Tracy's jaws are flapping

From today's PG Pirates Notebook by Chuck Finder:

Saying he doesn't hit, field, throw or catch, Tracy laid the club's National League worst record squarely at the players' feet.

"Every ... little ... aspect of the game has to be important to you if you're going to change the culture," Tracy said slowly for emphasis.

I won't deny that the players have been bad, you don't have to watch much baseball to see that. Still recently the players have been getting better. Almost everyone in the lineup is starting to hit the ball, the starters are becoming more reliable, the bullpen has generally been decent. They didn't win many games in Arizona or Cleveland, but this seems like a strange time to play this card. It also seems like a strange time to play this card because Tracy's managing has gotten even more indefensibly insane than ever in this past week. There was the fiasco last Sunday in which he took the bat out of both Wilsons hands, calling on Jack to bunt with a runner on second in the 8th and pinch hitting for Craig with Hernandez with runners on first and second and no outs in the 9th. We ended up losing that game by one run in the 10th. There was also the middle game of the Arizona series, in which Tracy's insistence upon playing Jeromy Burnitz in right lead to Ryan Doumit playing first base, where an error by Doumit (in his second game ever as a first sacker) that would've ended an inning lead to a three run homer by Conor Jackson, turning a 2-2 game into a 5-2 game, which ended as a 7-3 loss.

So the question is, why now, Jim? I've got a couple guesses. One possible reason is that he sees the players starting to come around and is looking to get credit for a Jim Leyland style rant if we run off some wins here (after Houston it's Milwaukee, San Diego, San Francisco, and Colorado so it's certainly possible, in a bizarre coincidence all of those teams are currently 25-23, but none of them are anything particularly special this year). The other possiblity is that Jim Tracy isn't quite as stupid as we all think. There likely will be a fall guy for the fiasco that 2006 has turned into, and that fall guy will likely be Dave Littlefield. Most new GMs want all of their guys in the right places. Since it was painfully obvious that Tracy is Littlefield's guy, a new GM may mean that his job isn't as secure as he'd like it to be. He may see his best option at this point to be passing the buck down to someone else.