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| Walking away from the game |
One of baseball's greatest managers of the last twenty-five years has decided to call it quits after this season, Lou Piniella. This decision comes after forty years in baseball, eighteen years as a player and twenty-two as a manager, including the past four years managing of the Chicago Cubs. Piniella the manager gained notoriety for his famously short temper and having a penchant for winning baseball games. He has 1,827 career wins, good for fourteenth all-time among managers, has a career .519 winning percentage, has won the Manager of the Year Award three times, and led the Cincinnati Reds to a World Series Championship in 1990. Piniella's winning pedigree and feisty spirit attracted Cubs' brass enough to hire him as their club's manager and join the team's recent era of success.
The decade spanning 1998-2008 was the most fruitful for Cubs baseball since before World War II, and Piniella's influence in that period cannot be understated. The 1998 Cubs reached the postseason for the first time in nine years and set up a higher standard of expectations for modern day North Siders. In 2003, the Cubs were able to capitalize on that millennial momentum and reach the National League Championship Series. Beating the Atlanta Braves in the Divisional Series that year marked the first time the Cubs won a postseason series in ninety-five years. Coming to Chicago in the 2007 offseason, Piniella guided the Cubs to consecutive playoff appearances in 2007 and 2008, the club's first since reaching the postseason in 1906-1908.
Following a season where they finished last in the NL Central with only sixty-six wins, sweeping changes needed to be made in Chicago to turn the 2007 Cubs into a contender. The team's main strengths were their new additions, free agent mega signing Alfonso Soriano, and the new manager, Piniella. Like the Cubs' previous manager, Dusty Baker, Piniella led Chicago to a division title in his first season as skipper. The Cubs' season turned around that year following an old-fashioned, full-on Piniella explosion. The Cubs were just 22-30 and in the midst of a five-game losing streak on June 2 when in a game Piniella argued a call, kicked dirt, kicked his hat, and even kicked the umpire. Piniella's melt down sparked a team to find its identity and play inspired ball the rest of the season to the tune of an 85-77 record and a division title.
From 2006 to 2007, the Cubs went from worst to first, which was their greatest accomplishment. Reaching the playoffs was just icing on the cake. Thus, getting swept in the first round by the Arizona Diamondbacks was not the end of the world for Piniella and the Cubs; it would be a starting point for a magical 2008 season.
2008 saw the Cubs firing on all cylinders from the get-go and looking like a team that could end a 100-year championship drought. Boasting a dominating pitching staff and a dynamic offense, Piniella could seemingly do no wrong from the manager's chair as the Cubs wrapped up back-to-back division titles and posted the best record in the National League. It was all for naught though as Chicago was swept in the first round of the playoffs for the second straight year, this time by the Los Angeles Dodgers. It was a choke job through and through. The Cubs' big boppers Aramis Ramirez and Soriano went a combined 5-51 in the series versus LA. Career years from Ryan Dempster and Mark DeRosa and a Rookie of the Year Award-winning campaign from Geovanny Soto were all squandered.
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| Lou blowing up, and blowing up his team in 2009 |
After the playoff sweeps and being dominated by Dodgers Derek Lowe, Chad Billingsley, Hiroki Kuroda, Jonathan Broxton, and the Diamondbacks' Brandon Webb the year before, Piniella and the Cubs decided their problem was that they couldn't hit right-handed pitching (despite roughly three-quarters of the league's pitchers being right-handed) and that they needed some left-handed juice in their lineup. Enter Milton Bradley.
Despite finishing with a positive 83-78 record, the 2009 Cubs were really a woeful bunch compared to the two teams previous. Bradley was a clubhouse cancer that sucked all the life out of a formerly jubilant Cubs team, Piniella in particular. Bradley was the Anton Chigurh to Piniella's Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and the playoffs were No Country for Old Cubs.
Piniella seems even more lost this season, looking like an old man wondering where his glory days passed him by rather than the competitor from 2007 tying to inspire his team and make it better. He has stubbornly plugged Ramirez and Derek Lee, hitters who throughout most of the season have been carrying batting averages around .230, or worse, into the three and four spots in the lineup. Piniella has lamented the Cubs' lack of offensive consistency, yet keeps putting two of this season's worst hitters into his batting lineup's most important positions. The middle-of-the-order guys need to be the team's best run producers, consistently knocking in runs, but Piniella keeps waiting for these veterans to regain their form rather than fielding the best lineup he can.
Chicago's defining player this season has been Carlos Zambrano. Coming into 2010, Piniella promised a new Zambrano, one more able to contain his emotions and focus on the baseball diamond. It has turned out to be a mistake to try and change him; the uncontrollable competitive fire was what made Big Z great. Taking the crazy out of Zambrano finally caused him to snap, and now he's a $91 million middle reliever in anger management rather than a Cy Young-caliber starter on a playoff contender.
I will always appreciate what Piniella has done for this franchise, but I will also never forget that in the same offseason that they hired Piniella, they could've gotten Joe Girardi, coming off a brilliant managing job of the Florida Marlins, an Illinois native, lifelong Cubs fan and former Cubs player, and now World Series-winning manager with the New York Yankees.
Rings since they've gotten their latest gigs:
Girardi 1 – Piniella 0
Just sayin'.
--from Eric
(First image from wikipedia.org, second image from sportsmaven.wordpress.com)
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