What’s the Deal With Jim Tracy?–Part II
Last week I wondered why lame duck Pirates manager Jim Tracy would go out of his way to be an asshole to his players. Well, now I have a reason. Tracy is completely insane. After the Pirates officially fired him Dejan Kovacevic wrote a story about Tracy’s tenure for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that paints a picture of a man who had some serious issues letting go of the past. I highly recommend reading the entire block quote. Basically, Jim Tracy is the Miss Havisham of Major League Baseball.
Quite curiously, the shortcomings that Tracy had in personnel or instructional matters seemed to originate from his never-ending emotional tie with the 2004 Los Angeles Dodgers, the $100 million team he managed to the West Division title.
He spoke about them incessantly, to the media and to the players. He even tried to recreate them, it seemed.
Before Tracy had donned a Pirates uniform, in the winter of 2006, he met with center fielder Chris Duffy and told Duffy he should play like Dave Roberts, the Dodgers’ leadoff man, even though all Duffy and Roberts had in common was being fast. Among the instructions: Duffy, a line-drive hitter, was told to pound the ball into the ground. He failed miserably, quit baseball for a month and has yet to recover.
Tracy told shortstop Jack Wilson, a three-time runner-up for the Gold Glove, that he did not like his approach to ground balls, that it should be more like Cesar Izturis of the 2004 Dodgers. Wilson had his worst defensive year in 2006 and, at Tracy’s behest, Izturis was acquired from the Chicago Cubs this past July. It was at Tracy’s urging that Wilson nearly was traded to Detroit in late July, after which Wilson batted .401 in the season’s final two months.
There was more: Jose Catillo was told to be like Adrian Beltre. Bench players were told to be versatile like Jose Hernandez, who also was acquired. Even Tracy’s batting orders were modeled based on profiles of the 2004 Dodgers.
Another fallout of that connection, possibly, was that a mostly inexperienced group of Pirates was expected to perform — and behave — just as those veteran Dodgers did, without extra instruction or attention.
That’s some pretty intense stuff. I’m not a licensed psychiatrist (Damn money grubbing AMA), but that sounds like a textbook case of living in the past. Let’s just hope Tracy hasn’t been saving Olmedo Saenz’s old jockstraps.
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