I was at the ballpark last night watching the White Sox take on the Rangers at Dollar Dog night (it would take a whole separate post to discuss the so-called “hot dogs” they were generously selling for only $1). There were two distinct games being played by each team’s respective manager which exemplified why one of them won the game but won’t make the playoffs, and why the other may have lost the game but will likely make the playoffs again after his team’s World Series win last year.
Rangers’ starter Vicente Padilla hit White Sox catcher A.J. Pierzynski on the first pitch in each of his first two plate appearances. After the second one, the home plate umpire warned both benches that would be enough. The Rangers got out to a 6-0 lead by the bottom of the seventh inning when White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen ordered rookie reliever Sean Tracey to hit Rangers third baseman Hank Blalock (who had homered previously) in retaliation for Padilla hitting Pierzynski twice. Tracy failed in the modest task which was his charge (Blalock instead grounded out to second) and immediately Guillen removed Tracey from the game, chewed him out in the dugout in front of his teammates, spiked his water bottle into the ground in disgust and demoted Tracey to Triple-A the next morning.
It was quite a spectacle, and most Ranger fans at the ballpark were oblivious to it.
Moving on, Padilla finished off the White Sox in the top of the eighth inning and had a three-hit shutout going. He had thrown 109 pitches on an unusually pleasant evening for Arlington, Texas, in June (not very hot or humid), and the Rangers spent the better part of 20 minutes scoring two more runs in the bottom half of the eighth to make it 8-0. But instead of putting the ball in Padilla’s hands and saying, “You started this, you finish it,” gutless Rangers manager Buck Showalter (a man who once intentionally walked Barry Bonds with the bases loaded) brings in Francisco “Coco” Cordero to pitch the top of the ninth.
Again oblivious, Ranger fans cheered Cordero’s entrance into the game instead of booing their manager for not letting Padilla go for the complete game shutout.
The moral to this story: If Padilla was Guillen’s pitcher, he would have finished the game.
Players notice the lengths to which their managers are willing to go not only protect them, as Guillen was trying to do last night (throwing at Blalock would have meant his own ejection), but also to show confidence in them, as Showalter failed to do with Padilla.