Notes, quotes and comment

I came into the ALCS not really caring which team advanced to the World Series. In my mind:

• the Red Sox and Astros are the two best teams in baseball;
• the Red Sox fan base has become essentially insufferable;
• the Astros management burned away its good will with its hypocritical trade for accused woman-beater Roberto Osuna. "Zero tolerance," my left nostril.

The pleasure I felt when Osuna gave up a grand slam to Jackie Bradley Jr. on Tuesday settled matters. Go Red Sox.

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The garish "home run sculpture" in Marlins Park is, somehow, to be moved out of the stadium.

Considering the difficulties in doing so -- it is seven stories high, connected to plumbing and hydraulics and exists to fill a Miami-Dade County requirement for art in public buildings -- I would probably have left it in place.

I can agree with Derek Jeter on the aesthetics of the thing. But it's not the ugliest thing playing in that ballpark since Jeter's consortium bought the team and sold off a brilliant outfield.

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Manny Machado is a marvelously talented player. He has also in this series repeatedly jogged on ground balls, twice made questionable slides into second (and was called on it once) and, on Tuesday, took a cheap leg-whip shot at Milwaukee's first baseman.

Counsell on if Manny Machado has gone beyond the bounds of playing hard: “I don’t think he’s playing all that hard,” Counsell said.

— Bill Shaikin (@BillShaikin) October 17, 2018

Pic of the Week

The Miami Marlins left their caps on the pitcher's mound
after Monday's game, their first after the death of
ace Jose Fernandez.

Having a co-worker die is a sorrowful thing. I've been though it a few times myself; we all have or will.

It's never easy, even when you know it's coming. It's even rougher when it comes suddenly, as was the case with Jose Fernandez last weekend. And, probably, rougher still when it comes to one of great talent, as was the case with Fernandez.

It was a goosepimple moment last Monday when Dee Gordon, a left-handed hitter, stepped into the batters box right-handed in tribute to Fernandez for one pitch -- then took his stance in the proper batter's box and hit his first home run of the season.

New horizons in managerial inexperience

Dan Jennings was the manager Monday night in the first
professional game he was ever in uniform for.

The Miami Marlins fired former Twin Mike Redmond as manager Sunday. On Monday they announced that general manager Dan Jennings would take the job.

Jennings has a good reputation around baseball -- as a front office executive and scout. He never played pro ball, never managed in the minors, never donned a uniform for any purpose until now.

Teams are increasingly hiring skippers without managerial experience (including Paul Molitor with the Twins), but this is a step further. There have been general managers who moved into the dugout, but they had managerial experience at some level of pro ball and/or played in the majors.

That this hire has met with near-universal scorn is hardly surprising, For one thing, Marlins owner Jeff Loria lacks the benefit of any doubt. Loria is reminiscent of Milo Bloom's description of Senator Bedfellow in the old Bloom County comic strip: "Leaving a trail of slime where ever he goes ..."

The protestations from Loria's lackeys not withstanding, the assumption is that Jennings was chosen because he's already on the payroll. Loria's now paying both Ozzie Guillen (for this season) and Redmond (through 2017) not to manage; Loria now essentially gets to avoid paying a third to actually show up.

I said near-universal scorn, This piece from MLB TV's Brian Kenny is the rare exception.

The key, of course, is what the players think. Jennings may be a good judge of talent; he may be adept at handling a spreadsheet; but he probably hasn't put the thought into the nuances of game strategy that an experienced manager has. I have no doubt that Buck Showalter or Ron Gardenhire could lay quite a filibuster on you about the best counts to put the runner in motion. Jennings has experienced hands around him to advise him (some of whom would have been well-received by the voices attacking the Jennings hire), but now the tactical moves are ultimately his call, and if the players doubt his acumen, he'll have problems regardless of what he does.

Outrages I'm having trouble being overly outraged about

Jose Reyes is one-and-done in
Miami.

Outrage 1: The Miami Marlins turned themselves into fish sticks with a major salary-dump trade with Toronto (it's still not official, pending physicals and probably some salary review by the commissioner's office). Mark Buehrle, Jose Reyes, Josh Johnson, John Buck ... they signed last winter for big coin with the the Fish, and now they're gone.

In a pure baseball sense, it's probably a good trade for Miami. It's not like they broke up a good team. The Marlins finished last with those high-priced guys. They can finish last without them.

