Seattle turns out to be right place for ‘Rig’
Posted on Tuesday, June 24, 2008
When the latest round of major league musical chairs stopped spinning last week, Jim Riggleman was back on his feet as interim manager of the Seattle Mariners.
“It’s a great break for him,” said Bill Valentine, Arkansas Travelers executive vice president and chief operating officer. “He’s got nearly four months and about 90 games to make something happen. Most interim guys just get to mop up the last two or three weeks of a season.”
As a Travelers player off and on from 1976-1981, and as their manager from 1985-1988, Riggleman became an extremely popular fixture with patrons of old Ray Winder Field.
Willie Randolph became last week’s first managerial casualty when the New York Mets replaced him with bench coach Jerry Manuel.
Randolph had been under the gun since the Mets blew a division title last year during one of the most spectacular September collapses in baseball history. With a $ 138 million payroll, they entered 2008 as a preseason favorite for a National League pennant. They were fighting to reach. 500 when Randolph was fired June 18.
Two days later, with the worst record in the American League (25-47 ), the Mariners fired Manager John McLaren and promoted bench coach Riggleman. They had sacked General Manager Bill Bavasi three days earlier.
“This season, the revamped Mariners expected to reach their first postseason since 2001,” The Associated Press reported. “Instead, they are on pace to become the first team to lose 100 games with a $ 100 million player payroll.”
The next day, as if to prove momentous events often come in threes, the 35-40 Toronto Blue Jays fired Manager John Gibbons and brought back Cito Gaston, manager of Toronto’s consecutive World Series champions in 1992-1993.
Nick Leyva and Gene Tenace, who served, respectively, as Toronto’s third base coach and hitting coach on those two clubs, returned with Gaston. (Nostalgia seems a strange choice as a rebuilding tool. ) After stints with the Travelers as players and managers, Leyva and Riggleman broke into the big leagues as St. Louis Cardinals coaches under Manager Whitey Herzog. Leyva managed struggling Philadelphia Phillies clubs in 1989-1990. Riggleman spent most of the 1990 s managing the San Diego Padres and Chicago Cubs. He was hired by San Diego with 12 games remaining in the 1992 season, while the Padres were dismantling an experiment that failed by scattering expensive salaries (Fred McGriff, Tony Fernandez, Gary Sheffield, etc. ) all over the baseball map. He had a rebuilding process underway in the strike-shortened 1994 season (which came to fruition under successor Bruce Bochy ).
Riggleman spent the next five years managing the Cubs, most notably in 1998, when MVP Sammy Sosa hit 66 home runs and Chicago reached the postseason as a wild card.
Dismissed in 1999 after a 67-95 season, Riggleman served the Cleveland Indians and Los Angeles Dodgers as a major league coach until 2006, when he accepted the job of coordinating minor league instruction in the St. Louis organization. He explained to a reporter at the time that he needed a change in perspective after six coaching seasons seemed to bring him no nearer another managerial appointment.
“That [job choice ] completely baffled me,” Valentine said Monday. “If you leave the big leagues, they forget you exist. You’ve got to stay visible in the majors or [general managers ] don’t know you’re alive.”
Riggleman was hired as a Mariners coach during the winter.
“Maybe he’s finally landed in the right place at the right time,” Valentine said.
“If this [Seattle ] situation shows substantial improvement the rest of the year, Rig will either get a contract extension, or some other club will be interested. One more chance was what he wanted, and this is it.”
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