Rongey: Players more key to success than manager
After a surprisingly fruitful offseason, there was serious enthusiasm leading up to the White Sox' Opening Day game in Kansas City. After the initial lull of the holiday months and the secondary lull of late March, I was beyond ready for the 2015 season to begin.
And I know the fans were, too, because I never heard from one that said otherwise, which isn't always the case. Some years you look forward to the baseball season more than others.
Unfortunately, the Sox did something they hadn't done in a couple of decades by going winless in the first four games. With that, much of the preseason promise evaporated and over reaction settled in.
The thing about losing streaks is that they're inevitable for every team (even the exceptional 2005 team lost seven straight at one point), but to begin the season on one is particularly difficult to accept.
And when it happens, fans naturally want to make sense of it. What I've heard so far is a surprising amount of people placing the blame for the rough start (some even calling for a change) on No. 23.
If you look at the roster, you'll see that number belongs to a guy who will never step in the box and never take the mound - Robin Ventura.
For anyone who has listened to me in the past, you know how I feel about the real-world effect of a baseball manager. They're a necessity, they can create a comfortable environment for players, but they're not the ones making hitters hit and pitchers pitch.
Take Jeff Samardzija on Opening Day, who gave up five runs, walked three, and threw a wild pitch while barely getting through six innings. Who bears the responsibility for that? Is it the manager in the dugout, or the guy throwing the pitches?
We can go through the lineup, rotation, and bullpen and find that the majority of individuals are not doing their jobs as well as they should over this first week of games. And in each case, Ventura will have never once touched a ball or grabbed a bat.
Yes, I understand managers make decisions that can affect games, but that effect is never as great as the influence a player's own ability has on any given situation. Even if a manager makes the "right" late-inning decision, that decision has a pretty good chance of failure, just as it's not uncommon for the "bad" decisions to come up aces.
On Saturday, however, Ventura chose to utilize a lefty-righty matchup in the 8th inning by replacing Geovany Soto with J.B. Shuck. The thing is that Soto already had 2 hits in the game, including a home run. It worked, but had Shuck popped out, that decision would've been torched by Sox fans.
The truth is that any number of options can work in any given moment and there's rarely just one correct move. Which means that, by a wide margin, execution by players is the single most important ingredient in success or failure of managerial decisions.
Ventura has never been at fault for a guy going 0-for-4, just as he can never take credit for Jose Abreu playing like an MVP.
• Chris Rongey is the host of the White Sox pregame and postgame shows on WSCR 670-AM The Score. Follow him on Twitter@ChrisRongey and at chrisrongey.com.