If you woke up today and read anything about the Dodgers, you might have noticed that one question sits on many lips: Will Don Mattingly be fired?
“Convinced,” writes one.
“I have swung to the side that thinks he will,” writes another.
There was also the more nuanced “it seems very unlikely that Mattingly will make it through the entire season at the helm though, but my prediction here is that he survives another seven days.”
We also had our choice this morning of “I don’t care” and “I do care.” Having options is nice.
Some even believe that the pitching matchups for the Dodgers’ three-game series in Milwaukee (Kershaw-Gallardo tonight; Greinke-Burgos on Tuesday and Ryu-Peralta on Wednesday) have something to do with this debate. Then again, as Baseball Prospectus notes on its daily podcast, “the idea that ‘we’ll give him one more series and see if he turns things around’ – either he’s the right guy or he isn’t! How much new information does that give you about whether he’s the guy that you want for the rest of the season?”
All we know is that it’s too late for the old cliché of “I don’t want it to become a distraction.” It’s become a distraction – if not inside the clubhouse, certainly outside the clubhouse – and acknowledging distractions is what we do every morning.
Some bullet points for a Monday:
• Here’s a stat:
Dodgers are 5th in OBP, 2d to last in runs and HR, .294 slugging w/ RISP worst in NL.
— Peter Gammons (@pgammo) May 20, 2013
• From the SABR bio project, the ’47 Brooklyn Dodgers.
• Bud Selig’s position on replay in baseball is evolving like a politician’s position on gay marriage, and Bill Baer of NBCSports.com, for one, welcomes “our new robot umpire overlords.”
• I’m not typically big on Italian pop, but the orchestral musicianship of “Per Te” by Jovanotti makes an ordinary song compelling.