To fully understand what caused Mike Hargrove to resign his commission on the U.S.S. Seattle Mariner, one must first bang one's face with a hammer several times.
Not that it'll help, mind you, but you won't be any further away from understanding just what the hell happened here.
|
|
| Fine, Mike Hargrove left. But the least he could have done was tell us why. (Getty Images) |
I mean, that's what he's asking you to do here -– go figure. What is more, he plainly doesn't care what your theory might be, because having been in baseball most of his adult life, he knows as well as anyone that when it comes to rumors, nature abhors a vacuum.
He didn't even offer a cover story, like "I did it for my family;" in fact, he said he didn't do it for his family, a nice touch.
No, what he said was, in essence, "I didn't feel like it any more." And that can cover any number of reasons.
He had his problems with Ichiro? Sure. He was on the hot seat two weeks ago and didn't want go through a whole summer and fall of speculation? Why not? He got tired of Seattle fans telling him he wasn't very good at his job? Sure. He and Bill Bavasi weren't getting along? Hey, what manager and general manager get along? The owners were bugging him? See the previous answer. He'd heard a new manager (not bench coach John McLaren) was loitering in the wings? Could be. He hated charter flights? Silly, but we'll take anything.
By leaving it open, though, Hargrove left himself wide open for any old mud ball to be hurled at the wall in hope of adhering. And he knew that, no more than when he said, "I don't expect people to understand it, because there are times when I don't understand it."
Indeed, a guy who leaves a job when it's going good is always going to have a difficult time convincing his next employer he will stick out the rough patches. When you're 57, it's all the more difficult.
No, Mike Hargrove quit for no immediately apparent reason, and unless someone is willing to spill the real porridge on this soon, his Wikipedia entry will include:
"Known as 'The Human Rain Delay,' he ended his managerial career by walking off for the hell of it."
It might not be true, but there is no evidence that says it isn't, either. And with so many helpful people out there willing to connect dots that aren't there to figure out why, he has put his reputation at the mercy of the media and the baseball rumor mill establishment, not all members of which have the milk of human kindness pumping through their aortas.
His wife, Sharon, offered family as a partial reason when she spoke with Larry Stone of the Seattle Times, but Hargrove's insistence that there was no sinister reason, that conspiracy theorists were wrong, only fueled the conspiracy theorists. He became the first manager to quit with eight consecutive wins at his back since before 1900, and maybe ever, and in a game ruled by numbers as well as crackpots, these two items drove both the statheads and the seamheads.
I suppose we may know in time just what drove Hargrove out of his professional life, and maybe the easy answer is the right one. That just isn't ever the way to bet in baseball. At times like this, someone did something to someone else, and we're not even sure right now if Hargrove is the someone, the something, or the someone else. Makes for fun guessing, though.
So if the backstory on Mike Hargrove turns out to be wrong, we can honestly say for once that he asked for it. And if there is no backstory, if the real reason he quit is because he didn't feel like staying, well, no backstory is often every bit as weird as several. And we will trot them all out until we find one we like. Or happens to be true. Either way. We're not always as particular as we should be.
