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1. PASTE is not impressed by Albert Pujols (Zeth) Posted: October 05, 2007 at 05:06 PM (#2561688)I don't know, in recent years he's seemed more willing to deliberately hurt his own team to sabotage his GM than most managers would be. He's also shown more than a ready willingness to throw his own players (and anyone else) under the bus in order to divert blame from himself.
He seems to be a lot worse than your garden variety clock puncher manager.
She should have her kids taken ... oh wait, nevermind.
I agree with what you're saying, I think the same way about Tracy.
However, that doesn't necessarily make this true. Maybe if Tracy was hired to manage a good team and had a good relationship with his GM, therefore being in a situation where he didn't have reason to whine and do stupid ####, then he would do well as a manager. He might just be a crappy person as opposed to a crappy manager.
But during the 2005 season, he completely lost his touch. It was baffling to watch.
That's true, except for the part about him not doing anything poorly.
Seriously, he's god-awful. He'll refuse to use players purely out of spite, he'll lobby incessantly to pack the roster with ex-Dodgers, and he's not satisfied unless he's got eight relievers at his beck and call (not that he knows the first thing about running a bullpen). Even worse, the next time he takes personal responsibility for a loss will be the first. Every time the team wins, it's because he had a brilliant strategy, and every time the team loses, it's because the players didn't execute.
I think that this incident is a fitting capstone to his Pirates career. I hope he never works again, in any capacity, anywhere.
Tracy's treatment of Hee Seop Choi was painful to watch.
Tracy and Littlefield had a great relationship; they had a history together that stretched back to Montreal (where Littlefield was one of Dombrowski's lieutenants and Tracy was Alou's bench coach), and Tracy was choices A, B, and C as Lloyd's replacement. They only turned on each other at the end when it became obvious that firings were in the works and it was every man for himself.
I'm surprised you don't hope he manages the Cardinals. I do, assuming your comments are accurate.
Vlad, out of morbid curiosity, who do you think is worse: Tracy or McClendon?
Kind of like Dusty Baker. Give him an awesome roster and a situation where nothing ruffles his feathers or otherwise goes wrong, and he's terrific.
In the real world, of course, he's a steaming pile of crap.
In fairness to Tracy, he was about the third manager to do that to Choi, not that that justifies it.
One of my great disappointments as a baseball fan in recent years is Choi's failure to develop (aided and abetted by a series of managers apparently bent on marginalizing him, or worse).
Dusty Baker hated kids.
Tracy simply couldn't stand Choi, to the point of playing Jason "Professional Hitter" Phillips at first base.
What was Jack McKeon's issue? It appears he gave Choi regular playing time.
As was his treatment of Jose Castillo.
-- MWE
Not sure. He did give Choi a good bit of PT, but the team jettisoned him awfully quickly, which (given that Choi hit well in Florida) suggests to me there had to be something going on there. Something other than the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to acquire Paul LoDuca, Proven Winner and Veteran Leader™, I mean.
What happened there?
Considering that Choi played BETTER for Jack than he did for anyone else I doubt Jack wanted him out the door. Clearly Choi was responding to SOMETHING in Florida that he never had before or since.
who knows. Maybe Choi's perceived passivity really did work against him..................
Irony of ironies - he was in camp w/ Tampa Bay this year.
-- MWE
Tracy, without a doubt. McClendon was a bad manager, but Tracy is a bad manager AND a bad person.
McClendon, for all his faults, appeared to genuinely want to do what was right for the team, and you could tell it just ate at him that he wasn't any better at his job. On a very basic level, it wasn't his fault that he was a bad manager. He just didn't have the skills for the job, and asking him to do it was like asking a dog to perform brain surgery. In contrast, Tracy really only cared about what happened on (or off) the field insofar as it reflected on him. He was happy as long as he got paid, and he'd throw his mother under the bus to deflect criticism.
I will say Choi took a whole lot of called third strikes along with those walks.
I tried to draw you out a little bit on Castillo in another thread, Mike, but you'd already moved on. I have to confess that I'd pretty much written him off as a future contributor a year and a half ago, but I respect your opinion on players enough that I'm second-guessing myself, and I'm interested in what you see in him right now (if you don't mind sharing).
Choi could hit.
Lo Duca was not a team leader.
DePodesta was not a disaster.
Etc.
Creech deserved to be fired a thousand times over, but I didn't necessarily see the others coming. It's a great sign that Huntington was willing to cut the cord with these guys, since he'd worked with a lot of them in Montreal and Cleveland.
You'd think that if Cust and Pena could turn things around eventually so could Choi, but he was godawful in 2006 at every level- and went back to Korea.
If Choi actually had a solid productive 150g season in the MLB that would probably complete the stathead trifecta (Cust, Pena and Choi) that would drive a certain poster or to to drink and drink and drink....
