June 24, 2011
The BP Broadside
The Hubris of Riggleman
by Steven Goldman
Vanity is a sin not because our self-approval hurts others, but ourselves. It blinds us to our own limited value, which is a particularly handicapping set of blinders to wear in the workplace. Many of us have fought the impulse to quit a job with which we have grown frustrated, thinking, “No one else does what I do here, or can do it as well as I do it even if they tried; let’s just see how they get along without me.”
Don’t ever let yourself think that; unless you’re the star of an eponymously-titled television program, the business might experience some temporary turbulence as the result of your absence, but chances are it’s going to be just fine in the long term. Most of us are, no matter how talented, dispensable. There might not be someone exactly like us ready to take our place, but Mr. or Miss Close-Enough is always right around the corner, and in most cases close enough will do just fine.
In baseball, there is the well-known tale of Charlie Dressen, best related by Bill James in his underappreciated Guide to Baseball Managers. Dressen, a former manager and longtime coach with undeniable baseball acumen, took over a successful Dodgers team in 1951 and won two pennants in three years, narrowly missing the third when he bollixed up the playoff game against the Giants that ended with Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard ‘round the world.” At this point, his Dodgers record was 298-166 (.642).
Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley liked to keep his managers on one-year contracts. Maybe he was thinking back to the early 1930s, when the team fired both Max Carey and Casey Stengel before their contracts were out, thereby paying them to take a year’s vacation. Dressen had a problem with the policy and insisted on a three-year deal. He was a good manager, or at least an intelligent one, and he knew it. No doubt, like Jim Riggleman, he felt that as a man in his 50s he was too old not to receive the respect implied by a long-term commitment. He likely felt he had played an important role in the team’s success, and didn’t want each new season to be an on-the-job audition for the following one. This is entirely understandable. It was also, in one important respect, wrong.
O’Malley said, “Hey, we’d love to have you back, but not on those terms, sorry.” The impasse was never resolved. O’Malley turned the team over to Walter Alston, the manager of his International League team. Dressen, shut out of the majors, headed off to the Pacific Coast League to manage the Oakland Oaks for a year, then resurfaced with the Washington Senators where, as good a manager as he might have been, he couldn’t rescue a team whose ownership wasn’t overly invested in having a farm system or African Americans (as either players or customers). James convincingly argues that this series of decisions likely kept Dressen out of the Hall of Fame.
Meanwhile, though Alston was, as one writer put it, “23 years of bad managing,” the Dodgers rolled on to seven pennants and four championships during his tenure. He in no way possessed the brilliance of Dressen (Jackie Robinson called him “a wooden Indian”), but it turned out the Dodgers didn’t require more than a steady hand. When he was hired, a sportswriter remarked, “The Dodgers do not need a manager, and that is why they got Alston.” To some degree, this was true; the team, with its strong farm, executives, and ownership (remember, we’re talking about the O’Malleys, not the McCourts) might have been better off with a more nimble tactician (particularly in 1962), but it was generally going to put a good product on the field that needed gentle guidance more than radical sculpting. As Leonard Koppet wrote, the Dodgers “let him… manage the team on the field and in the clubhouse, with no hint of larger responsibilities.”
After Alston had signed the last of his 23 one-year deals, the Dodgers switched to Tommy Lasorda and added another four pennants and two titles. Lasorda was a very different manager than Alston, but the strength of the organization remained consistent and that allowed the outcomes to remain consistent despite the change of emphasis brought by the new skipper. A manager can be the making of a team in small but important ways, but in most cases (with some notable exceptions), the team is the making of the manager.
Riggleman might have considered the way managers and teams interact before presenting Nationals GM, and thereby ownership, with an ultimatum. His career record doesn’t testify to his being a transformational figure, and the recent Nationals turnaround is potentially an ephemeral little soap bubble. Bob Brenly won 92 games and a World Series (two things Riggleman has yet to do), and it didn’t prove he was a good manager. A 15-6 June no more made Riggleman indispensible than the team’s 23-31 record over the previous two months was grounds for immediate dismissal. Note that the Nationals have gone 7-1 in one-run games this month. That’s not progress, that’s a series of lucky breaks disguised as real progress.
Like Dressen, Riggleman had a good thing going but overrated his advantage and destroyed himself. Only the future will tell if he did so more thoroughly than his predecessor, who did, after all, go on to manage in the majors for all or part of another nine seasons. Perhaps, like Billy Martin saying, “One’s a born liar and the other’s convicted” of Reggie Jackson and George Steinbrenner in 1978, he had an emotional need to get fired but, unable to push himself to jump, maneuvered so that his being pushed became an inevitability.