The real reason this deal draws universal derision when the Red Sox got a pass for doing the same thing in midsummer is that Jeffrey Loria and his co-conspirators in the Miami organization have poisoned the well. They don't get the benefit of the doubt, because they burned that long ago.

I believe that Loria and Co. are slimeballs and represent the worst of big-time pro sports ownership. I also believe that they are systematically wrecking Miami as a baseball market, just as they did Montreal.

I can despise Loria and everything he stands for without trashing this trade.

Miguel Cabrera wasn't the worst defensive
third baseman in the league -- hello, Trevor
Plouffe -- but he was close.

Outrage 2: Miguel Cabrera won the American League MVP award Thursday in a one-sided vote over Mike Trout.

Miggy had a big year, but he wasn't better than Trout, Triple Crown or no. Trout wasn't far behind Cabrera as a hitter, and was far superior in the field and on the bases. Yes, Cabrera's team made the playoffs, but Trout's team (a) won more games (b) playing a far more difficult schedule.

But this isn't the biggest outrage of recent MVP voting. This isn't Juan Gonzalez winning an MVP for piling up RBIs in an extreme hitter's park.

Outrage 3: David Price on Wednesday won the AL Cy Young Award in a close vote over Justin Verlander.

Again, Price had a fine season. Verlander was better. This is very much akin to 2005, when Bartolo Colon won the award over Johan Santana, an award the writers apparently began to regret almost as soon as it was announced. Colon had a good year, but everybody knew Santana was the superior pitcher.

The same is true this year, perhaps not to the degree that it was in 2005, but still ... I doubt anybody in baseball would rather have Price than Verlander (ignoring the salary difference).

Mike Redmond and the Miami managerial job

Mike Redmond in 2009, his final
season with the Minnesota Twins.

Mike Redmond, who played 5 years with the Twins as Joe Mauer's backup, is widely assumed to be the front runner for the Marlins' manager's job, which was opened by the dismissal of Ozzie Guillen.

Redmond definitely wants to manage in the majors, and there are only 30 such jobs. Plus he played for the Marlins for seven years — yes, Twins fans, he played more for the Fish than for the Twins — and was part of a World Series winner there (2003, when he backed up Pudge Rodriguez), so there's a genuine attachment between the man and the franchise.

Still, there are not many less attractive managerial jobs than Miami's. It's not that one can't win there — the Marlins have, after all, two World Series titles in the past 15 years. It's that the internal politics of working for Jeffery Loria are essentially impossible.

The Marlins haven't had the same manager for two opening days since 2010, when Fredi Gonzalez opened his fourth and final season. In 2011 it was Edwin Rodriguez, in 2012 Guillen, and in 2013, it will be Redmond or somebody else.

It hasn't exactly been a managerial graveyard; both Gonzalez and Joe Girardi have gone on to some success elsewhere after running afoul of Loria's misguided Steinbrenner impersonation. Still, I would think a good managerial prospect — and Redmond probably is one such — might well decide to hold out for a more stable working environment.

It could be worse, Twins fans

Ozzie Guillen was one-and-done as the manager in
Miami, where he led the Marlins to the division cellar
despite a drastically expanded payroll and sabotaged the
team's marketing strategy by expressing admiration for
Fidel Castro's longevity.

The Twins have been terrible the last two seasons. They had the worst record in the American League both years. They've been bad.

They have, however, kept some semblance of dignity, which cannot be said of at least a couple of teams.

The Miami Marlins on Tuesday, for example, fired Ozzie Guillen in their latest lurch of impulse management.

Last year around this time, the Marlins gave the White Sox two minor leaguers for the right to sign Guillen to a four-year contract. Now they've canned him with three years left on the deal and $7.5 million yet to pay — and they concede that the Fidel Castro flap at the beginning of the season played a major role in this decision.

Of course, had Marlins done their homework, they would have known that Guillen had said similar things about Castro in the past. Even without knowing that specific, they had to have known that Guillen talks. A lot. And sometimes — "sometimes" being definable in his case as about once a week — he says something his bosses really wish he hadn't.

If they couldn't live with that, they shouldn't have hired him.

His successor, whoever the sucker is, will be the Marlins' fifth since early 2010.

In another piece of Marlins news/embarrassment ...  the city of Miami has a contingency plan for the death of Fidel Castro, and city officials have suddenly realized that it's outdated. Part of the plan is to use the Orange Bowl for public rallies/protests.

Only there is no Orange Bowl anymore. It was torn down to make room for Marlins Park.

And, says the mayor, Marlins Park won't work as an alternate location:

I don't think the Marlins would want that. Knowing them, they would charge to protest.

