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If they keep playing well, they may become "Non-Sellers." Certainly most people thought the Nats would be sellers at July 31st __maybe Marquis or Livan or some veteran bench players. Now, maybe they are a "stand pat" team.

What would you trade for __that's actually available? They have five starters and a couple extra in AAA. They have a deep bullpen. Bernadina is playing/hitting better and takes care of CF as well as anybody you'd get. If Werth, Z'man, Desmond start hitting at their career levels, where's the Big Obvious Hole to fill?

Maybe they just play it out with the hand they are holding and a new manager. 

The Nats sure landed in a soft spot after a bad fall.

Johnson's career win percentager .564. Riggleman's .445.

Put another way, Rig lost 824 games, Johnson 888. Not too far apart in loses. But Davey won 1,148 games while Jim won 662. Or 486 more wins for Johnson.

Is it mostly the difference in players? Of course it is. But there's a big gap in managerial skill, too, imo. If you asked 100 baseball people, I think 95-to-99 would say that the Nats are better off taking a chance on finding out if Johnson is still one of the best managers in baseball vs. finding out whether Riggleman could go from an average (.500) manager (if you give him the benefit of every doubt) to a good one.

My view on Rig, very similar to my view of Frank Robinson, is that their career managing records didn't do them full justice __Frank .475 and Rig .445 which is really low for such a big sample size. But you can only rate above their record to a small degree. You can't "give" either 100 extra wins and say, "That's what his record really should be."

Rizzo was very lucky Johnson agreed to come back. Every year, if I bump into him, I asked Davey if he wants to manage again and every year he laughes like I'm crazy.  Several years ago, he almost died. He's fully recovered but that will make you want to spend more time with wife and family. However, in Viera this year, Davey kept talking about a heart procedure he'd had over the winter that got (I think) his heart in better "sync." He didn't know he'd had a problem. I'll get the facts on this from him later this week. The point: He said, "I haven't had this much energy in 20 years. It's amazing. I think saying, 'Don't overdue it.' But I just don't get tired."

I probably said, "But you're still not dumb enough to come back to managing, are you?" He'd get the joke because he took the job soooo seriously and when things didn't work out to his standards or he got in a flap with a boss, it truly madfe him miserable. I think he laughed off the question. But even after Riggleman resigned, I didn't think Davey would come back. Why risk denting an excellent reputation and a good life? But he's really connected with Rizzo and the Nats in the last two years. And it probably wouldn't bother him to be part of building a winner in the backyard of the team from which he resigned the same day he was named Manager of the Year in '97. 

There's an eternal debate over how much managers are worth. Their salaries probably give you a tip. If they were worth 5-6-7 extra wins, wouldn't the best ones be paid >$100-million like A-Rod, Teixeira, etc? You'd think so, wouldn't you? But if a good one is worth 1 or 2 wins and a poor one costs you 1 or 2 wins, then maybe salaries would be about what they are for managers. 

If you think there is such a thing as a "replacement player" then maybe there is a "replacement manager." The kind of player/manager who is always available. When the Nats turned to Riggleman in '09, that's what he was __a caretaker manager with a hometown connection who could hold the fort and let an awful seasaon have a chance to reboot. But he'd moved up since then in any sensible evaluation. I've only written two columns on Riggleman in the last 18 months, but these were the headlines on them: 11/13/09 "Riggleman Is The Man For The Plan" and 5/7/10 "Whether He Likes It or Not, Washington Nationals Manager Jim Riggleman Deserves Praise." So, I sure didn't think of him as a replacement manager anymore.

I think Bernadina in CF and at leadoff is now obvious. But that's easy to say now that's he's started to hit, bunt and rob Adam Dunn of a two-run homer by leaping way above the wall in CF in Chicago on Friday night.

Dunn almost won that game twice __with the near HR and a double in extra innings. When he ended up 1-for-6 in a loss, it just looked like he was in a total funk, culminating in the 4K game Sunday.

One of the most interesting things we'll see with Davey is what lineup he uses. Will he have Werth at either No. 1 or No. 2 tonight? His biggest immediate job is to get the confidence of Werth, Z'man and Desmond back to normal. They are hitting .228, .232 and .226. If they held the bat by the barrell and swung the handle they could probably hit .225.

One thought: Bernadina, Espinosa, Z'man, Morse, Werth, Nix, Ramos, Desmond and pitcher/DH. But this is a tough team to align. I'm more interested in what Johnson will do than in what I think. That's when you think a team has a good manager: You're trying to learn what he's doing rather than trying to figure out what he's doing wrong.

