Good morning.
Here are several links from the past week that will make your Monday a bit more bearable:
- The Diamondbacks relieved Kevin Towers of his general-manager duties. Jay Jaffe of Sports Illustrated ’s The Strike Zone details why Towers had to go.
- Rangers skipper Ron Washington abruptly resigned to “take care of a personal problem.” SB Nation’s Steven Goldman takes the opportunity to raise a contentious issue involving “Wash” and one of his stars:
If you add up all [of this year’s] players currently listed on the 60-day disabled list and considered them as consecutive jail terms, the Rangers would be serving nearly two years. . . .
None of that has anything to do with Washington except that it apparently caused him to suffer a serious loss of perspective as epitomized by his suggestion that Yu Darvish pitch through elbow inflammation because to do otherwise would be to “quit on his teammates.” “So he’s got inflammation,” Washington shrugged. “I’ve got inflammation.” (In an example of either good or bad timing, depending on your point of view, I wrote about this as part of my quotable series earlier on Friday morning.)
Washington later disowned those comments, but they called into question not only his judgment, but his whole raison d’etre given that he was a terrible X’s and O’s manager. His whole appeal was based on his ability to manage players as people, not as chess pieces. If you’re a danger to those pieces, risking breaking them for questionable gain, or character-assassinate them in the press, well, then what are you contributing? You’re not the morale officer anymore, you’re just the boss, and not a good one. He may well have retained the respect of the players right down to the day of his resignation, but at that point there are bigger issues at stake, greater risks to be avoided.
- Lookout Landing’s Michael Barr takes readers back to 2003, “the last time September mattered” for fans of the Mariners.
- According to David Schoenfield of ESPN’s SweetSpot, Giancarlo Stanton remains a viable contender for the NL MVP crown.
- Do advanced defensive statistics confuse you? Do you doubt their effectiveness? Not to worry: Fangraphs’ Neil Weinberg is here to help.
Watch Little League superstar Mo’ne Davis challenge Jimmy Fallon.
That’s it. Have a walk-off week!
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