The arrogance of Mike Scioscia

It's been nearly four months since my last post, a fact which makes a mockery of the whole idea behind a blog.

It's what happens when you uproot and move to a new city. Emails go unanswered. Bills go unpaid. Projects get pushed aside.

Since the last entry, the pinstripes played their final game at the stadium against the Orioles, a game which to everyone's relief they won. But the Yankee's grim season is not the inspiration for this overdue post. We've long repressed the memories of a rotten year. It's about our northerly neighbors who eked out a win last night against the Angels and slipped into the ALCS.

We caught the game from 7th inning onwards, and learned a valuable lesson on how a manager's arrogance can cost his team dearly. After the Angels plated two to even the score in the 7th, they put a runner on third with one out in the 9th.

And here's where the cracks in the logic of smallball, that brand of play long favored by Scioscia, emerged. The batter Aybar got ahead of Delcarmen 2-0. Rather than let the player make the decision about the course of his at bat, the most of crucial of the evening by far, Scioscia decided to dictate the terms of it by calling a bunt -- a suicide squeeze, no less. The ball missed Aybar's stationery bat, and Varitek wobbled down to third to (just) tag a stranded Willets.

Michael Kay once criticized Terry Francona for never playing hunches. Francona rarely puts on a hit and run, a double steal or anything else that could thwart an offense that would put up runs if it played on the moon.

Tito is a company man, and he knows it. His main role is not to fuck up what the organization does. It must take a bit of humilty to admit to the press that you don't ever run the team on instinct. Managers are famous, after all, for gut decisions. Boston, Oakland and other smart clubs stifle those instincts, many of which lead to losses like last night's.

Francona and other managers who join a moneyball francise commit a form of professional castration. But in relinquishing control, they are rewarded beyond imagine. Paroxidically, today few would call Francona an inferior tactician, despite the absence of any strategy to his approach. Not even Michael Kay.

Scioscia, through his own arrogance, seems to want to make people think that he's in control of things. I'm convinced that small ball managers and their advocates suffer from the weight of their own egos. They like small ball because it makes them seem pivotal when in fact they are powerless.

And it's that kind of thinking in the opposition which will make Francona a winner, again.