That kind of psychological explanation would be preferable to what might turn out to be the plain ol’ vanilla truth: that Riggleman believed the Nationals couldn’t get along without him. With the fruits of the farm system starting to fall into place now and in the future, he will have a long time to contemplate whether he mistook an evolution that should have been credited to the organization for his own handiwork. For Dressen, that moment came quickly: The Dodgers won their elusive first World Series title in 1955, as their former manager watched from the sidelines, having brought the Senators in at 53-101.
Riggleman’s comeuppance will probably be further off, but that’s all right. As the saying goes, act in haste, repent at leisure. Some lucky skipper will get to manage Wilson Ramos, Danny Espinosa, Ryan Zimmerman, Bryce Harper, and Stephen Strasburg to an NL East title or two—don’t scoff; the Phillies are aging, the Mets lost, the Braves always a player and a dollar short, and the Marlins just don’t care—and he’ll reap the rewards that could have gone to the man who thought he was so important that his reward couldn’t wait another day.
Steven Goldman is an author of Baseball Prospectus.
Click here to see Steven's other articles.
You can contact Steven by clicking here
The BP Broadside: Bill... (06/23)
the archives are now free.
43 comments have been left for this article. 
Fantasy Beat: The Underappreciated Leo Nunez
It was interesting that Paul McCartney's sad little shot across John Lennon's bow was referenced in the front page blurb for this article. It's not an apt comparison on any level, but it was interesting. First, the song was terrible. Cats screeching-level bad, like the rest of McCartney's post-Beatles song catalogue. Paul was tied for least talented in the group, after John, George and the fifth Beatle.
Riggleman is no John Lennon in terms of his influence on the group. The strength of the Nats has been built upon the same foundation as the Tampa Bay Rays - extended futility alchemically transformed into first-pick gold.
Comparing Rigs to Dressen is way off base as well, their records and careers could hardly be less similar.
I'm a little confused as to why BP is all alone racing to attack Riggleman and defend Rizzo. Perrotto slammed Riggleman without the benefit of facts, Goldman comes up with a couple of "out of left field" comps that in no way further his argument .... this sort of stuff is reflective of BP's seeming editorial decision to place snark and opinionated blather over nuanced analysis.
Interesting comparison to the Rays, though not for the reasons you suggest. To say the Rays have been built upon fumbling their way to the top of the draft is highly misleading and has largely been discredited elsewhere. The only Rays players who were drafted #1 overall were Delmon Young, David Price, and Tim Beckham. Only one of those three has played a significant role on the strong Rays teams of late. Meanwhile astute scouting and player evaluation has lead to the Rays winning ways-- Shields, Hellickson, Joyce, Zobrist are just a few of the names that were finds due to the hard work and expertise of the front office and development personnel; and with a stocked minor league system (that has been largely acquiring players since the team's rise to the top of the AL East), they'll be more than ok for a while.
Likewise, much of the Nats' bright future has been through hard scouting work and deft player analysis. Sure, Stras and Harper give the team a hope for the future that few other teams have; but the two Zimmermen(n), Espinosa, Ramos, Desmond, and some more arms on the way down at the farm have more than a minor role in that future as well, and all are the products of scouting and development, not lucking their way to draft gold.
Oh, so trading Delmon Young (total draft misfire, btw) for Matt Garza didn't help the Rays? So it didn't help build the team to get B.J. Upton 2nd overall in 2002, Evan Longoria 3rd overall in 2006? Rocco Baldelli and Jeff Niemann were also chosen 6th and 4th overall.
The Rays have done an excellent job of restocking their farm system even after they no longer had a top-6 pick, something the Nats will be hard-pressed to do.
The larger point that you seem to be ignoring is that Mike Rizzo is simply not a competent baseball executive, and he was hired by one of the biggest scumbags baseball has seen recently.
Ryan Zimmerman - 4th overall pick. But once again, don't let facts get in the way.
You sound personally invested, you wouldn't be a plant by any chance, would you?
Ah, but you said first-pick gold. And I'm the one letting facts get in the way?
All of those guys-- Zimmerman, Longoria, Baldelli, and Niemann-- were far from slam-dunk sure things when they were drafted. They were all calculated risks that other teams passed on for whatever reason.
No plant, just a guy who should be getting back to his day job. TGIF.
I never said anything about having the first "overall" pick of the draft. Please go back to doing a horrible job at your day job.
"extended futility alchemically transformed into first-pick gold."
Will do, boss.
Every team has a first pick. Extended futility makes that first pick higher. Higher picks come with higher probabilities of future success.
But don't let that stop you from doing a bad job at two things at the same time.
*Sigh* My real problem in life: I can't stop arguing with monkeys.
Thanks for keeping the conversation classy!
If by "every team has a first pick" you mean that every team participates in one way or another in the rule 4 draft, and one of their picks has to be their first in that draft, well, that's like saying "water is wet." But if you mean every team picks in the first round, that's demonstrably false.
