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Tuesdays with Brownie: It's just the Marlins' way

(A weekly look at the players, teams, trends, up-shoots and downspouts shaping the 2015 season.)

The best part about the Miami Marlins is how rigorously earnest they are in all endeavors: in full attack, in frantic retreat, in their various zigs and zags, in sickness and in health and in, you know, same ol’-same ol’.

At some level, maybe at all levels, they really believe this stuff. So, I’m pretty sure (if not totally positive), they are not just messing with us, though it would be great if they were.

As baseball operations president Michael Hill assured us Monday morning after opting to replace his field manager with his general manager, a somewhat uncommon personnel tactic, “If we didn’t think it would work we wouldn’t be sitting here today.”

OK, just checking.

The list of things they thought would work and instead ended up refashioning in a ceremony a lot like Monday’s is beginning to rival the arc of a Giancarlo Stanton home run. First, a loud noise. Then, from certain vantage points, that list gets small, fast. Finally, sometimes people wind up bruised. Fortunately, it seems, the bruised hardly ever include Marlins ownership and management, which plods, yes, earnestly along across the strategies and philosophies and emotional turns of the day.

Dan Jennings taking over the field manager job is the Marlins' latest odd maneuver. (AP)
Dan Jennings taking over the field manager job is the Marlins' latest odd maneuver. (AP)

Build up, knock down, build up again, hire a manager, fire him, hire somebody new, payroll dumps, payroll spikes, old ballparks, new ballparks, tax promises, tax realities, but, hey, if they didn’t think it would work …

We wouldn’t all be sitting here today. Amused.

The group that showed up Monday to explain what happened over the previous 24 to 48 hours – general manager-turned-manager Dan Jennings, Hill to his right, president David Samson to his left – allowed the impression owner Jeffrey Loria was only peripherally involved in the decision. Of course he had to sign off on the firing of manager Mike Redmond, bringing to two – with Ozzie Guillen – the number of managers he’d be paying to sit at home. He would have to agree to have Jennings do 1 ½ jobs – manage the ballclub, keep a hand in the general manager duties – for however long this lasts. And he’d have to believe that the man who would run his roster would be good at it, or at least OK enough to drag that roster out of its 16-22 start, or less expensive than hiring someone else.

The rest was left to Samson and his baseball men, or so the story went.

Hill and Jennings are smart, engaging and good at what they do, especially considering the variables of their jobs, especially considering the variables of their owner. Running a ballclub and running a ballgame isn’t the same thing, but they’ve probably thought of that. They’ve seen enough managers walk in and limp away to have an idea what’s next.

“The only thing I am certain of,” Jennings said, “managers do not win games in this league but [they] certainly can lose them.”

So here we go. Another manager is gone. The general manager was demoted to replace him. The Marlins go round and round. The game remains the same.

You know, unless they’re messing with us.

Playing the right way?
Jorge Posada says of Alex Rodriguez, Roger Clemens and those like them, “I don’t think it’s fair for the guys that have been in the Hall of Fame that played the game clean,” and there are two problems with that:

First, he’s too late.

Second, he took it back.

(Actually, there’s a third thing: He has no idea who was “clean” and who wasn’t. Nobody does. And most of those “clean” fellows in the Hall of Fame have had no problem standing back and letting the Hall of Fame voters express their opinions – and protect their images – for them.)

I run into a former player occasionally around L.A. He was a good player. He retired. He says he was “clean.” OK. And what he does is rail against the generation he played in, against the players he played with and against, and against the unfairness of it all. No matter where the conversation begins – weather, golf, how the local teams are playing – it always ends at his juiced era and the dirty players who stole his career and money.

And I ask him, “Where were you then? Why didn’t you say something? Did you ask your enabling union to protect your honest brothers?”

“Pffft,” he says. “Wouldn’ta done any good.”

So here we are. Posada went home, thought it over, circled back, texted an apology to Rodriguez and, perhaps, Clemens, and then explained he’d been “cornered” into, I don’t know, speaking his mind? Having an opinion? Sticking up for the guys he believes played clean?

Posada, a very decent man who has a book out and therefore is making the media rounds, played 17 seasons in the Bronx, endured that media zoo for every second of it, and then claimed he was prodded into saying something he did not mean.

The interrogation on CBS This Morning went like this:

Interrogator: “Because some of your teammates, you know, Roger Clemens, and eventually A-Rod will be up for the Hall of Fame. I mean, and there’s a great debate in baseball about who knew what and did they look the other way and are the records tainted or whatever. I mean, should players who were known to have used steroids, should they be in the Hall of Fame?”

Posada: “No.”

Interrogator: “No?”

Posada: “No. No.”

