Welcome to Saturday Scorecard, a popular sports venue without personal seat licenses. With the pennant race, Packers, Badgers and PGA to keep us occupied, we'll get right to the good stuff.

Dugout view: While many Brewers fans blame manager Ned Yost for the team's lengthy slump, a surprisingly sizable contingent also wants to hold the skipper accountable for high gas prices, global warming and the unsatisfying ending of "The Sopranos."

Phil Garner knows the drill.

Two years ago, the Astros manager was second-, third- and
fourth-guessed on a daily basis as he led his team to its first World Series. With the Brewers in Houston this weekend, we figured it was a good idea to ask Garner his thoughts on criticism, the role of managers and other topics.

"Unfortunately, you have to turn a deaf ear to it," Garner said of the second-guessing. "Ned's a good manager. He's pulled the ballclub together. A lot of times, you have to be a little bit lucky. You have to do things right and you have to be a little bit lucky, too.

"Most of the time, managers don't lose the pennant. Neither do we win the pennant, even though we get our names associated with that some times."

When Garner explains it, the key to managerial success seems simple.

"The players have to play," he said. "Sometimes, players run out of gas. As Reggie Jackson said one time, it's not a baseball season, it's an endurance contest.

"That's what happens. It becomes, 'Who can survive in the last six weeks of the season?' Part of what happens when you have a lot of young players is they fatigue and they don't know how to get through the season."

But what about the nightly chess match? How much impact can
managers have during the course of a 162-game season?

"We actually talk about that a lot among ourselves," Garner
said. "(Former Pirates manager) Chuck Tanner used to tell me it was 10 games; you can affect five games on the positive side and five games on the negative side. That's the most I've heard. Some guys will even say it's even less.

"The bottom line is, I think in modern-day baseball the manager of some ballclubs can have a little bit less of an impact and some can have a little bit more.

"It depends on what kind of egos you have on your ballclub. If you have whoppin' egos and guys that just want to over-run your ballclub, then a good manager, one that's a strong-willed manager, that can keep the players in line ends up being bigger force but from a psychological standpoint rather than from a tactical standpoint. A poor manager can let a ballclub get away from him in a sense because the players just run him over.

"I think that's where it's changed. It used to be, when I first came into the game, if a manager said 'Drop down and give me 20 pushups,' you didn't ask why, you just did it.

"Today, that has changed. Perhaps the actual bringing in the pitchers, pinch-hitting and that sort of stuff has not changed that much, but I think the psychology of the players has."

 Page 1 of 2 (view all on one page)

Next >>

Post a comment / write a review.