"Extended futility makes that first pick higher." Nope. A team's draft position depends upon how they finished the previous year, not "extended futility."
"Higher picks come with higher probabilities of future success." Perhaps, but it's not always as much as you assume, as this article suggests-- http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=4368
What is clear is that teams that do pick higher still have to do work-- scout, develop, etc.-- if they want those picks to eventually become foundations of championship level teams. If it was just as easy as lucking into having the best amateur prospects fall into your lap, explain the Orioles and Pirates.
It's pretty much time for you to be quiet now.
Much as I'm loathe to take the side of MoGreen, since he's being something of a wang, this argument is pretty weak. His point pretty clearly was the Rays have benefitted a ton from very favorable draft positions over the last few years. Restricting it to first overall picks is missing the point. Saying Delmon Young did nothing for them is also false since he netted them Garza. I'm very curious to see what the Rays minor league system will be like in a few years now that they're not getting tons of high picks.
But they still had to utilize scouting and player development/analysis of resources to capitalize on Young by trading him and Brendan Harris for Garza (and Bartlett). To use Delmon Young as evidence that the Rays front office has lucked into prominence is highly suspect to me.
My opinion is that stating that Young magically turned into Garza is the part of this conversation that is missing the point. How many other teams would have had the balls to trade their 1st overall pick after one season in the majors (and a guy universally seen at the time as a perennial .300 hitter in the making) for a 3rd starter?
Your statement about MoGreen being something of a wang, however, is spot-on.
1. While I agree that as a supposed shot at Lennon the McCartney song was a weak effort, I like it on its own merits and it seemed to fit. As for the rest of Paul's output, Ben Lindbergh and I will be disagreeing with you from the comfort of field-level seats at his upcoming Yankee Stadium concert. I think your "least talented" remark betrays a pretty weak understanding of how the Beatles functioned as a unit. Still, tastes vary, so fine: you registered an opinion.
2. The Dressen comparison is a parallel in terms of a manager who confused his own importance in what is, as you actually point out, an organizational-level success that results in part from good drafting (or in the Dodgers' case, scouting and open-mindedness). That they are not identical figures in terms of what got them to this point doesn't matter at all. It's that they arrived at roughly the same place.
3. Look around the web, turn on your radio. I am not alone in being critical of Riggleman, I'm sorry. Even those defending him don't endorse how this was handled. And John's piece hardly qualified as a slam.
4. Finally, I get really, really bored of hearing "snark over analysis," which has been a favorite of some readers since I got here in 2003. There is no snark in this piece. There is a historical comp. We reject [anything] over analysis on the rare occasions we get it. While I respect and appreciate every reader who takes the time to read and comment, I have long since come to the conclusion that sometimes, to invoke another 60s songwriter, a man will hear what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. Sometimes a writer starts with a certain intention but doesn't execute, so his motives are not well understood by the readers. That's his fault. But you can carry through exactly as you meant to and still not be understood, because as with opinions on ex-Beatles, levels of comprehension vary. I have learned to be happy simply that people are galvanized enough to say something, so again, I thank you.
I am a huge Beatles fan, and freely acknowledge that Paul was absolutely integral to that unit as a counterweight to Lennon's excesses. His post-Beatles career was less than inspiring. I own every Beatles, John, and George album, but all of the Wings stuff is godawful. In my opinion, of course. "Too Many People" was not a supposed shot at Lennon, it was a definite Broadside (like how I worked that in?)
The snark comment was more directed at Perrotto, although I still do not feel you did a balanced or reasonable job in your analysis.
Mike Rizzo has done a horrendous job as GM, as one would expect from a Bowden hire. The Jayson Werth signing will hamstring that franchise financially for a long time. Announcing yourself as a major free agent player by dramatically overspending on a lukewarm talent is not a good strategy for a mid-market team in a contested market. Then simultaneously keeping his manager on a second one-year contract (for $600k, not a lot for an MLB manager at all) without even extending him on the cheap ... talk about pennywise and pound foolish. The contrast is just too glaring.
Would it have been that difficult to tell that side of the story as well?
Less than MightyMoGreen,
"Paul was tied for the least talented in the group" ... and then you put on a blast on the writer for putting opinionated blather or nuanced analysis?
While he wasn't my favorite Beatle, to suggest that Paul McCartney is anything less than incredibly and immensely talented is either crazy or a lame attempt at trolling. Either way, you're a moron.
Extremely jedjethro:
Yes, I was opinionated while criticizing the analysis. In ... the ... Comments ... section. Where opinionated blather belongs.
Paul McCartney was very much less than incredibly and immensely talented. If that makes me a crazy lame trolling moron, so be it.
If that makes you a crude, insulting ignoramus, well yes it does. It does.