From then on, it was completely forgotten that Trembley’s first pledge was to raise these new Orioles up to be professionals, to make them grow up with the right priorities, and to hold all players, no matter at what stage they were, accountable – not to mention holding himself accountable as well.
Trembley did all of that for 2 ½ seasons. Before that first half-season was over, though, the screams to get rid of him had begun. It might have been half in jest when, in September of ’07, the Orioles rewarded the signing of a contract for the following season by losing that 30-3 abomination to Texas at home.
From then on, though, not a soul in the organization caught more blame from fans than Trembley. The players were, from time to time, old, hardheaded, selfish, inattentive, dense, raw, unpolished, callow and brittle mentally and physically. They lost often enough to blot out the occasional triumphs and to distract from the real growth of players being groomed as the core of the finished product – outfielders Adam Jones, Nolan Reimold and Nick Markakis, catcher Matt Wieters and pitchers Brad Bergesen, Chris Tillman, Brian Matusz and Jim Johnson.
Trembley got none of the credit for any victory and all the abuse for every loss. Every syllable he spoke and the tone in which he spoke it was parsed for proof that he didn’t belong. There was no double-standard to which the fans couldn’t figure out how to hold him. It was almost awe-inspiring to see the volume of the rage, and how misdirected it was.
Here’s one theory for it all: Orioles fans, after a dozen losing seasons (and broken promises) in a row, started running out of people to blame. Putting it on Angelos didn’t work anymore; he was staying out of it and leaving it to MacPhail. MacPhail didn’t deserve it; he was doing exactly, almost verbatim, what he had promised. The players could only be pointed to so often, as the roster changed until few recognizable faces were left from the past bad years.
No one was willing to truly live up to their own promise – to buy into the MacPhail/Trembley plan to finally, without delusion or self-deception, fall down so far that there was nowhere to go but up. As badly as everyone wanted the 12 years of losing to end, no one could accept suffering a 13th or 14th to get to the ultimate goal.
Thus, the wailing and teeth-gnashing over the news at the end of last week – as the Orioles barely dodged a 100th loss – that Trembley was coming back.
He, MacPhail and the O’s have a job to finish. Apparently, so do the fans: to hound Trembley until the very end of time itself.
When this happens, you end up with – just to pull a random example out of thin air, that has nothing to do with the author’s location or the team he once regularly followed – the Baltimore Orioles catching 11 different brands of hell for retaining Dave Trembley after a 98-loss season.
Now, this is far from a singular phenomenon, even in the Baltimore-Washington area, in which Eddie Jordan was fired early last season by the Wizards because he was failing to win without Gilbert Arenas, and where Jim Zorn is being dragged over the coals for having been unprepared for and undeserving of the job capriciously handed him by Dan Snyder.
But it has reached new levels of insane and illogical behavior in and around Camden Yards. On a team that proclaimed – a day or so before Trembley was promoted to the position in June 2007 – that it was time to clean house, get rid of the old ways of doing things, tear it down and build it up from the bottom, Trembley is now being blamed for the team having an awful record three seasons later.
A 98-loss season was unavoidable. It was unavoidable for a reason. The man put in charge to do the cleaning, getting rid of, tearing down and building up decided that there was simply no other choice. The long-suffering Orioles fan base – witnesses to the decimation of the glory years of the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s and the early Camden Yards years in the ‘90s – practically danced in the streets when that man, Andy MacPhail, was handed the reins.
Even more revelry ensued when the man handing them over, owner Peter Angelos, kept his words and completely removed his own hands from them. No more baseball decisions being controlled by the man who had proven over and over again how uniquely unqualified he was to do it.
A real baseball man, storied and successful and with an unimpeachable lineage, was finally being allowed to do what he did best, and MacPhail decided that what was best for this team was to re-build the crippled farm system, re-stock the arsenal of pitching arms, quit the ridiculous habit of overpaying for a player on his last legs to either nudge an overestimated team into contention or to build a bridge from one wrongheaded rebuilding plan to another.
Good plan.
Good manager to handle it, too, because Trembley had been a career minor-league manager and coach, and there was no need to find a big name to steer a shop that wasn’t ready to really sail yet. Besides, going marquee on the manager was as ineffectual and pointless as the marquee player-signings had been over the years.
The Orioles were going to stink for a while, and stink bad. Trying to stink only a little had gotten them to this place. Stripping everything bare – including all pretensions that what took a couple of decades to destroy could take only a couple of seasons to restore – was the only path.
Great! Orioles fans exclaimed.
Until they actually started to stink as bad as MacPhail had said.
From then on, it was completely forgotten that Trembley’s first pledge was to raise these new Orioles up to be professionals, to make them grow up with the right priorities, and to hold all players, no matter at what stage they were, accountable – not to mention holding himself accountable as well.
Trembley did all of that for 2 ½ seasons. Before that first half-season was over, though, the screams to get rid of him had begun. It might have been half in jest when, in September of ’07, the Orioles rewarded the signing of a contract for the following season by losing that 30-3 abomination to Texas at home.
From then on, though, not a soul in the organization caught more blame from fans than Trembley. The players were, from time to time, old, hardheaded, selfish, inattentive, dense, raw, unpolished, callow and brittle mentally and physically. They lost often enough to blot out the occasional triumphs and to distract from the real growth of players being groomed as the core of the finished product – outfielders Adam Jones, Nolan Reimold and Nick Markakis, catcher Matt Wieters and pitchers Brad Bergesen, Chris Tillman, Brian Matusz and Jim Johnson.
Trembley got none of the credit for any victory and all the abuse for every loss. Every syllable he spoke and the tone in which he spoke it was parsed for proof that he didn’t belong. There was no double-standard to which the fans couldn’t figure out how to hold him. It was almost awe-inspiring to see the volume of the rage, and how misdirected it was.
Here’s one theory for it all: Orioles fans, after a dozen losing seasons (and broken promises) in a row, started running out of people to blame. Putting it on Angelos didn’t work anymore; he was staying out of it and leaving it to MacPhail. MacPhail didn’t deserve it; he was doing exactly, almost verbatim, what he had promised. The players could only be pointed to so often, as the roster changed until few recognizable faces were left from the past bad years.
No one was willing to truly live up to their own promise – to buy into the MacPhail/Trembley plan to finally, without delusion or self-deception, fall down so far that there was nowhere to go but up. As badly as everyone wanted the 12 years of losing to end, no one could accept suffering a 13th or 14th to get to the ultimate goal.
Thus, the wailing and teeth-gnashing over the news at the end of last week – as the Orioles barely dodged a 100th loss – that Trembley was coming back.
He, MacPhail and the O’s have a job to finish. Apparently, so do the fans: to hound Trembley until the very end of time itself.
(Photo: Baltimore Sun)
No comments:
Post a Comment