07.02.07

No more passion for Mike Hargrove

Posted in sports at 1:17 am by Administrator

Mike Hargrove resigned Sunday, in the middle of his third and most successful year as Mariners manager.

Hargrove felt he did not have enough to give his team at this time after 35 years in baseball. The man known as the “Human Rain Delay” during his playing days for his deliberate actions in the batter’s box, seemed to have mulled this over a bit before shocking his players and managment with the decision.

Nontheless, the Mariners went out and beat the Toronto Blue Jays, 2-1 on Sunday, thanks to the pitching of former punching bag Jeff Weaver and the timely hitting of the mercurial Jose Guillen. Hargrove goes out with his team winning eight games in a row.

Baseball is certainly a grind with 162 games on the schedule. Hargrove’s wife Sharon, spun the decision in an FoxSportsNorthwest interview, as an unselfish one, offering the explanation that if he can’t give 100 percent he should let someone else, in this case bench coach John McLaren, do the job.

This is yet another odd baseball occurance to happen with the last week or so here in Seattle. Last weekend, fans rooted for an opposing player, Ken Griffey, Jr., much-beloved in his days here, to hit home runs against the home team. I admit I was one of them, despite his decision to turn his back on Seattle after the 1999 season. He wanted try to create a new legacy in his hometown of Cincinnati and the results of that experiment have been mixed with Griffey spending 40 percent of his time there on the disabled list. And on Sunday, the manager decides to quit when the team is finally starting to make some noise in the American League playoff race.

Can you imagine Lou Pinella, Joe Torre or Jim Leyland quitting in the middle of the season because of a lack of passion? I can’t. Then again, perhaps Hargrove, like his odd mannerisms in the batter’s box, is a different type of manager. Maybe like Seattle’s often bandwagon sports fans he found something else to be passionate about. Because right now, it’s not baseball or at least managing the Seattle Mariners. His mind is somewhere else besides this corner of the country.

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