Old-School Manager Stays Out Of Order

Final Say

There are the rare situations when Robinson will actually write out his own lineup. This happened last week when the manager decided to sit shortstop Cristian Guzman and third baseman Vinny Castilla for a few days. He wanted to talk to both players before the lineup was posted on the bulletin board across the hall from the clubhous e door. In this instance, Robinson called Rodriguez in the late morning to notify him of the change.

"I wanted to get him before he started doing the work," the manager says.

Which was, of course, preposterous because Rodriguez is always working on the lineup. Just the other night the coach's wife, Mavelin, caught her husband talking in his sleep about lineup possibilities while his fingers moved as if typing the order out on a computer keyboard.

He spends the morning after breakfast thinking more about lineups, sometimes breaking out the notes he keeps on the back of his lineup cards and rifling through his statistical data. He gets to the stadium about noon, where he sits in the coaches' office, opens his briefcase and spreads out his information.

Inside the briefcase he carries a stack of folders -- one for each team the Nationals play. The folders contain an endless log of vital tidbits that he has gleaned from his years in the game. If he thinks he picks up one of the opponents' signs, he jots it down. If a pitcher seems vulnerable to a bunt on the third base side of the mound, he writes this down too. Some of the information goes into a printout he makes for each game -- a list of things that might come up sometime in the evening. The rest of it goes into making the lineup.

Before writing out the batting order, he grabs a package of statistics provided by the league each day to consult the head-to-head matchups of the Washington hitters against that game's opposing pitcher. Usually something will be glaring. Maybe Jamey Carroll is hitting .481 against the pitcher, or Brad Wilkerson has never gotten a hit off the man. Unlike Robinson, Rodriguez thinks this matters, so he makes the lineup accordingly.

He does this by carefully typing each name into a laptop computer. He makes the lineups on a program he bought for $10 in 1994 called "Expert Forms," even adding the Nationals insignia, downloaded from the Internet. Then, he prints it on a portable printer. At around 1:30 p.m., when Robinson arrives, Rodriguez has the finished product ready for managerial perusal.

Upon Robinson's approval, he sits down to write out the official lineup cards, the ones that go to the umpires and opposing teams and the one that will be pinned to the dugout wall. The umpires' and opponent's cards are handwritten because Robinson does not like cards with names scratched out. The big card, the one that goes on the dugout wall, Rodriquez writes with a calligraphy pen.

"Obviously [Robinson] pushes the buttons, but I give him the most information I can," Rodriguez says. "At this level you're trying to find the combinations that give you the best chance to win. You're thinking three days down the road. You're obviously thinking what's going to fit in that slot."

Teacher and Student

Robinson seems appreciative of the information Rodriguez bombards him with and, for the most part, they work well in tandem. Nonetheless, there is the generational divide between the 69-year-old manager and his 46-year-old bench coach as well as a different understanding of the game. Robinson still approaches baseball like the superstar outfielder he was for many years. Rodriguez looks at it like a career minor league shortstop who has made it to the majors because of his willingness to work harder than everyone else.

For instance, there is the splitting of right-handed and left-handed hitters. Rodriguez is a devotee of the philosophy in which a right-handed hitter would be followed by a left-handed hitter in the lineup, thus ensuring that later in the game, the opposing manager would have to use several relief pitchers to get out of sticky situations if he wished to have the advantageous matchup of a left-handed pitcher facing a left-handed batter or vice versa.

Robinson shakes his head no.