Everyone knows what’s wrong with the Mariners.
It’s Bob Melvin. He’s a crummy manager.
Isn’t that right? Isn’t that what you think?
He isn’t passionate. He isn’t fiery. He isn’t demonstrative. He can’t inspire. He’s too nice a guy. He’s too laid back. He isn’t tough enough.
He’s no Lou Piniella, I’ll tell you that.
No, he isn’t. But that’s what the Suits who run the Mariners wanted. They wanted the antithesis of Lou Piniella. Someone who wasn’t feisty. Someone who didn’t throw temper tantrums. Someone who wouldn’t question upper management.
The Suits got what they wanted. They got Gentleman Bob Melvin.
Gentleman Bob. A man every mother would be proud to have as a son-in-law. A man every Scout troop would feel safe to have as its leader. A man every high school team would be pleased to have as its coach.
In the nearly two years he’s been field boss of the M’s, Gentleman Bob has been just that – a true gentleman.
Even during his occasional rants, you got the feeling he didn’t really want to be out there in the umpires’ faces. You almost felt sorry for him sometimes. You almost felt that he would rather have sat down with the arbiters at home plate and tried to reason things out. I still find it hard to believe that he’s been ejected several times. Usually a manager has to drop a few choice words to get the boot and I just can’t see Melvin uttering those words.
Piniella had no problem with it. When he went off, parents covered their kids’ eyes as well as their ears because you could read Lou’s lips. And he wasn’t saying, “Can’t we agree to disagree?”
The truth is, everything Gentleman Bob did was going to be measured against what Piniella was and what he accomplished in Seattle. That Melvin even accepted the job tells you he’s got guts because there was no way he was going to win a popularity contest with Sweet Lou.
You never, ever want to succeed a legend. You want to be the guy who replaces the guy who replaced the legend. If the guy who replaces Melvin does a better job, he’ll be compared to Melvin, not Piniella.
If the guy who replaces Melvin wins a World Series championship, even Piniella will lose some of his luster among Mariner faithful.
That was the only way Melvin could have captured the popular vote in Seattle: win a world championship.
That he didn’t was not what Bob Melvin did or didn’t do as manager, but what his players failed to do.
I’m not saying Melvin didn’t make mistakes. He did. We all do.
I would like to have seen a little more emotion, but if that isn’t who he is, then it would have been phony and his players would have seen through it. Besides, I’m not convinced fiery speeches have any effect in baseball. Football, yes. It’s an emotional game. In baseball, “Let’s kick some booty” doesn’t work for 162 games.
Someone said to me recently that Melvin didn’t inspire his players. I said if I’m making $8 million a year, that ought to be inspiration enough.
What I do believe is that most great baseball managers and most great football coaches have an air of quiet toughness about them that players don’t want to test. And the way not to test it is to go out on the field and play as hard as you can every day.
Don James had that toughness as football coach of the Washington Huskies. James didn’t have to raise his voice to get his point across. All he had to do was look his players in the eyes. Those eyes could send shivers up and down a guy’s spine. His players not only feared him, they respected him. The truth be told, they probably even got a little nervous when they faced him at get-togethers 20 years later.
Yankees manager Joe Torre seems like a mild-mannered gent, but there is also about him an aura of “don’t cross me or you’ll be sorry.” Maybe it’s his dark features. He puts you in mind of a Mafia boss.
“Joe speaks in a low voice,” said Yankees scout Chuck Cottier, a former Mariners manager who was in Seattle last weekend, “but don’t think he can’t get the (red) ass. When he shuts the door, he can make some noise.”
Melvin doesn’t have an edge, but that didn’t keep guys from playing hard for him. Could it have been that they respected him? Or was it just because true professionals give good effort every time they step on the field? Unfortunately, good effort doesn’t always produce positive results.
For those who say Bob Melvin isn’t a good manager, there was a time in his life when Joe Torre wasn’t very highly regarded, either. Then one day he woke up as skipper of the Yankees and became a genius, winning four world championships in five years. That’s what the best players money can buy will do for you.
Gentleman Bob Melvin inherited some good players from Lou Piniella when he took over the Mariners a year ago. And they did a nice job for him, winning 93 games.
It was a team of veterans and Melvin pretty much left them alone to do their jobs, a smart move, maybe his best move as a manager. Some contend the ghost of Piniella hovered over the team, and it was that rather than anything the new manager did that was responsible for the 93 wins.
Well, then, I guess you or I could have been equally successful making out the lineup card.
This year, some of those same players didn’t hit or pitch as well as they did last season, and new players brought in didn’t measure up to expectations, and the ghost of Piniella was no longer lurking around, so it was up to Melvin to somehow produce a miracle.
That he didn’t will likely cost him his job.
And how will he be remembered? As the guy who replaced a legend and didn’t win a world championship in Seattle.
But then, neither did the legend.
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