Remembering the Lou Piniella Show in Seattle

It took a long, long time for me to learn what a baseball manager does. I still don't really get it. They set lineups, they sometimes tell runners when to steal or batter to bunt, they make pitching changes and defensive substitutions and bring in pinch hitters—but there are long stretches of games, especially in the early and middle innings, when they're basically not doing anything but leaning against the dugout rail, chewing gum (or tobacco if they're "old school") and gazing out at the field like a homeowner watching the crew of landscapers he hired. If you like, you can say that managers "set the tone" for their teams and act in some ineffable way as "leaders"; if you're sabermetrically inclined, however, you might believe that managers have very little effect on whether their teams win.

All of that is to say I don't know if Lou Piniella was a good manager, even though I grew up watching him lead the best Seattle Mariners teams of all time. There was the 1995 "Refuse to Lose" squad that came from out of nowhere in August to win the American League West and beat the New York Yankees in the playoffs thanks to what's still the most dramatic moment in Seattle sports history. There was also the 2001 "Bret Boone Is an MVP Candidate All of a Sudden" team, which won a record-tying 116 games in the regular season but choked disastrously against the Yankees in the ALCS. The club has never made the World Series, but the only times the Mariners have reached the playoffs they've been managed by Piniella. You can credit Sweet Lou for all those wins, or you can look at the talent he had playing for him—Jay Buhner, Ken Griffey Jr, and Edgar and Tino Martinez in 1995; Boone, Ichiro, and a dozen guys who had career years in 2001—and conclude that all he needed to do was tell them, "Go out there and play baseball" and he would have raked in plenty of victories. Here's one telling factoid: In his last season with the Mariners, in 2002, they won 93 games, and the next year, with Bob Melvin at the helm, the team won 93 games again.

Piniella is going into the Mariners Hall of Fame this weekend, and it's safe to say that not many Seattleites are digging through stat sheets looking to play down his impact on their team and their town. Judging him by advanced stats, even by his wins and losses, seems unnecessarily dickish, like telling a young couple that love is just a chemical imbalance in their brain. Piniella was more an entertainer than a strategist, a sort of mascot who instead of a costume wore a cloak of barely containable rage.

When you remember Piniella what you remember are the tantrums. Most managers will argue calls, but he'd turn arguments into performance art, spitting, throwing his hat, kicking dirt over home plate, and—his most famous contribution to the managerial cannon—pulling first base free from its moorings and throwing it into the outfield. These weren't premeditated moves he thought up in advance, like a wide receiver's touchdown celebrations; you got the sense that he was so angry he needed to do SOMETHING, and there's not that many objects on a baseball field that can be used as props. He simply took it out on whatever inanimate object he could fit his hands around: What's this? First base? Fuck this, whatever it is! Fuck it straight to hell! The crowd loved it, they always loved it—they'd chant his name as he worked himself up into a lather abusing a stone-faced umpire, and when you got back from a Mariners game where he blew up you'd talk about his tantrum like you had seen a historically long home run. Lou Piniella wasn't a manager, he was an event.

It wasn't an act, though, that's important to remember. He seethed with menace when the cameras weren't on, too, taking out his temper on young players—he had a reputation for burning out pitching prospects—and terrorizing reporters in his underwear during terse question-and-answer sessions in his office. Even in his playing days Piniella had the "red ass," as Jim Bouton wrote in Ball Four. He was lantern-jawed, sturdy as a pile of bricks, one of those guys who stares you down if he thinks you've disrespected him and is always the first one to take a swing in a fight. His anger eventually mellowed out with age, but it took a long, long time. In 1992, two years after managing the Cincinnati Reds to a World Series title, he got into a locker room scrape with Rob Dibble, his own reliever:

Unsurprisingly, that was his last year with the Reds. He was in Seattle for the next season and hadn't learned to restrain himself—in a June game against the Baltimore Orioles, he flew into a rage after a benches-clearing brawl and got himself ejected:

He "only" got ejected 65 times in his 23 years as a manager, but every time he made the most of it, tapping into his id the way most of us can't. In Seattle, a city known for residents who are polite but reserved to the point where it's tough to befriend them, seeing a grown man get angry in public is a pretty novel sight. No wonder Piniella was so beloved in that town: He was a totem of fury who let fly with every spiteful, vicious thought in his head when the mood struck him. When he fell into one of his fits, the fans chanted a low, approving LOOUUUUUUUUUU because he was breaking the taboo against anger they had placed on themselves. For years, they had endured having one of the worst teams in baseball in silent resignation, and now here was a guy who got righteously pissed off when a call didn't go his way.

It doesn't have to be this way, you don't have to put up with this losing crap, we are going to claw and fight and bellow to make our unhappiness known, even when it doesn't make sense—that was Sweet Lou's message to Mariners fans. I don't know that his presence had anything to do with the emergence of a decent baseball team in Seattle, but I do know that we loved him the way no town has ever loved an angry old man who kept making a fool of himself.

Harry Cheadle gets all misty-eyed thinking about The Double. Follow him on Twitter.