That was a tough 48 hours for Jim. He made a tough life-changing, career-changing decision and took some flack for it. I don't think his wcomments were worthy of him. And, in general, they aren't worthy of comment by me. Two exceptions. I interviewed him plenty, as he knows, including a lot of things that were off the record and, of course, will remain that way. As for taking a jab at his managing every once in a while, that's just part of my job. He didn't like it when I wrote Weaver's quip about Mauch: "Play for one run early, lose by one run late." But we laughed about it the next day.  I liked Riggleman, still do. Thought he was an adequate manager, better than his record and served his home town well the last two years. I think it was a bad idea to quit in mid-season. Only four other managers ever quit in-season with their team in hot streak like 11-1 or 10-2. Two of them (Bowa and Hunter) did it with only one or two days left in the season. Christy Mathewson did it in '18 with his team 61-57. (I forgot to ask him "Why?" Must have been covering Harry Vardon that day.) 

The other is Mike Hargrove in mid-season '07 when he said he just got fed up with managing. I believe McLaren replaced him as Seattle bench coach and...drum roll,,,Riggleman replaced McLaren as bench coach.

You gotta love the chatters on here!

Nice thought.

My wife read it and, as soon as she finished, used one of the favorite expressions in our family for making hard decisions when you are mad or annoyed: "Would you rather be right? Or would you rather win?"

I smacked my head because I'd like to have incorporated that concept in my column to give a sense of Rig's decision.  So, maybe I'd have added something like this.

...

     Do you want to be right? Or do you want to win?

      Do you want to be morally indignant and make the world see that you have been wronged? Do you want the emotional satisfaction of yelling, “I’m right. They’re wrong.”

      Or do you want to bite your tongue, play the percentages and figure how you can turn the situation to your advantage so that, in the end, you win? And maybe “they” lose, too.

      There is no one correct answer. There has to be some point, some issue or principle that is so central to you that you don’t care if what you do is “smart;” you don’t care if you give yourself the best chance to win in the long run. You just have to take a stand.

       Neither position is noble or ignoble, courageous or cowardly. It’s just personal. You decide where to draw the line and what price you’re willing to pay when you do. Because taking a stand usually has a price. It’s inherent in really tough decisions that, if you take the tough line, you’ll probably “lose” in some way, otherwise it wouldn’t be a hard call.

       To Jim, his ability as a manager, and his reputation as one, is enormously important. He also knows all the codes of the game. When Manny Acta’s job was hanging by a thread he never tried to undermine him, even though Rig was the obvious choice (since he was the bench coach) to finish out the season and get a shot to end up with the ’10 job.

    Jim decided that this was the time that he'd rather "be right" in his own view, rather than play the longer-term game of hoping the Nats, say, went 82-80 and he got rehired, then found himself with a big-time team on the rise. That could have happened. Average managers get some great rides with the right players. Remember, Earl Weaver didn't manage the '83 Orioles to a Series win. It was Joe Altobelli.   

Davey made his first million in real estate, not baseball. He has a masters degree in mathematics from Trinity (in Texas). That's a serious advanced degree in real math. Davey was a scratch golfer for many year, may still be. Don't know. He was/is a pilot, I believe. He played in Japan, so he knows the game there. In '84, he was the only person in baseball who was aware of a book by a Johns Hopkins prof on applying advance math to baseball. I saw it in his Mets office. We barely knew each other but were having a good talk about baseball theories. As soon as I said that I also had a copy of Earnshaw Cook's math/baseball book, he clammed up and barely said anything the rest of the interview. He was so far ahead of the Sabedrmetric curve. My Total Average came out in April of '78 in the Post but it was child's stuff compared to the things in the Cook book (which were largely beyond the math I'd taken in college).

So, for years, Davey had a hard time hiding that he was probably the smartest or most accomplished person in the room. But age will take some of that out of you. He'll come back as a better manager than he ever was. or not as good, for some reason I can't guess. Or about the same. And I really have no idea which it will be. "Worse" like Joe Gibbs is obviously possible. But "better" is one of the possibilities, too. If he's "pretty much the same, but a little more mellow," then DC is in for a fun ride.

I'm writing about this for tomorrow. Thanks for framing some of the questions for my column!

I know exactly how you feel.

Jim talked to me about three times, starting in Feb, about how much his contract bothered him and how much he thought it hamstrung him in dealing with players. I sympathized, but only to a degree. After we had a talk after the Marquis incident, I said something like, "Why don't you just do it your way and not give a damn about anything else? If they don't want you back, go out on your own terms. And if it works, you'll be back." FWIW, I thought he gave Marquis just what was coming to him. But it didn't help him. Another example of "Would you rather be right or win?"

