Garner the Idiot
Everyone around the league is starting to know the Phil Garner that we all know here in Milwaukee. He's a nice guy, a real player's coach, a scrappy, firey guy, ...but he's got absolutely no baseball smarts.Because he was fired from here and then fired from Detroit, sports pundits around the country have used Houston's rise to the playoffs this year as a way to stick it to Bud Selig and to Milwaukee.
"SEE? You guys suck! It wasn't Garner, it was YOU YOU YOU!"
Coming from a bunch of ink-stained stiffs who didn't sit there and watch game after game of perplexing decisions, of players bossing the coaches around, zero accountabillity, and pitching moves that appeared to have been decided by a random number generator, ...I never took those comments seriously, though they did annoy me.
Czabe was one of those clowns, I guess he can be excused (as usual) for having no idea what he's talking about.
And I will admit that they were half right, ...yes we did suck, but let Garner's reign of error in Milwaukee forever prove that you CAN make a bad team suck worse. THAT'S the point all the pundits missed.
Here's a quick run-down of what I gleefully watched take place Sunday afternoon (from espn):
Up 2 games to 1, Garner didn't have to start Clemens, who admitted his legs still haven't recovered from the virus that turned him greener than Tal Smith's Hill last weekend. But the manager ran Clemens out there on short rest anyway -- and got only five innings out of him. Which created all kinds of trouble over the post-Roger portion of the afternoon.
Reliever Chad Qualls then marched in to relieve Clemens and gave up a game-tying, crowd-anaesthetizing, three-run, upper-deck homer to Braves first baseman Adam LaRoche. And that development led Garner into a double switch that caused him to take out his leadoff man, Craig Biggio, even though the game was tied and Biggio was already 3 for 4, with a double and homer.
An inning after that, Garner waved for his closer and most trusted reliever, Brad Lidge, with a man on in the eighth inning of a still-tied game. But this time, the manager didn't double-switch. Which, naturally, forced him to pinch-hit for Lidge when the Astros got two runners on in the bottom of the eighth. So Lidge was done for the day -- having thrown only seven pitches.
That meant Garner had already blitzed through the best of his bullpen many outs sooner than he wanted to. But somebody still had to pitch the ninth. And that somebody turned out to be Russ Springer -- a man who was sitting home retired as recently as this June.
Which led to the final, ill-fated decision of the day -- the decision to let Springer pitch to J.D. Drew with first base open and the winning run on second with two outs in the ninth, even though on-deck hitter Marcus Giles was right-handed, and happened to be 0 for his last 12, with five strikeouts. As if there were any doubt, given how Garner's day had gone, Drew promptly singled in the winning run.
Go Atlanta.
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