Beyond the basic nine innings of play, any baseball game carries with it many storylines.  Some are obvious to the onlooker; some only become apparent once the action has come to a halt.

As I watched Kansas City Royals closer Joakim Soria pitching in the ninth inning with a 6-4 lead against the Cleveland Indians on Thursday, there was a sense that the potential victory would be worth more to the team than just an extra ‘1’ in the win column.  A demoralising seven-game losing streak needed to be snapped and reigning Cy Young winner Zack Greinke was in line for his first win of the 2010 season at the eighth attempt.

So when Soria threw a perfect pitch on a 3-2 count to Austin Kearns, knee high on the outside corner, only for the home plate umpire to mystifyingly call it a ball, manager Trey Hillman’s show of disapproval in the dugout was entirely understandable.  The game should have been over; instead Jhonny Peralta was stepping up to the plate as the potential tying run. It’s the kind of thing you come to expect when things are going against you and things had been going against the Royals for a long time. 

Too long for Hillman. 

Peralta scorched a 2-2 pitch back towards the pitcher’s mound, but before Royals fans could groan in despair at another promising position being thrown away, Soria had stuck his glove in the air and somehow snatched the comebacker out of the sky.  In one heart-stopping moment, the game was over. 

And although we didn’t know it at the time, so was Hillman’s tenure as manager of the Royals.

Royals General Manager Dayton Moore informed Hillman prior to Thursday’s game that he was being sacked.  The former minor league manager in the Yankees organization, who enhanced his reputation by leading the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters to a Japanese title in 2006, decided to take to the Major League dugout one final time without telling anyone else of his fate.  He finished a winner, but it was an all too rare feeling.

And so the first managerial casualty of the 2010 MLB season was thrown to one side, discarded and immediately replaced by Ned Yost.  Yost himself was unceremoniously dumped from his previous job with the Milwaukee Brewers with less than two weeks of the 2008 season to go, his team having lost four in a row and seeing their grip on the NL wild card under threat.  Both men know how it works: if the team is in trouble then someone has to carry the can and that someone is inevitably the manager.

Hillman was one of the ‘favourites’ to be the first victim of this ritual sacrifice.  The Royals went 75-87 in 2008, his first year with the club, and moved backwards last year with a 65-97 campaign.  A poor start to 2010 was always likely to place his employment in jeopardy and a poor start was always likely considering the roster he had to work with.

Not that Hillman was an innocent victim.  He made some questionable calls with his lineups and use of the bullpen this year and his manner often wasn’t conducive to building up good will to recover from his mistakes.  In fact, Hillman blotted his copy book right from the outset with the Royals. As Joe Posnanski notes:

“One of the first things Trey Hillman did as new manager of the Kansas City Royals was call together a team meeting at home plate after a spring training game. He then yelled at his players in full view of the public — while people were filing out of the stadium — for some base running blunders they had made. Now, some people LOVED that. It showed guts. It showed that he was serious about discipline. Dayton Moore would say that he watched Hillman pull that Herb Brooks stunt and thought, “He’s going to be one of the great ones.”

And that’s fine but … many of the players lost respect for him. They thought he was showboating — he certainly could have yelled at them behind closed doors. They thought he was compensating — he was ACTING the way he imagined a big league manager acts rather than BEING a big league manager. Mostly, they thought he was small-time. A Little League coach. And whatever point he was trying to get across, well, it didn’t take. The Royals were a dreadful base-running team all year”.

It was Hillman’s ‘Phil Brown’ moment (technically it was Phil Brown’s ‘Trey Hillman’ moment as the Royals manager did it first, but never mind).  The ex-Hull City manager memorably embarrassed his team by berating them on the pitch at half time in their Boxing Day 2008 game against Manchester City.

As with Hillman’s act, some claimed it was a great move at the time, but the players disagreed.  The resentment towards Brown festered and although they narrowly avoided relegation in 2009, the damage had been done.  Brown was ultimately placed on ‘gardening leave’ as Hull were relegated back down to the Championship this season with veteran midfielder George Boateng stating:  “the team felt disrespected that day … we were sixth in the league and we didn’t feel like we deserved to be treated like that, like a bunch of kids”.

It’s natural to roll your eyes and mock those poor millionaire players having their feelings hurt and their egos bruised; however, it’s not something that a manager can laugh off so easily.  Even if it’s just a case of masculine pride, it matters a great deal to the manager’s future.  He can come up with clever tactics and deliver Churchillian speeches, but it’s the players that play the game and if they don’t respect the manager, he will struggle to be successful.

Even if you have the players’ respect, success is also dependent on the quality of the roster you are managing.  No one expects Yost to magically turn the Royals into playoff contenders for that very reason.

Jim Tracy received the National League manager of the year award in 2009 due to the way the Rockies turned their season around after he replaced Clint Hurdle.  Tracy deserved credit for getting the team playing again, but Colorado’s charge to the NL Wild Card was only possible because they already had a talented roster in place.  The same can be said for Spurs’ Harry Redknapp, who took over a team with 2 points from 8 games at the start of the 2008/09 season and has now led them to a fourth-placed finish this season.  It’s a notable achievement, but Redknapp didn’t take over a poor team.  Spurs were an expensively assembled squad who were woefully underperforming, knowing that their then manager Juande Ramos was a lame duck who would get the blame.

Of course, one key difference between baseball and football managers is that the former largely has to work with the roster given to them, while the latter generally controls the ins and outs.  So all eyes now fall on General Manager Dayton Moore.  He assembled this poor Royals team, a few honourable exceptions (Greinke, Soria, Billy Butler) aside, and he was the one who placed faith in Hillman to be his manager.  Judging by Posnanski’s post, the Royals ownership made him take action against Hillman and if things don’t improve over the next year or so, Moore will be clearing his desk too.

One piece of advice for him: don’t march your manager out onto the field and start laying into him.  That approach only leads to trouble.

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This week’s early MLB game schedule

We’ve got eleven early games to enjoy this working week.  Highlights include probable starts on Tuesday by Yovani Gallardo, Justin Verlander, Josh Johnson and David Price, plus Adam Wainwright, Ricky Romero and the Reds’ impressive rookie Mike Leake on Thursday.  All times are in BST.

Monday 17 May

No early games

Tuesday 18 May

17.35. Milwaukee at Cincinnati (Yovani Gallardo – Homer Bailey)
17.37. Minnesota at Toronto (Carl Pavano – Shaun Marcum)
18.05. Chicago White Sox at Detroit (John Danks – Justin Verlander)
18.10. Arizona at Florida (TBA – Josh Johnson)
18.10. Cleveland at Tampa Bay (David Huff – David Price)

Wednesday 19 May

No early games

Thursday 20 May

17.05. Kansas City at Cleveland (Luke Hochevar – Mitch Talbot)
18.05. Cincinnati at Atlanta (Mike Leake – Tommy Hanson)
18.05. Chicago Cubs at Philadelphia (Ryan Dempster – Joe Blanton)
18.40. Florida at St. Louis (Nate Robertson – Adam Wainwright)
20.35. Detroit at Oakland (Dontrelle Willis – TBA)
20.40. Toronto at Seattle (Ricky Romero – Jason Vargas)

Friday 21 May

No early games

All the above games can be followed via various resources on MLB.com (Gameday, At Bat with Gameday Audio and MLB.tv), while ESPN America’s MLB schedule can be found here. A complete schedule of MLB games can be found on MLB.com.