Hargrove's Incompetence Goes Unchallenged by Local Media

Mike Hargrove cost the Mariners a win on Friday night, but you wouldn't know it from reading the local papers.

Good baseball managers stay out of the way and let their best players win the game (see Torre, Joe). Great baseball managers look for specific matchups that give their team an advantage (see Weaver, Earl).

Hargrove has a different tactic. He removes his best players, and cedes advantages to the opposition.

Friday night:

--Hargrove removes his best hitter, Jose Lopez, in the 6th inning of a tie game. He then removes his hottest hitter, Adrian Beltre, in the 8th. All this in the service of the "double-switch," an overrated managerial manuver that Hargrove used completely incorrectly.

--If you were the Padres, who would you want as the winning run on second base in the 9th inning of a tie game? Yes, the Mariners' slowest player, Richie Sexson. Hargrove had already used his two best pinch-runners to replace Lopez and Beltre, so there was no one obvious left to run. But Sexson was THE WINNING RUN! Carl Everett, Joel Pineiro, hell, even Hargrove himself are faster runners. But Hargrove did nothing, and when Johjima singled, Sexson got thrown out at home on a hit that anyone else would've scored on easily.

Even more inexplicable than Hargrove's failure to run for Sexson was the fact that neither Larry Stone, writing for the Times, or David Andriesen, writing for the P-I, even bothered to mention Hargrove's non-action.

Andriesen's article was particularly infuriating, as he chose to include this inane quote from Hargrove:

"It was a good ballgame," Hargrove said. "The only bad thing about it was we lost. It was an exciting game, it just didn't turn our way."

No, the only bad thing was that you made one of the worst managerial flubs we've ever seen. A junior high coach would've known to pinch-run for Sexson there. Hargrove--and the local beat writers--are doing a crummy job.