Well, I suppose that wouldn't be entirely unwarranted. She IS largely responsible for Tracy's coming into the world, after all.
Petagine hit .327/.452/.635 in Pawtuckett.
He also hit .281/.361/.438 for the Sox (32 abs)
rumor has it that he was a pawn in the power struggle between Theo and Lucchino
The Sox also had David Ortiz.... But you'd think that Petagine could/should have eased out Millar...
Choi was horrific in Pawtuckett: .207/.347/.361
For kicks, I combined Choi's stats for his pre-concussion 2003 and pre-trade 2004:
In 416 at-bats over 144 games, Choi hit .262 with a SLG of .495. 29 doubles and 22 home runs. 81 walks to 126 Ks.
EDIT: I figured out his OBP: .388
So, his stat line was 262/388/495/883.
For a guy in his age 24-25 seasons, not bad.
But during the 2005 season, he completely lost his touch. It was baffling to watch.
Tom Boswell once had a write up about Rich Dauer. He was supposed to be the shining prospect for the Orioles. He had all-world written all over him. Then he made it to the majors and began one of the greatest slumps of all-time. Though he pulled out of it, he never quite recovered. Instead of all-world, he had to settle fore being a poor man's Jim Gantner.
Jim Tracy strikes me like that. For a few year he was so well-thought of. Since it fell apart on him, he's been totally unable to pick up all the pieces again.
Tracy decided before spring training that Sanchez was going to play second, rather than third, and that Castillo - who had never played 3B before - was going to have to compete for the starting job at 3B with Jose Bautista. Castillo hit over .300 in ST while Bautista hit .182, yet Bautista was given the job anyway. Castillo started at 2B at the beginning of the season when Freddy Sanchez was injured, but after 4 starts he was nailed to the bench on Sanchez's return, sallying forth only when someone else got hurt for most of the rest of the season. He had all of 20 PAs in September.
Castillo hit well for two months in 2006, culminating with a 6-HR in five game stretch at the end of May, yet all you heard from Tracy and his coaches was how dissatisfied they were with Castillo's tendency to be "pull-happy". He kept his BA up through June, although the power stroke vanished, yet the b****ing kept getting louder. Finally, everything vanished; Castillo was virtually useless the rest of the year, and immediately after the season the Bucs threw his job open.
-- MWE
Sounds like Tracy's M.O.
Here's his stat line. From what I can tell, he's hitting .338 with 17 2B and 7 HR in 195 AB.
The season there seems to still be in progress.
From the link: Tatum O'Neal: Britney Needs Help Fighting Addiction
Other headlines:
Rich Garces: C.C. Sabathia Needs to Lose Weight
Matt Clement: Carl Pavano Needs to Stay Healthy
John Kruk: Steve Phillips is an Idiot
So much for his hope to break the Korean single-season HR record.
Sure is. And she was once so eminently do-able.
And from such a nice family.
I will put in another plug for McClendon...if you listened to him talk it was obvious he WANTED to get better, he WANTED to understand some of the more sabermetric aspects of the game. He simply never was effective at his overall job.
But I agree with this, there is no comparison between McClendon and Tracy.
I mean it in the nicest possible way. Lloyd was a really nice guy and a really hard worker, but he managed games like Scott Bakula had just teleported into his body five minutes before.
He seems to be doing well in Detroit, which makes me happy.
I'd heard that about Dauer too, saw him play, nothing special, from the Cube I see that he hit for half a season at AA and at AAA, was terrible for awful season of AA and a cup of coffee in AAA...
but having seen him play, I'd say he never really had the tools, the Orioles shouldn't have been fooled by him overperforming for a stretch in AA and AAA.... Easy to say that now.
The Orioles back then were a terrific organization, if they saw something, something must have been there.
Felipe Alou 80/1 ????
Jim Leyland 10/1 ??!!11??!!11
Not really. 28% of his Ks were called. Fairly normal percentage. He's averaged 157 Ks per 650 PAs.
Looking at the pitch data summary I can see what drove his managers nuts. His contact rate's the same as Adam Dunn's (though he struck out far less frequently by resolving PAs sooner.) That's always going to be an issue for somebody who doesn't have huge power.
Finally, something I can agree with him on.
Sure. I certainly don't mean to imply that if I was a GM I'd want Tracy as my manager, even if I did have a good relationship with him and the team was good I'd be afraid that the moment the team started slumping or we had a disagreement over personnel then he'd turn on me and start being a jackass again. No GM should be willing to take that risk even if the upside is the pre-2005 guy described in #15.
Good to know.
Is a season-by-season (or team-by-team) breakdown available?
Emeigh has been beating this drum for a while, that the Rays are getting smarter.
Didn't Bell announce his retirement several months ago?
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