The One Hitter – AJ Pierzynski White Sox Manager

This is the One Hitter, don’t forget to exhale.  With a bad team, brings disgruntled fans and at the end of every season we all question whether the current skipper in charge should be the person manning the controls in the following season.  Ricky Renteria has his faults, 1) Bunts too much, 2) Likes to use 4 pitchers in an inning 3) Benches players as if he’s running a CYO team 4) Plays Adam Engel as if he knows where the bodies are buried……and finally, the team sucks.  We even ran a poll to see if fans approved of Ricky’s 2018 performance, they didn’t.  We also ran a poll to see if fans would replace Ricky with Dusty Baker, they wouldn’t.  So where to go from here.  A common refrain I hear on twitter is “AJ Pierzynski will be our next manager.”

Look, I very much enjoyed AJ Pierzynski as a player, although a further look at his stats leads me to believe that he is undervalued by modern metrics or overvalued by us White Sox fans.  Either way, I think some of this “AJ for manager” shit has to do with a theory that AJ is a super genius.  Most of this thought process comes from two places…..

Nothing pleases me more than watching the replay of this play and the subsequent plays afterwards.  I’m a big fan of a player trying this and and even bigger fan of it fucking working, but this is hardly a genius play.  AJ tried to “angle shoot” all the time and it rarely worked.  This wasn’t the only time he tried this gambit, he just happened to get it to work in a super big spot (which we are all undoubtedly grateful for).  However, angle shooting doesn’t making him a particularly sharp guy when it comes to managing a ballclub.

This one particularly makes my lollercopter go zoizoizoizoi…..for a fan base that constantly makes fun of the crazy shit that Hawk says, we are going to believe this one?  C’mon now.  No doubt major league catchers are generally not dumbasses given the job they have to do, but smartest ever.  Let’s slow down.

Finally, the job, which is managing a major league ballclub is fraught with having to deal with lots and lots of people across various age groups and levels of employ in the organization.  From what we know about AJ, he kept his circle small and was a throbbing prick to nearly everyone else, so this doesn’t seem to really fit into his MO as a person.  Maybe we pump the breaks on AJ for manager for a bit…..maybe forever.