Thursday, October 13, 2005 |
Pickoff Moves, Bedtime Edition
Management By Baseball: Part II, Interview With Mike Scioscia
Management By Baseball has the second part of their series about the Angels up, this time including a transcript of an interview with Mike Scioscia. Excerpt:JA: You won a WS, you manage a team w/a very unusual profile for a SUCCESSFUL team. I want to learn about it. Who were your mentors?MS: First of all you never go through your childhood and you never dream of being a manager or managing in the 7th game of a World Series. You don’t fantasize about that. ...
Just thinking back, there are a few things that really influenced me. I was very fortunate to be in the Dodger organization with some great baseball minds. Roseboro, Campanella, I can never thank those guys enough. Roy would take me out on the field and he’d just say a few things and I always learned something from him. Walter Alston, Tom Lasorda, John Roseboro.
And Tommy had a bench coach, Monty Basgall. And when Tom was moving around, he just sat there calm and still.
...
My mother was a schoolteacher and my dad sold beer. He taught me that the foundation of dealing with other people had to be respect and humor. Respect for people, for institutions, for what you’re doing (working at).
He also taught me that people who think they know everything haven’t asked the right question.
NLCS Game 2: Astros 4, Cardinals 1
As the AP would remind us, the one thing the Cards haven't done in the postseason so far is come back. All their previous postseason games this year, they got ahead and stayed ahead.Save for tonight.
Mark Mulder, hardly his dominating best, didn't exactly stumble through the game, but Yadier Molina's passed ball got the Astros on the board for a 1-0 win, and Houston would never look back. Compared with last year, this marks a positively brilliant start; last year, the 'stros didn't win a single game away from their home park. If they can equal their 2004 mark of not losing a game at home -- hardly a given -- they're in the World Series for the first time ever as an upset NL champ.
Yet More On The ALCS Game 2 Call
Reader Glen Balcom forwards this New York Times story, written by Lee Jenkins. Jenkins apparently attended Vanderbilt together with Josh Paul:The country now knows Paul as the backup to the backup catcher for the Los Angeles Angels who basically rolled Game 2 of the American League Championship Series right into the hands of the Chicago White Sox.Worth reading, if only by way of BugMeNot.I know him better as a poet.
Ten years before Paul reached the national spotlight, he and I sat next to each other in a poetry-writing seminar in the fall semester of 1995 at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. We were the only men in the class. It was a dream class.
But every week, when we handed out our poems, we braced for the ultimate in public humiliation. Our classmates would shred our metaphors. They would ridicule our rhymes. The criticism could not have been much more personal. We tried to stand up for each other when we were not getting shouted down.
It's interesting what Jim Tracy might have said in same kind of interview. I could see him folding his shoulders and defending everything behind his track record, team chemistry, and so on. And he'd probably ask himself more questions than the interviewer? :)
: 10/14/2005 11:02:00 AM
1) Obviously made easy sound bites. Most sports journalists shoot out generic questions anyway just to get enough copy for their articles. He does the work for them.
2) When the questions are pointed, Tracy reframes the question by droping the original sibject of his question and turning the voice passive. Why is this important? Because it means he doesn't have to use people's names directly, deflect responsibility, AND sound like an authority. It's the use of a passive voice that basically says "This is the way it was" without stating a cause-effect. He's the cause for nothing bad in the organization.
That is partially why many bloggers are so angry with Tracy. If Tracy flat out said "I didn't do Choi because I didn't like Depo", then fine, we could say that he's claimed responsibility for his part in the season. Instead, if somebody asks, "why didn't you use Choi when he had better numbers than Jason Phillips?" He would reframe it as "why wasn't Choi used instead of other matchups that were used?", and then the subject becomes anything but Tracy. He never really answers the original question, "what did you do wrong?" Bloggers smell cowardice. Media plugs his subject "Depotesta" for him. Who's fault is it for Choi never being used? Depo, that's who! ;)
: 10/14/2005 02:15:00 PMNewer› ‹Older
 |
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.