Better lawyer-up, man, ’cause the phone book across the head is next.

We’re going on a couple decades of this, of course, (way longer if you count the greenie era) and the code runs thick. The disappointment, perhaps, comes from this: If it takes little nerve to hold the sport and its players to a reasonable standard post-retirement, at least it’s one voice toward a more honest game.

Maybe, some day, that makes championship anniversaries and old timers’ games slightly more awkward. Maybe you get the side-eye from a couple guys in the dugout when you throw out that first pitch.

Oh well.

For a few hours last week we could add another conscience – a significant Yankee, even – to the side of broader accountability, only to learn later the conscience was, you know, coerced.

Too bad, too.

Woulda done some good.

The ballad of Arte and Josh
Arte Moreno has been a lot of things during this Josh Hamilton episode. Let’s go with cold, indignant, impulsive and plain mean. The end result had Hamilton returning to the Texas Rangers, Moreno out tens of millions of dollars, and the Angels in dire need of a good, even a decent, left-handed hitter.

Josh Hamilton, playing with Round Rock last week, should be back in the big leagues soon. (AP)
Josh Hamilton, playing with Round Rock last week, should be back in the big leagues soon. (AP)

That’s where the story figured to fade, at least until Hamilton, who will turn 34 on Thursday, had the time and opportunity to determine if there were anything left in his bat. In 19 minor-league at-bats, he’s not done much yet, but that’s not the test. He’s expected to join the Rangers in a week or so, and then we’ll all find out together what Hamilton is as a ballplayer anymore.

But, since Hamilton brought it up …

Don’t get too worked up over the latest chapter of Josh vs. Arte, whether Hamilton hoped to call Moreno over his drug and alcohol relapse and if Moreno’s lieutenants stood in the way. It’s in the timing, after all.

According to sources, Moreno once asked Hamilton for his word he would not backslide into his previous life. Hamilton gave it. They shook on it. (You could debate the merits of having an addict promise not to be an addict anymore, but this allegedly is how Moreno went about it.) So, Hamilton stumbled. Moreno was unhappy.

A phone call wasn’t going to change the next four months. Moreno, being Moreno, didn’t want to hear it. Hamilton, by that point, was trying to get back to Texas anyway. They both knew the relationship not only hadn’t worked until then, but wasn’t going to work going ahead. Hamilton was too fragile, Moreno too stubborn, and the time for apologies and/or forgiveness was long past.

One Marlin flying high
One of the better stories in the game is Dee Gordon, once rushed to the big leagues, where his success was rich but temporary, and then largely forgotten when he appeared overmatched. Gordon went home one winter a beaten man, yet returned with a new muscled body and a promise to take it all back. Since, in a season with the Dodgers and going on two months with the Marlins, he’s a .313 hitter with a .341 on-base percentage and 76 stolen bases.

Dee Gordon has been the Marlins' best player this season. (AP)
Dee Gordon has been the Marlins' best player this season. (AP)

Today, he is one of the few players to have gone right for the erratic Marlins. His .406 average and 63 hits lead the game. When Marlins players and management grouse about a lack of energy, they’re not talking about Dee Gordon.

The reputation Gordon took with him to Miami was as a first-half player, and he’s certainly lived up to that, who fades when the games and at-bats pile up on a frame better suited to lesser grinds.

But let’s wait this out. He has played one full season, in 2014. His batting average fell by eight points and his on-base percentage by 44 points in the second half, true. He also batted .300 or better in July and September. If he carries anything close to his first six weeks of the season into summer, he’ll almost have to return to something more mortal, and the baseball sages will nod at the result.

But I wouldn’t be so sure.

Changes likely coming for A's
The Oakland A’s being the worst team in baseball after six weeks is one thing. What Billy Beane does about that over the next six weeks is another.

After a sometimes hard-to-follow winter that took on Brett Lawrie, Billy Butler, Ben Zobrist, Marcus Semien and Ike Davis, and whacked Derek Norris, Brandon Moss, Josh Donaldson and Jeff Samardzija, the A’s find they are a decent offensive club, an average pitching club (in spite of the worst bullpen in the league) and a dreadful defensive club.

We think we know what we’re looking at: an 8-8 team that lost 18 of its next 23 games. But what must Beane think of this? Last July, he had a first-place team, made a couple major trades (netting Samardzija and Jon Lester, costing him Yoenis Cespedes and others), and finished 10 games behind the Angels. The A’s finished out 2014 with a two-month record of 22-34 and are well into the first two months of 2015 at 13-26, which comes out to 35-60.

The first to go, should it come to that? A good bet is left-hander Scott Kazmir, in his walk year and continuing his career renaissance.

Scott Kazmir WAR Over Career | PointAfter

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