By Yours Truly
https://throneberryfields.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-cardinals-have-their-own-saturday.html
Mike Matheny and two of his coaches
have been executed in St. Louis.What a weekend for the Cardinals so far. They conducted a Saturday night massacre of their own. No, they didn't trade a franchise pitcher and one of the game's more titanic sluggers. They merely executed their manager, the first such mid-season execution in 23 years. While they were at it, they sent their hitting coach and his assistant hitting coach to the electric chair, too.
The timing was just too perfect, unlike a lot of things with the Cardinals this season.
On Friday and perhaps Saturday, too, you might have read assorted articles saying Mike Matheny deputised veteran reliever Bud Norris to be his clubhouse and bullpen monitor, which---considering Norris seems to come from the Goose Gossage School of Baseball Behaviour---may seem something like hiring Louis Litt to boost morale at your law firm.
Norris's favourite target was said to be rookie setup man Jordan Hicks, but Hicks is downplaying it, perhaps diplomatically. Or, perhaps like a bullying victim trying to find a self-protective excuse to keep the bully from ramping the abuse up further.
That after seeing about a week or two worth of stories suggesting struggling, disgruntled outfielder Dexter Fowler was being mishandled enough in the clubhouse that president of baseball operations John Mozeliak had to step into it. Except that one and all stepped in it by questioning Fowler's effort while he was going on paternity leave.
And, maybe you harked back to stories from last year in which some suggested, almost ridiculously, that the Cardinals were being poisoned by too many players who hadn't been reared in the organisation. (Fowler is one such player; so is Norris himself.)
Then, you woke up Sunday morning to discover the Cardinals threw the switch on Matheny, hitting coach John Mabry, and assistant hitting coach Bill Mueller after an 8-2 loss to the Reds left the Cardinals one game over .500 and losers of 10-15 since their last known positioning in a National League wild card tie.
And you might think, how ridiculous for the Cardinals, who make a fetish out of proclaiming their stabilities, to dump a manager who's never had a losing record while on the bridge. In the absolute middle of a season. They haven't dumped any manager mid-season since they canned Joe Torre during 1995, freeing Torre, of course, to become a Hall of Fame manager steering the Yankees.
But add the foregoing to Matheny's too-well documented tactical and strategic lapses, and one conclusion becomes too inescapable: The Cardinals' clubhouse became a nervous wreck, and the vaunted Cardinal Way sounded more like the name of an alley than a baseball philosophy and guideline.
Only one previous Cardinal skipper was fired after posting nothing but winning seasons, and that was Johnny Keane, who managed them as winners from the moment he succeeded Solly Hemus in 1961. Keane finished that season with a winning record, then had three straight full winning seasons climaxing in a staggering seven-game World Series triumph over the Yankees in 1964.
If Matheny thinks he's been executed with less than honour, he might care to know what happened to Keane. Dogged by mid-season speculation and machinations intended to purge him after 1964, Keane shepherded his Cardinals to the pennant on the final day, after the infamous Phillies collapse threatened to produce a three-way pennant tie.
The day after the Series ended, Cardinals owner Gussie Busch called a press conference to announce Keane's rehiring. Keane trumped Busch by handing him a letter of resignation . . . and accepting the Yankee job after the Yankees fired first-year skipper Yogi Berra, who'd managed to win a pennant despite a lack of bullpen most of the season and backstabbing between some of his players abetted by manager-turned-GM Ralph Houk.
Firing managers with nothing but winning records is rare enough for a baseball team. Berra, Keane, Burt Shotton (the 1948 and 1950 Dodgers), Charlie Dressen (the 1951-53 Brooklyn Dodgers), Casey Stengel (1949-60 Yankees), Dick Howser (1980 Yankees), Dusty Baker (1993-2002 Giants; 2016-17 Nationals, Bobby Valentine (1996-2003 Mets), and Matt Williams (2014-15 Nats) were that club before Matheny's inglorious joining.
Al Lopez never had a losing record managing the Indians, but he quit on the final day of 1956 because he was fed up with management and fans alike riding merciless herd on his third base slugger Al Rosen during a late-season, injury-abetted slump.
Matheny can say he's just joined a very exclusive club that includes at least one Hall of Fame manager. (Berra, of course, is a Hall of Fame player.) Some bragging rights. And one member of the club, Girardi, is rumoured at this writing to be the number one prospect at getting the permanent job. (Bench coach Mike Shildt has the bridge for now.)
The loss to the Reds didn't stop the Cardinals from thinking they still have a postseason shot. It only left them thinking Matheny---who led them to four postseasons in his first four years after the Tony La Russa era but hasn't been back since---isn't the man to get them there anymore.
