Player A: .211/.286/.320 with four homers agianst right handed pitchers in 287 PAs. .304/.372/.557 with four homers in 129 PAs against lefties
Player B: .262/.302/.337 with no homers against righties in 184 PAs. .314/.427/.512 with three homers in 103 PAs against lefties
Both of those players seem like platoon players, right? These sample sizes are a bit small, obviously, but neither has much luck at all against right handed pitching, both guys mash lefties. Player A is career platoon player Steve Pearce. Player B is Lastings Milledge in 2010, a player that was in a much-maligned platoon until last week.
Now obviously there are larger factors at play in the now-defunct Church/Milledge platoon. Milledge is just 25; Pearce didn’t even break out in the minor leagues until he was 24 and he’s now 27. Milledge has a different pedigree that gives him a ceiling that Steve Pearce has never had as a player and he was being platooned with a player who’s on the wrong side of 30. The Pirates knew what they had in Ryan Church coming into the season, but Milledge was a question mark. Teams in the Pirates’ position should always, always, always favor young unknown players over older known players. To do otherwise is bad business.
When I was an undergrad, I hated Physical Chemistry. Our book was a giant dictionary-sized tome (think of a book about the physical size of the Infinite Jest paperback, only with thinner pages) that was full of symbols and equations that were just way, way over my head. The book was printed in Britain, so all of the notation was different. It was the class that told me I was definitely a biochemist or molecular biologist and not a biophysicist. The worst part of the whole class for me was the tests. I’d get the tests and see all of these crazy glyphs that seemed vaguely familiar to me, but I had absolutely no idea how to make real sense out of them. No matter how much I studied, the exams made me feel completely helpless. I knew what the constants were, so I’d spend an hour re-arranging variables in the way I thought I remembered from my notes, pulling numbers out of thin air, and praying for a C. Failure wasn’t an option. I could find a way to graduate if I failed, sure, but could I get into grad school with that F on my transcript? I made it through both semesters (C+/B-), but I’m still not sure how.
I imagine that managing the Pirates gives John Russell the exact same feeling that I had during my P-chem exams. He’s given edicts from the front office that amount to the constants in the equation (Pedro Alvarez must play, Neil Walker must play, Jose Tabata must play) and he knows what to do with a few of the variables (Andrew McCutchen has to go in center, Garrett Jones has to be in the lineup), but everything else is a giant mismash of gibberish that he has to somehow shoehorn into baseball team.
So what does a manager do? He fiddles. He has to fiddle with the lineup. What else can he do? If John Russell ran the same starting lineup out every single day in the month of June, the Pirates would have probably still finished the month with the exact same record that they did with Russell putting Milledge and Church in a soft platoon (Milledge still got a great majority of the playing time, despite being the right-handed hitter in the platoon), fiddling with the batting order, etc. And what happens if the Pirates go 6-20 with John Russell playing the same starting lineup 26 times in a row? People would have said the exact same things about that as they did about platooning Milledge and Church.
I don’t think John Russell is a stupid man. He knows that if this team loses more than 100 games, he’s very likely to be sacrificed to appease angry fans. That’s what happens when a team’s loss count increases every year, no matter how much of the blame for that belongs on the rebuilding plan and not the manager. And JR knows how many managerial gigs that Gene Lamont and Lloyd McClendon have gotten since leaving Pittsburgh. How many jobs Tony Muser and Tony Pena and Buddy Bell have landed since leaving the Royals.
This is probably it for JR as a big league manager if the Pirates fire him in the near future. It won’t matter that he was asked to do the impossible with a bad team in 2010, that the front office gutted the first team he was handed in the name of rebuilding and cost him any shot he had a finishing .500 in 2008 or 2009 (and they were right to do so, but it didn’t make JR’s job easier). People will remember him as the stoic guy that managed some crappy teams just like they remember Lloyd McClendon as the angry guy that managed some crappy teams, and that’ll be that no matter what he goes on to do for the rest of his career unless he gets a second chance somewhere. And he knows it because, well, how could he not? So what does he do? Bench Ronny Cedeno for a stretch. Sit a guy who got into a tussle with a coach, has a bad platoon split, and poor baserunning skills. I don’t agree with the sort of playing time that Church got, especially given how poorly Church played, but the longer I think about it the more I think I at least understand it. Major League managers have much less influence on their teams than people think, except in one category: who plays and who doesn’t. So if your team is struggling and your career is slipping away before your eyes, yeah, I can understand trying to coax a little more out of Milledge and Church than you might otherwise get.
If Russell is fired, I won’t exactly shed any tears. After all, I don’t agree with the Church/Milledge platoon, some of his in-game tactical decisions and batting orders can be head-scratchers, and as I’ve said before I’m just not sure how much any manager does for his team. But I will feel bad that Russell never got a real chance here in Pittsburgh because he’s done some things very well (he’s got a much better feel for his pitching staff than Tracy or McClendon ever seemed to and besides the Milledge/Church thing, he’s done a good job getting young players in the lineup) and he seems like a good guy and he strikes me as much smarter than he ever gets credit for and really, having your career as a manager derailed simply because you hitched your wagon to the Pittsburgh Pirates seems unfair.
