Not getting on the bus? Not getting on the plane? Talk turkey or I quit? In three hours? Try that with your boss. Give me $700,000 for next year or I’ll resign in the middle of a long winning streak and say I didn’t get proper respect and fair treatment.
Riggleman has a decent case for continuing as manager, but not a compelling one. His team has a 38-37 record and has won 11 of 12. But just a month ago, the club returned from a 1-7 road trip in such disarray that Rizzo cut short a scouting trip to come back to D.C. to “put out fires” in the clubhouse.
Since at least February, Riggleman has been working himself up, getting more frustrated. If you haven’t heard his dissertation on this subject, never for attribution, then you haven’t talked with him. I’ve taken the position that picking up his option for next season was a low-cost and decent move — not absolutely necessary, but the better course.
In the last month, Riggleman has almost certainly read tea leaves that made him feel Rizzo had lost confidence in him as the Nats’ long-term manager. So, he left with an chest-out exit that said: “A man’s got to do what a man’s . . .”
Yet he disdained an obvious alternative, one that, with a run of luck, might have brought him a very happy ending. Why not try to take a Washington baseball team to a winning record for the second time since 1953? Or come close. Then, no team on Earth could, or would want to, deny him a new contract. In ’12, he probably would have Stephen Strasburg and Adam LaRoche back from injury as well as, perhaps, more free agents. Rig says he’s never had the horses. If he did, he’d show ’em. Now, just as he might actually have gotten ’em, even if granted grudgingly, he probably ended his managerial career.
In Rizzo, Riggleman couldn’t have found a worse boss to nag about a new deal or one who would respond worse to his lobbying in the media (me included) for help.
Why? Because Rizzo faced the same obstacles when he became GM. Instead of whining about a longer deal, he did such a strong job that the Nats did what was obvious: They gave him a five-year contract. Rizzo replaced Jim Bowden on an interim basis in 2009. Then, the next year, he was on a short leash like Riggleman this year.
Rizzo said ex-president “Stan Kasten told me, ‘Forget the [expletive] contract. Own the job. Just be the [expletive] GM. Prove you’re the guy.’ ”
And Rizzo, even though he’d spent his whole life working up the baseball chain to be a GM, swallowed and did it. Talk about playing the wrong card with the wrong guy.
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