How do you explain Jimy Williams?
How do you explain how some people in baseball thought he ought to be manager of the year -- while about 90 percent of the population of New England thought their waiter at Legal Seafood could manage the Red Sox better than Jimy could?
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It was the last year of Williams' contract. The franchise is about to be sold, to owners who may or may not want to keep Duquette around to run it. The Duke wasn't about to let a team with a $112 million payroll drift any further back of the Yankees or A's. |
How do you explain this stuff?
How do you explain all the bizarre events that led to this guy becoming the first manager to get fired in midseason with a record this good since Steinbrenner canned Billy Martin for the fifth time in 1988?
And how do you explain why so many people were so happy about it?
How do explain all that? Well, you start with two words:
Dan Duquette.
You don't have to be a distant relative of Peter Gammons to understand that the Red Sox GM and the manager he just fired were about as compatible as Ted Kennedy and Rush Limbaugh.
It's one thing for a manager and his GM not always to be on the same page. But these two weren't even in the same Barnes & Noble.
The GM sent players the manager's way. Then he sat back and seethed at the way the manager used those players -- or, in some cases, didn't use them.
Jimy Williams would rather have sent Johnny Pesky up there last year, at age 81, than pointed Izzy Alcantara toward home plate, for example. But the GM wouldn't back off and return Alcantara to Pawtucket. No matter how long Izzy hung around, though, the manager wouldn't budge and play him. And it was that kind of stubborn tug of war that defined the relationship between the Duke and Jimy -- or lack thereof.
It was so obvious that we know baseball friends of Williams who occasionally asked him, "Are you trying to get fired?" And there were times it was tough to tell whether Jimy was or not.
So it's been apparent for a long time that Jimy Williams was always one 2-8 funk away from getting canned this year. And as it turned out, games eight, nine and 10 of that funk weren't even necessary. A 1-6 funk was plenty for Duquette.
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You're fired!
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Since 1983, managers fired in midseason with a winning record:
1983 Phillies, Pat Corrales (43-42)
1985 Orioles, Joe Altobelli (29-26)
1988 Red Sox, John McNamara (43-42)
1988 Yankees, Billy Martin (40-28)
1992 Rangers, Bobby Valentine (45-41)
1992 Padres, Greg Riddoch (78-72)
2001 Red Sox, Jimy Williams (65-53)
Teams that fired a manager in midseason and still finished first:
1932 Cubs: Fired Rogers Hornsby (53-46), hired Charlie Grimm (37-18)
1938 Cubs: Fired Charlie Grimm (45-36), hired Gabby Hartnett (44-27)
1978 Yankees: Fired Billy Martin (52-42), hired Bob Lemon (48-20)
1982 Brewers: Fired Buck Rodgers (23-24), hired Harvey Kuenn (72-43)
1983 Phillies: Fired Pat Corrales (43-42), hired Paul Owens (47-30)
1988 Red Sox: Fired John McNamara (43-42), hired Joe Morgan (46-31)
1989 Blue Jays: Fired Jimy Williams (12-24), hired Cito Gaston (77-49)
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Now in the ex-manager's defense, it wasn't as if those six losses in the last week came against the Devil Rays and Tigers. Five of them came against the A's and Mariners -- in games started by Mark Mulder, Tim Hudson, Barry Zito, Jamie Moyer and Freddy Garcia. So it could have happened to anybody -- and has.
But the Red Sox averaged 1.7 runs a game in those six losses. They also started six different lineups in those six games.
And it was those ever-revolving lineup cards that got Jimy Williams fired as much as anything. They drove his players crazy. They drove the GM crazy.
In part, of course, they were a product of the misfitting parts the GM gave Williams to work with. This was no easy team to manage. It was overflowing with veteran players who probably shouldn't be playing every day -- but thought they should. John McGraw would have had trouble making out a lineup card that would have made everybody happy on this club.
But players also need some sense of stability, some sense of where they fit, where they will hit, when they will play and what glove they might be wearing when they do.
On Williams' Red Sox, that sense never existed. So when new manager Joe Kerrigan's first public words were, "I'm a guy who likes a stable lineup," that was more than just music to the GM's ears. It was the Boston Pops on the 4th of July.
But there will be other changes, too, now. You can be sure of that.
The loyalty Williams showed to some players -- Rod Beck and Derek Lowe, most notably -- was admirable in many respects. But that loyalty, no matter what, also got Williams in trouble. So what happens now?
"You can bet your house," guessed one baseball official Thursday, "that (Ugueth) Urbina will be the closer. That's one thing."
But Joe Kerrigan, as bright and prepared a man as he may be, can't make all the Red Sox troubles disappear with one wave of the lineup card. How can he?
Can he make all those Red Sox injuries go away?
Can he get Pedro back tomorrow, if not sooner?
Can he instantly shake the rust off Nomar Garciaparra?
Can he make Bret Saberhagen 21 years old again?
Can he heal Jason Varitek's fractured elbow?
Can he find a way to make Carl Everett fit into the fabric of a normal baseball operation any better than Williams could?
We wish him luck. Because those are the big reasons this team has lost 9 games in the standings to the Yankees -- and 10 to the A's -- in the last month and a half. Not Williams' lineup roulette wheel. Not the frosty relationship between the manager and the man who hired and fired him.
For this team -- with all its problems and all its injuries and all its mandatory Red Sox angst -- to have been 12 games over .500 at this stage was more a tribute to Jimy Williams than an indictment of him.
So why was he fired? Why now?
As always, you have to look at the big picture here. It was the last year of Williams' contract. The franchise is about to be sold, to owners who may or may not want to keep Duquette around to run it.
The Duke wasn't about to let a team with a $112 million payroll (counting Urbina) drift any further back of the Yankees or A's; way too much invested here, in more ways than one, to let that happen.
And that led us to a 3 p.m. press conference Thursday at 4 Yawkey Way. One manager gone. One new manager trying to lay out his own personal road map to October.
That press conference may have made a lot of New Englanders happy. But how happy will they be come October 28?
We'd be willing to bet, right here, right now, that that will have more to do with how many pitches Pedro throws in September and October than how many lineups the manager uses.
Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer for ESPN.com.
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