FWIW, right now there are six managers in baseball who have contract with just as short a leash as Riggleman had and four of them have won the World Series: Bruce Bochy (SF has option for '12), Ozzie Guilleen (same), Jim Leyland (contract up after '11), Jack McKeon (same) and also Bob Melvin (Oakland) and Brad Mills (Houst).

So, while a short contract leash isn't a plus for a manager, the Nats were far from alone in dealing with Rig's contract the way they did. He made it seem like some kind of unique disrespecty.

Okay, enough about the past, even if it's only four days ago, and will be rehashed a lot. The future is a whole lot more interesting. 

It's possible that Rizzo and Johnson have such a good relationship that they will simply sit down after the season like two adults and say, "What's best?"

Does Davey still love it? Is he still (roughly) as good at it? Family consideration? How well did the team play for him or not? What other managers are available? Believe it or not, I think Johnson is one of the few people who might actually be able to might say, "Mike, you gotta go get THIS guy. He's great. And he could be ypour manager for a long time."

Or maybe it ends ugly. I sure hope not. Or igt turns out some other way that you don't expect. But Johnson does not have to be a big success as manager for the Nats to do very well the next few years. He and Rizzo, two smart guys, have to sit down and figure it all out after the season. Maybe the right choice will be obvious.

I'm going to go look up his tendencies with the bunt and SB in his years as a N.L. manager w the Mets and Dodgers.

His former pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre once told me that Johnson does some really out-of-the-box things, but only in game-on-the-line situations in the nith inning or extra innings. "Like what," I said.

"Like putting on the 'take' sign for every pitch of the first three hitters of the 10th inning with the No. 7-8-9 hitters coming up."

What happened.

"Before he took the 'take' off, we had two men on base and one out." Then he added that Johnson would never do things like that in the middle of the game because it might take away from the confidence of the player.

My guess is that he'll still steal and bunt because he has players who can do it, but he will "give away" less outs with the sacrifice. More likely to bunt for a hit or hit-and-run. I think he'll encourage his lineup, which has a lot of power, to go for the pump in hitter's counts __2-0, 3-1 and even 3-0 (a count that isn't used nearly enough to try to get extra base hits). We'll see.

Ownership gets some blame here, too. When they went after a manager in '09, they provided a low budget __not really enough to go after a Bobby Valentine competitively, for example,  if they'd wanted him.

The Lerners do not give away what I would call "happy money." That is, extra money just to keep key people "happy" in their job. They negotiate contracts __in their businesses and in baseball__ aggressively, then they expect everybody to live by the letter of the contract. Their reputation is that, once the deal is done, they live by their end of it, too.

There have been plenty of times when The Baseball Way and The Lerner Way haven't been the same. There's been a learning curve, lets say! They've changed their views, to a degree. I think they now 'get it' that baseball isn't a "contain costs" industry (like their other enterprises), but rather a "grow revenue" industry. And you have to spend money first to grow the revenues later. How much? They debate that on a case by case basis.  

Davey moved Ripken from SS to 3rd at a time in late-'96 and all of '97 when Cal wasn't happy about it. But it established Johnson's authority. He made Bobby Bonilla, his cleanup man, a DH at times in '96, rather than a full-time outfielder. Bonilla, a big star slugger, didn't like it and asked why. Johnson told him it was because he wasn't a very good outfielder and sometimes it was better for the team for Bonilla to DH. Bobby was a DH for 44 games that year and drove in 116 runs as the O's went to the ALCS. 

But Johnson is also big on boosting the confidence of those who need it. He's had big stars everywhere. So, he won't be out of his element __at all__ with guys like Werth, Z'man, Strasburg, Harper. In fact, compared to the accomplishments of a lot of the players he's played with or managed, they have a long way to go to get to that level.  

When Davey joined the Nats in '10 there was no chance whatsoever that he'd have taken the managing job under any conditions, imo. His health wasn't good enough, in his view. As I explained earlier, it is now.

That's a perfectly defensible view. as I've said in chats before, why not extend Riggleman for '12 because you can always fire him. But if he turns out to be a great "match" for this particular team, you can keep him and be happy about it. Apparently, Rizzo didn't think it was looking like a dream "match," despite the 38-37 record.

GM takes a wide range of skills __baseball judgment, management of employees, dealing with media, etc. Kasten made Rizzo's job much more manageable while helping mentor him in various areas that Mike was the first acknowledge he wanted to learn. 

McLaren is really a class act. He and Riggleman have worked together so closely __almost interchangeably as manager/bench coach with both of them in both roles at different times__ that it probably wouldn't have been tenable for Mclaren to stay in the dugout. Or at least it sure wouildn't have been standard baseball practice. Mac looked terrible when I talked to him Thursday just minutes after he (and the team) got the news.

