Dejan and Tracy

The Pirates beat writer for the Post-Gazette, Dejan Kovacevic, would never say this in so many words, but it is becoming clear that he considers our new manager a horse's ass. The theme of his story in today's paper is the disparity between Tracy's perception of yesterday's loss and that of everyone else who watched it. That's a theme that Dejan has used before.

"You know that the club has made progress," Tracy said. "Now, the next step we have to take is realizing exactly what it is I'm sitting here talking about and know that, if you're going to be a club that's going to win these games, the mistakes that we saw happen today ... they can't occur. They just can't happen."

As I've pointed out before, realizing exactly what Tracy is sitting there talking about is a challenge in itself. But the larger issue raised by the article is that Tracy's leadership style, again as we have seen before, is to hector his players unreasonably while failing to take public responsibility for his own game decisions.

Jack Wilson and the others players who are quoted in this article don't believe there is anything that Jack could have done to make the play on the goofy little popup that started the rally. Most people also agree that charging an error to Perez on the bunt was ridiculous. There is, in fact, only one thing in that inning that can be second guessed. After Torres came in and hit Cuddyer, Morneau, a lefty, came up to bat with Grabow warming in the bullpen. Tracy left Torres in the game, and Morneau promptly cleared the bases.

The Pirates didn't get anymore runs, so a case could be made that, after the first run scored, nothing else mattered. Maybe that's why Tracy focused his comments on what happened before the Twins took the lead. Still, Tracy's tendency to be publicly critical of anyone other than himself can't be helping the atmosphere in the Pirates clubhouse.