Originally Posted at www.theunplayable.com

With a new stadium, a new star in Jose Reyes and new life in South Florida last off-season (not to mention a new “location” as the “Miami” Marlins) the Marlins wanted to make a big splash in selecting a new manager. The splash they made in hiring Ozzie Guillen was akin to Refrigerator Perry doing a cannoball from a ten meter platform.

I’ll give you a moment to process that image.

Guillen seemed to be the perfect man for the job, a successful Latin American male in a community that wants and needs Latin American role models, a bombastic presence on a team that was looking to make a bombastic return to relevance in the National League, and a ratings producing mouthpiece on the Showtime documentary that was set to follow the team’s progress last season.

One year later, Guillen looks like the worst managerial decision ever made in baseball. He offended Miami’s Cuban community by openly touting respect for, Fidel Castro. He battled openly with Miami’s hierarchy, who aren’t the most stable group to begin with, and showed a general disdain for his players, specifically Heath Bell.

In truth, Guillen never changed his style from his White Sox days, and the Marlins should have known what they were getting into. In Chicago, Guillen openly ripped his players, but the team was steadily improving while he did so, so the World Series-starved fans and organization on the South Side was willing to put up with it. When his approach brought them a title in 2006, the win meant that even though many people hated him in Chicago, you couldn’t question his results.

In Florida, Guillen’s brusque could only ever ruin the feel-good factor that was the Marlins coming into their new ballpark. Instead of a city focused on a young, talented team ready to compete in the National League, everyone turned their attention to the travelling 38-ring circus that was Ozzie. On a team filled with outsized personalities (Logan Morrison, Giancarlo Stanton, Jose Reyes, Heath Bell until his trade), the Marlins brought in a man whose idea of handling such players is to be more colorful than they are. Just by being himself, Ozzie torpedoed what should have been a special season in Miami, win or lose.

So when Larry Beinfest and Jeffrey Loria went looking for a new manager, they went and found a man who has the potential to be Guillen’s polar opposite. Mike Redmond’s name may have come out of the blue, but anyone who remembers Redmond as a player can probably see the logic in his hire.

Of course one of the main reasons that the inexperienced Redmond was hired is strictly financial. Guillen will be paid $7.5 million over the next three years to stay far away from the Marlins, and since Redmond has not managed above the Florida St. League, he comes cheap. A closer look at the man, however, sees that he has a chance to succeed.

Redmond was a major league survivor. Never drafted, never thought of, but he played fairly regularly and well for a thirteen years in the major leagues based on two traits: steady defense and personality.

As a catcher, Redmond was the ideal backup. In 687 career regular season games, he committed just 18 errors and 23 passed balls. Furthermore, he seemed to understand, even embrace, the idea that he was not an everyday player. He spent the balance of his career backing up three excellent catchers in Charles Johnson, Ivan Rodriguez and Joe Mauer, and took his opportunities when he could. On what will undoubtedly be a young Marlins team in 2013, a manager who understands the mentality of all players can be crucial. Handling players was never Guillen’s strong suit, and he could be downright brutal to those who lacked experience.

After the torment of the 2012 baseball season, there is little doubt that the Miami Marlins would like to make baseball fun again. Redmond may just be the man. A talker with a wry sense of humor who was known for taking batting practice naked to get out of slumps, Redmond has experience keeping it loose. his press conferences will certainly unpredictable, but in a different fashion than the unhinged Guillen. Furthermore, he knows the Marlins, having played for the team for seven seasons, one of which was their 2003 World Series triumph.

Who knows what will happen to Redmond in Miami. Loria and Beinfest don’t have the best track record when it comes to managers and it remains to be seen how patient they will be with their new man. For now, however, it appears the Marlins have what they need: the anti-Ozzie Guillen.

Originally posted at http://www.theunplayable.com/ on 10/14/12

For a while last night, it looked like the same old story: (Insert Non-Yankee baseball team name here) has a lead in the Bronx in a playoff game, and it’s late in the game. You think you have them, and then it all goes horribly, horribly wrong. The Tigers had them last night, leading 4-0 in the bottom of the ninth. Of course Ichiro homers, and three batters later, Raul Ibanez does the same, the latter now meeting the minimum (patron level?) status for induction into the fraternity of “Yankee Legends.” It looked like anothoer one of those nights where the Yankees are down and out, and something comes and saves them. Call it their destiny, or the “ghosts” of Yankee stadium, or whatever undefinable force that makes the Yankees seemingly always succeed (2001 and 2004 notwithstanding) in these situations.

Multiple teams’ fans know this feeling. The Yankees have tied you up, and they are going to finish you off in the most soul-crushing, “f__ this I’m burning my jersey and cancelling my season tickets because baseball is soooooo rigged” kind of fashion possible. Since the mid-nineties, at least in the American League, the playoff theme in baseball has centered around the Yankees, their superiority, which at times has been more perception than reality, and their opponents’ inability to overcome the unrelenting leviathan has been the modern Yankee dynasty.

