When the White Sox acquired Jake Peavy, shortly before the interleague trade deadline on July 31, he was supposed to be the addition that would make them serious World Series contenders. Yet by the time he actually debuted on September 19, not only the team’s championship hopes but their mere playoff aspirations were all but dashed.
Team chemistry —that is, the chemistry of players who hang out day after day for eight months, sometimes developing a knack for winning and sometimes not—remains as elusive to managers as anyone else. To this day, the pithiest expression of the successful baseball formula has come not from a player or manager, but from the fictional Henry Wiggen in Mark Harris’s baseball novel The Southpaw: “Winning makes winning like money makes money.” A team on a roll tends to stay on a roll, and a team that never gets on a roll winds up an also-ran. Blame usually falls on the manager; but this may be changing, as fans, general managers, and players themselves recognize the difficulties of dealing with millionaires. Peavy’s comeback reflects the change.
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Guillen recently acknowledged the troubles he and Piniella share with an offhand but dead-on imitation of his Cubs counterpart: Guillen tilted his head to the side, shrugged his shoulders, turned up his palms, and said, with a nasal inflection to his thick Venezuelan accent, “What can I do?” Managers are increasingly powerless over their veterans—what good does it do to call Bradley a “piece of shit” when he’s into the team for $30 million guaranteed? It’s up to the players to police their peers.
Who’s to blame? Anyone who said a few months ago that Chicago’s teams were both good enough to win their divisions—I’m thinking of several local sports talk-radio hosts—can’t blame the general managers who put the teams together, and with a few small reservations neither can I. And I can’t blame Piniella and Guillen, the managers who provided the season with its most enjoyable moments. Sometimes, as Piniella said, it just doesn’t happen. I’m reminded of the immortal line of Rocky Bridges, later borrowed for a book title by Jim Bouton: “I managed good, but boy did they play bad.”
