The Brewers' Catch-22; More On Randolph (Sans Job Security Speculation)

• Brewers 4-Pirates 1:

    Brewers manager Ned Yost began the season in a precarious position as it was and now, through no fault of his own, the team is wobbling along at or around .500 and doesn't appear to be a serious contender. Even before Eric Gagne wound up on the disabled list with shoulder issues, he was completely untrustworthy as the closer; the rest of the bullpen corps isn't much better which left Yost in the difficult position of pushing his fragile ace past a reasonable threshold in number of pitches in yesterday's complete game win over the Pirates.    
    Ben Sheets threw 123 pitches in beating the Pirates. I'm no fan of arbitrary pitch counts, but Sheets is so injury-prone that there has to be a number where the risk/reward dictates taking him out of the game, but the circumstances surrounding the Brewers forced Yost to leave his ace out on the mound regardless of the number of pitches he'd thrown.
    With the Brewers bullpen in the sad shape it's in; Yost's job status already shaky; the team needing to win the games that Sheets pitches given the injuries and mediocrity in the rest of the rotation; and Sheets's impending free agency with the Brewers unlikely to be able to keep him, they have no choice but to push Sheets to the limit and hope for the best. As self-serving as it is, if the Brewers want to win now, they can't worry about Ben Sheets's arm; they have to do what is in the best interests of the organization in the present and with the way the team is struggling combined with their bullpen, they're probably not going to contend anyway; but Yost's job status may influence how the manager deals with his ace and games that he might have managed differently with more reliable personnel. Even though Yost sometimes looks like the pressure off the job is eating away at his objectivity and he's not all that great a manager anyway, he's not the one who put that bullpen together with names like Eric Gagne, Guillermo Mota and Salomon Torres; he may take the fall if things continue as they are, but I don't see how Ted Simmons or anyone else is going to fare much better.

• Willie Randolph's misplaced anger:

    Why is it that the team that gives the opportunity to a previously shunned hire always bears the brunt of the fallout for that employee's anger? Willie Randolph appears to have a giant chip on his shoulder out of some belief that he was slighted for whatever reason in not getting the jobs he interviewed for. Now, under fire, that anger is coming out in different ways as he acts out against anyone and everyone except Willie Randolph.
    Many of the criticisms that cost Randolph managerial opportunities were legitimate despite what he thinks. He didn't have any managerial experience at all and refused to go down to the minor leagues to acquire that experience; he does tend to run his words together when speaking and not elucidate himself as clearly as he might like which may lend itself to the interviewer thinking Randolph's not as sure of himself as the employer might like his manager to be; he was offered a job as manager of the Cincinnati Reds, but chafed at the lowball nature of the contract (supposedly $300,000 a year). I don't know Randolph's financial situation and maybe he needed more money, but perhaps it would have behooved him to manage a team with a low payroll and moderate expectations to garner some experience for when another job opened up.
    Randolph ended up getting the job in his hometown with the Mets, but having played in New York, he also had to know the pitfalls of such a high-profile position. As the Mets have blossomed into contenders under Randolph, the scrutiny and spotlight has grown incrementally. The gaffes he made for a team that wasn't a contender and was in the middle of a retooling in 2005, were put under a larger microscope as the team's payroll and expectations increased. The acting out as people criticize him seems in part due to some anger he harbors for not getting a managerial job sooner; perhaps it wasn't any kind of industry-wide agenda against Randolph though; perhaps he could have made some concessions to get one of those jobs. Either way, instead of being passive aggressive and lashing out in other ways, he should look in the mirror and think about what he could have done differently and might now do differently in an effort to save his job, which appears to be slipping away by the moment.

    Please check out and purchase my book The Prince Of New York's 2008 Baseball Guide also available on Amazon.com and BN.com.