The Nats really wanted to win the White Sox series for him. He threw a fabulous tantrum in his ejection on Friday night. He had enough anger stored up to mtake care of all four umps and give each of them a 'second helping." I estimated that he "earned" at least eight ejections in one outburst. Really impressive. 

After Sunday's game, Sean Burnett nailed it about McLaren: "It's been a tough couple of days, but he's handled everything as professionally as he possibly could. Kind of sad not to see him around any more. It's unfortunate that one man's decision kind of affects other people's lives."

Until the last few weeks, I think Rizzo and Riggleman talked a lot. I asked one Nat who Rig talked to the most. I thought he'd name which players. He said that he talked the most to Rizzo.

The last few weeks, after the 1-7 road trip that got the Nats down to a 93-loss pace, the same pace as last year, I thought there was a distinct chill between the two. It was a recent change (to me anyway). But you shouldn't read too much into such vague tea leafs.  It can mean nothing. "Everything changes everything" always applies in baseball. If the team gets hot, whatever is eating at people usually disappears (or submerges).

Rizzo needs to have excellent lines of communication with key people, especially his manager. In this case, there was, I suspect, a breaskdown in recent weeks. And I think that's one of the things Riggleman read as "it's not me." I still think that views in baseball are so fickle that if the Nats had ended the year, say, 79-83 __10 more wins than last year, for the second straight year__ they'd have picked up Rig's contract. I'm sure that's what I'd have pushed for. At something like 72-90, maybe they go another way. In between, who knows. But your basic stats __including managing stats__ usually carry the day in baseball.

Just a year ago I don't think I ever saw a team prez, GM and manager who seemed to get along any better than Kasten, Rizzo and Rig. All in the same foxhole. Now, two of them have resigned. Adam Kilgore had an excellent blog post on how thisx "would never have happened if Kasten" had still been around. I think that's right. If I felt a new chilliness between Riz and Rig after the bad trip and the Marquis incident __and it was just a hunch with me, I'm sure Kasten would have sensed it 100 times as much. On the day Rig resigned before the game, I passed one of the Nats on-air TV folks and Rig's name came up. Would he be extended? He'll be back next year for sure, he said. The elevator door was closing and I have no idea why I said it, but I heard myself say, "There's no way he's coming back next year." On the elevator, I felt stupid, telling myself, "You don't know that. And you don't prefer that. So,  keep your mouth shut."

This one is some complicated that there are a wide range of sensible viewpoints. So, this will let you give yours.

Really important point. Storen is on pace to pitch in 80 games! In his first full year as closer. That's just too much. He needs to be protected, at least to a degree. Johnson will manage for the long-term good of the franchise as he did with the Mets in '84. Marty Noble had a good piece on MLB.com about the comparisons between the Nats and the '84 Mets. Gooden-Strasburg. Strawberry-Harper. Keither Hernandez-Ryan Zimmerman. The Nats can only hope. That's asking a lot. Lets start off with smaller bites, like whether Strasburg makes a full comeback or if/when Harper is the goods.

I suspect there are quite a few people who feel this way. Including quite a few with the Nats who could never have imagined this turn of events a week ago.

The Redskins better watch out. Okay, half-joking, but only half. The Nats are stealing their thunder. With Johnson added to the list, the Nats have FAR more big name or potential star players than the Skins and look to be well ahead of them in getting where they want to go. Look out a few years and the balance in fan fanaticism between the two teams my be different. Look how fast the Caps took off. The Redskins have alienated a lot of fans for almost 20 years. Now, they aren't even playing.

And, finally, the Nats also seem to be talk-show material with lots of nice arguments, screaming debates. It's June and a lot of people in the DC area actually seem to be fascinated with baseball. What a shock. The long homestand before the All-Star game should be interesting.

Thanks. That column was intended far more to give a sense of context to readers __how on earth did this happen and what's going on behind the scenes__ than to take a side on who's "good" or "bad" in the fuss since nobody involved in it is either of those extremes.

Just noticed this question. Guess I'm not alone in seeing some of these trends.

There are far more questions than I can possibly get to. Guess that Wiuz draft pick isn't going to get much analysis! Look forward to seeing everybody next week. Thanks for the great questions.

The more the merrier. And good pieces, I thought. I had to go to New England early Fri to Sunday to help with some long-standing medical issues in my wife's family. So it was great to see everybody joining the talk. But I've got to say that not one person in Red Sox Nation mentioned the Nats.

Thanks. I knew he died young (45) but didn't know why. Much appreciated. Multiple people have mentioned this. Pretty impressive chatters!