It has been sixteen years since the Yankees reclaimed their perch as the pace car of baseball. In that time, they’ve gone through multiple eras of players. It began with grubby, workaday battlers like Jim Leyritz and Joe Girardi, who founded the modern incarnation of “America’s most hated team” and evolved into the preening, mercinary superstars that populated their roster for much of the 2000′s. There were two constants to the roster, one was Mariano Rivera, who would haul the carcass of a defeated opponant away after the Jeter and the res of the assassins had done their job. Rivera was the Yankee’s undertaker, and Jeter was the captain of the hit squad.

Before you stop reading because you think that this is another love letter about the greatness of Derek Jeter, I would ask you to bear with me. I will say Jeter is certainly not the greatest Yankee ever. He was probably never the most talented player on any of the Yankee teams he played on. Jeter’s gift, however, was his ever-present ability to be, well, present. Most of Jeter’s career accomplishments, even his 3,000 hits, seem more like inevitibilities of time rather than amazing skill.

Jeter is the face of the Yankees because he personifies, more than anything else, everything about the Yankees that was stated in the first two paragraphs. Yankee fans love Derek Jeter because his team almost always wins. Opposing fans hate him for the exact same reason. Jeter has been there for every one of those moments of Yankee glory over the past decade-and-a-half, but rarely as the central player. Rather, Jeter was the man on the top step of the dugout, looking suave and unconcerned as Scott Brosius or Tino Martinez (or Raul Ibanez or Russell Martin) breaks your spirit in the bottom of the 12th inning.

Perhaps no story personifies this more than Jeter’s admission that he was in the bathroom during Russell Martin’s go-ahead home run against the Orioles in game 1 of the ALDS. So certain was he that the Yankees would get the job done, he didn’t need to be engaged.

No player likes to invoke the existence of Yankee “ghosts” more than Jeter, but even he is missing the point. The “ghosts” aren’t the disembodied spirits of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, etc. come back to twist the fortunes of a game in New York’s favor, but rather Jeter himself. His mere presence on the field, with his steely glare and proud stance. Everything about the man exuded an air of “my team is better than yours, and eventually we will beat you.”

But even to Jeter, sports can be a cruel and unfeeling world. Which is why I will print the end of this era of Yankee mystique in as cold and unfeeling terms as possible:

This is what the end looks like:

D Phelps relieved D Robertson.	4	4
M Cabrera walked.	4	4
P Fielder grounded out to first, M Cabrera to second.	4	4
D Young doubled to deep right, M Cabrera scored.	5	4
D Kelly ran for D Young.	5	4
J Peralta reached on infield single to shortstop, D Kelly to third.	5	4
J Nix at shortstop.

In a way, this had been building. The Yankees couldn’t hit at all in the Division Series. Alex Rodriguez is no longer Alex Rodriguez, and he was never really Alex Rodriguez come playoff time anyway. Their rotation is propped up by a man who looks to be one cheeseburger away from a total cholesteral meltdown, and their roster contains so many 35+ players that it is starting to look like a rest home for untradeable contracts. But as long as they had Jeter, the Yankees had a shot.

The game transcript above tells us the rest. Without even mentioning his name, it tells us that Jeter is removed from the game for Jayson Nix, which is a bit like removing Daniel Day-Lewis from “Gangs of New York” and replacing him with Jim Varney. Nevermind that the Yankees had already been sunk by Delmon Young (of all people!) by that point. The game wasn’t over until Jeter went down and didn’t get up. Now, not only is the game over, but the series is likely done as well. The Yankees are fully de-stabilized at this point, and they likely won’t recover this post-season.

When Derek Jeter was helped off the field, He took the Yankees' hopes with him.


And after that, what is there? Jeter will heal, and he will likely play on, but he’ll be 39 next year, and time has been catching up with him for several years now. Alex Rodriguez seems finished as a Yankee, one way or another, and the rest of the lineup, bar Robinson Cano, just doesn’t seem frightening. And even Cano will be 30 in eight days. Don’t even get me started on the pitching staff. I want to keep this thing under 3,000 words.
Of course these are the Yankees, and they will reload. They will likely be back in the playoffs next season. The question is, what will they look like then?

There comes a sudden point near the end of every great athlete’s career when it seems like their relevance disappears. For Johnny Unitas it was the day he trotted out in a powder-blue San Diego Charger uniform. For Wayne Gretzky, it was being traded to St. Louis.

For Jeter, it just might be the night his ankle snapped, and as he left the field, he took all of the Yankee hopes for glory with him.

They were replaced by Jayson Nix.