His in-game management too often has been far more suspect than his clubhouse management, especially with big prizes on the line. The too-classic example: He refused to even think about his closer Trevor Rosenthal in the bottom of the ninth, Game Five, 2014 National League division series, with the score tied at three and two Giants aboard. He left in a rusty Michael Wacha---who hadn't pitched in nine weeks previous due to an injury---watched the pennant fly Bobby Thomson-like aboard Travis Ishikawa's three-run homer to the top of Levi's Landing.
Last September, Matheny cost the Cardinals a postseason trip when, with Wacha again the inadvertent catalyst, he had nobody ready in the bullpen while Wacha began a third turn around the Cubs' batting order, clinging to a 1-0 shutout including eight punchouts in six innings. Suspect on third times around the order as it was, Wacha accordingly got slapped silly by the Cubs in a game the Cubs went on to win, 5-1, digging the Cardinals' 2017 grave while they were at it.
Matheny also wasn't adept at handling his roster long-term. He once relied on the same eight position players more than three-quarters of the time, had no consistent plan for relieving them at particular times, seemed disinterested in revolving matchups and percentages in late game pressure situations, and probably caused Cardinal lineups to wear down just enough to matter down the stretch.
For a manager who proudly displays old-school attitudes ("I think this game has gotten progressively softer"), Matheny wouldn't have gone for Stengel's philosophy: when you have an opening, shove with your shoulder.
The front office finally went for as much depth as possible---inspiring Matheny to flip and make so many lineup changes that enough players didn't know their jobs or shuttled back and forth to the minors on rehab or roster crowding issues.
Former Yankee manager Joe Girardi awoke Sunday, surely, to discover his is the number one name being tossed around as Matheny's permanent successor. If the Cardinals do name Girardi, they may have in mind his ability to shepherd clubhouses with more built-in obstacles than a Super Mario hunt for the stolen power stars.
He inherited and survived the Alex Rodriguez messes, navigated around too many injury prone veterans like Mark Teixiera, and managed to keep the aging of the fabled Core Four (Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada, and Mariano Rivera) from turning the Yankees completely into doddering old men on the field while shepherding their eventual, mostly graceful retirements. And Girardi does have with the Yankees what Matheny couldn't bring with the Cardinals, a World Series ring.
It wasn't necessarily Girardi's fault that last year's consecration of the Baby Bombers just couldn't get one more win in the American League Championship Series against the eventual world champion Astros. The new Yankees weren't even supposed to reach the postseason just yet. Theirs was one of the livelier clubhouses in the business last year.
Yet the Yankees fired him saying he didn't "connect" with his young crew. It was probably exacerbated by Girardi's frustration with talented but often defensively indifferent young catcher Gary Sanchez---Girardi being a former catcher himself---and when he didn't call for a replay challenge in last year's division series, when a pitch hit the knob of Lonnie Chisenhall's bat but Sanchez caught the ricochet, which would have been strike three on replay review.
Instead, Chisenhall got first base on the house, ruled hit by a pitch, to load the pads for Francisco Lindor, who rang one off the right field foul pole to turn a Yankee blowout in the making into a one-run game the Indians went on to win. The Yankees lost that battle but won the division series war.
Girardi would become the fifth ex-Yankee to have the Cardinals' bridge if the Cardinals do make the move---behind Branch Rickey, Bill McKechnie, Gabby Street, and Whitey Herzog. (The White Rat was originally signed as a Yankee as a player but dealt away before he got to play even one game in the 'Stripes.) By comparison, three ex-Cardinals, players, managers, or both, have gone on to take the Yankee bridge: the aforesaid, ill-fated Keane, plus Hall of Famers Torre and Miller Huggins.
Some think the Cardinals wouldn't be wounded to have just a little Yankee injected into the Cardinal Way. If nothing else, Girardi would bring a lot more intelligent bullpen management aboard.
Fangraphs and
Baseball Prospectus rated him the third-best bullpen manager the 21st Century.
Other candidates in the discussion for the permanent job include longtime Cardinals bench and third base coach Jose Oquendo, Giants vice president of player development and former Cardinals player and coach David Bell, and former Yankee coach Joe Espada, who worked under Girardi in New York and succeeded Alex Cora (now the Red Sox manager) as the Astros' bench coach and is considered managerial material in the making.
Graciously enough, Matheny refused to say he was blindsided by the Saturday night massacre. "This has been in conversation for quite awhile," he told reporters. "We had conversations even last season that if we didn't improve the way we went about it, this would be inevitable.
"You always hear the term, 'shakeup'," he continued. "Cincinnati is a real good example with how well they're playing. They decided to make a move early in the year and not to forfeit a season, which I completely agree with. This is a good Cardinal team, which is much better than their record shows."
It goes from "my team" or "our team" to "their team" only too fast when you're the skipper made to walk the plank.
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