The Marlins aren't alone among major league franchises in finding new levels of stupidity to plumb.

The Pittsburgh Pirates have instituted a bizarre Navy SEALs approach to treating their prospects.

The latest piece of this ongoing saga, detailed by Dejan Kovacevic of the Pittsburgh Review-Tribune, was "Hell Week" -- and the injury of one of their top prospects.

The piece really must be read to comprehend the extent of the lunacy, but the upshot from Kovacevic is this:

I know about the above because I continue to hear from prospects worried about injury (some among the team’s most expensive draft picks), from parents who wish their sons had never signed with the Pirates, from angry agents, even from men who answer to [assistant general manager Kyle] Stark and GM Neal Huntington.

I’ll repeat: The Pirates’ development system is the laughingstock of baseball.

The Twins have problems. They don't have the compulsive stupidity of the Marlins or Pirates.

On the new Miami park

Miami starter Josh Johnson throws the first pitch
in his team's new stadium.

I watched Wednesday's U.S. opener expecting to dislike the new stadium in Miami.

I didn't.

It helped that the Marlins didn't hit any homers, which meant that the gaudy "home run sculpture" sat still all game.

It helped that ESPN didn't focus on the aquarium built into the wall behind home plate. It helped that the Marlins wore what figures to be their most subdued uniform, white with minimum piping. Wait 'til they break out their orange jerseys ...

The Fish did have women in Brazilian dancer outfits accompany the starters during the pregame introductions. For an operation apparently bent on bad taste, that was as bad as it got.

I didn't dislike the new park. But it's early.

Taking the 5

One of the sillier things baseball teams occasionally do is retire a number for reasons unrelated to anybody who actually wore the number.

One such is now creating a bit of a controversy around the Miami Marlins. The Florida Marlins retired the number 5 even before they played their first game to honor Carl Barger, the team president who died four months before the expansion team's debut. They picked the number 5 to mothball because that was Joe DiMaggio's number, and DiMaggio was Barger's favorite player. Now, some 20 years later, Logan Morrison wants to wear the number (in memory of his father, whose favorite player was George Brett), and the Marlins are "unretiring" the number. Hey, they have a new stadium, a new name, a new logo -- let's put their one retired number back into play.

And the Barger family, which had apparently been ignoring messages from the Marlins for a while, is upset.

Unretiring numbers is a silly thing to do, or it should be. The core principle ought to be: You retire the number if it is so closely associated with a particular player that it will be jarring, if not unthinkable, for anybody else to wear it for that team again.

Retiring a number for a team president, or owner (as the Angels did in retiring 26 for Gene Autry on the basis that he was their 26th man, or as the Cardinals did in retiring 85 for Gussie Busch when the beer baron was 85 years old) is sillier than unretiring it. You want to honor those guys, fine -- but do it in a way appropriate to their role.

Of course, not many players would want to wear 85. But 5 is a rather prestigious number -- legitimately retired by seven franchises, for six Hall of Famers (DiMaggio, Brett, Brooks Robinson, Hank Greenberg, Johnny Bench and Lou Boudreau) plus Jeff Bagwell -- and 26 is pretty common also. Taking those numbers out of circulation for suit-and-tie guys who didn't actually wear it is lame.

The goofiest officially retired number belongs to the Cleveland Indians: 455. That's "retired" in honor of their 455 consecutive sold-out games. And I put the word "retired" in quotation marks because who ever heard of a three-digit uniform number? It's not a legitimate number to retire.

A monstrosity in Miami

Jeffrey Loria, owner of the Florida/Miami Marlins, made his money as an art dealer, so, theoretically, he is a man of wealth and taste.

Wealth, I'm still willing to grant. Taste is becoming another thing. There should be no sympathy for this devil.

The team is getting a new stadium in downtown Miami, at the site of the Orange Bowl, and part of the deal is that the Marlins will ditch the Florida name for that of its city. Which, of course, makes their original logo — a capital F intertwined with a realistic marlin — obsolete.

What they're apparently replacing it with is ... a mess:

The official unveiling of the new logo is to come next month, and maybe they'll wise up enough to ditch the rainbow effect before then. The basic look, however -- the simple M and a stylized marlin -- is part of the seating, in white.

But even the gaudy color scheme of the leaked logo isn't the worst. Check out their planned home run sculpture:

This ... thing ... is to rise up and dance when Miami hits a homer. To which I say: Hooray for the bunt.