Kept His Gun in Quiet Seclusion, Such a Humble Man

Now these thugs actors all of a sudden

[Marlins general managers] hustle backwards all of a sudden

-Rick Ross, "Rich Forever"

I never thought that random hillbilly Dan Jennings would become a beloved recurring character on this blog.

I'd never heard of him until last year, when he parlayed his position as general manger of the Marlins into a demotion and termination. That's what we call "hustling backwards." With a combination of good intentions and incompetence, Dan Jennings has made himself the platonic ideal of hustling backwards, and now he works for the Nats!

Now that we're on the same side, I hope he doesn't take it personally that I spent a fair amount of 2015 referring to him as a random hillbilly and comparing him to Billy Carter. I don't think he will. Whatever his faults, Jennings seems like a good-natured fellow, and he doesn't strike me as the kind of person who would take "hillbilly" as an insult.

In fact, he seems like the kind of guy who not only knows all the words to the song from "Dukes of Hazzard" but tries to live by them. He's just a good ol' boy, never meaning no harm, etc.

Dan Jennings on his way to work

It's worth recounting what is, for all its dopiness, the most unusual baseball career since Rick Ankiel's:

1. Dan Jennings grows up somewhere in Waffle House country. He makes his way the only way he knows how, even though it's just a little bit more than the law will allow. He probably plays baseball at some level.

2. Dan Jennings winds up working for the Marlins, straightenin' the curves and flattenin' the hills.

3. Dan Jennings becomes general manger of the Marlins. I assume that this is because everyone ahead of him quit or got fired, but still. As GM, he is called upon to fire manager Mike Redmond.

4. Dan Jennings exhibits a deep-seated understanding of the spirit and purpose of the Marlins organization: In an effort to prevent the team from having to pay another manager, he offers to step in and manage the team himself. It's an unusual move, going from general manager to regular manager and expecting to be kicked back up to GM when you're done. It beats all you ever saw.

5. Dan Jennings isn't any good as manager. Maybe it's not his fault, but I bet Mike Redmond felt pretty good about it.

6. Having done his part to save his loathsome organization from paying an extra salary, Dan Jennings asks for his job back. He is fired.

7. Dan Jennings gets a job with the Nationals as special assistant to the general manager. There are nine special assistants to the general manager, so there's no telling what he's actually doing. Maybe he's getting coffee. Maybe he's running moonshine. The mountain might get him, but the law never will.

So there's Dan Jennings' bizarre baseball career arc. From GM to field manager to unspecified front office job. Based on his demonstrated tendencies, we can assume he's using his face time with Mike Rizzo to hustle himself backwards into a bullpen catcher job. After that? The ground's the limit for Dan Jennings. Maybe he'll start blogging.

Happy Birthday Rome

Rick Ankiel continues to impress. Not as a ballplayer, because he's been awful, but as a story. Not only is he in many important ways just like a dinosaur, he appears to be just a heck of a nice guy.

During his first trip back to St. Louis as an opposing player, Ankiel thanked Cardinals fans with an advertisement in the city’s main newspaper.

“Many Thanks to Cardinals’ fans and the City of St. Louis for your support and cheers over the years,” the ad read, with a picture of Ankiel smiling. “It was a privilege and an honor.”

So that's nice, and he even played pretty OK during that series, so we shouldn't mistake his kindness for weakness.

Did you notice how all during the Brewers series Santangelo was whining about all the shifts? The complaints just kind of zipped into one side of my head only to escape from the other side without sticking to anything, but they did increase awareness of all those shifts. Turns out the Brewers are trying something pretty interesting.

The Brewers use spray charts to set their defense, and in many cases, that means defensive shifts that put infielders in odd places. It's common for most teams to position three infielders on the right side to play defense against power-hitting lefties such as David Ortiz, Adam Dunn or Jim Thome.
But thanks to information in spray charts that indicate where a batter is likely to hit a ground ball, the Brewers are taking infield shifts to a different level, sometimes to the extreme. For example, the Brewers' infield shifted against the Nationals' right-handed batters Jayson Werth, Michael Morse, rookie catcher Wilson Ramos and Rick Ankiel, a lefty.

I'll be interested to see if this winds up helping. As the data available to teams become more detailed, we could see some seriously crazy stuff. Only two of the dudes out there are restricted in where they have to be on defense. A maniacally charismatic manager could maybe find seven strong men without well-developed regards for their own safety and have them stand right in front of the plate. I'd think about that for the major league minimum.

Important news in the field of blogging equipment: Costco is apparently selling giant jugs of good-quality bourbon for basically nothing. Now, I live in a police state (as far as liquor blogging paraphernalia goes) bordering another police state. BUT! Say I put up an add on this thing and clicked on it from as many computers as I could get to. Could I write off gas for a road trip to Delaware on my taxes? Something to think about.

Greek for "Ankiel-Lizard"

Ankylosaurus was an herbivorous dinosaur that wielded a club made out of a bunch crap that congealed at the end of its tail. The typical Ankylosaurus found its target only occasionally, but it did enough damage on those occasions to make its Cretaceous contemporaries think twice about messing with it.

Rick Ankiel is an omnivorous outfielder that wields a club made out of wood, which he swings with the wild desperation of an also-ran dinosaur being eaten by a Tyrannosaurus rex. Like his namesake, he seldom finds his target, but he makes sure it hurts when he does.

Rick Ankiel is the Than lan moc cau of baseball. And in my book, that's worth 1000 đồng.

Unlike the Ankylosaurus, which didn't exactly stand out among the really impressive animal life of 100 million years ago, Rick Ankiel has had one of the most compelling stories in baseball.

Ankiel came up with the Cardinals as a pitcher sometime during the pre-Nats dark ages. He boasted one of those preposterous curveballs that in other contexts would cause one to criticize a video game for being unrealistic. Unfortunately, his other go-to pitch was a fastball to the backstop, which he debuted and used perhaps excessively during the 2000 playoffs. It was an awful sight, and Ankiel was sent to the minors to work on some of those things that a pitching coach really can't help you with.

That should have been the last we ever heard of him. He pitched all over the Cards minor league system, threw some of those Desmond-style random target fastballs, and had some injuries. News filtered up through whatever it is that protects the casual baseball fan from every dispatch from Knoxville that he was going to try baseballing from the other side, as an outfielder.

The crazy thing was: it worked. He displayed both the power and whiffiness of an Ankylosaurus' tail, along with the ability to handle the outfield and gun down anyone who remembered his pitching career and figured it was safe to run on him. He hit a three-run home run in his first game back in the majors since his playoff humiliation and went on to have a couple quite decent seasons as a major league outfielder.

Isn't that nuts? I mean, that never happens. One of the things that happens when you watch baseball for a while and take the long view is you see the same stuff happen over and over. Great players get old, bounce around, and retire. Pitchers blow out their arms, try to come back, and retire. GMs rob Dominican teenagers, get investigated by the FBI, and get fired. Ankiel's career path is, if not unique, enough to set him apart from all the other soul patched hopefuls that march over the green fields of baseball every year.

And now he's here, bringing with him his rich backstory and his distinctive, dinosaur-with-a-bone-club-on-its-tail skillset, and I'm all for it. I'd rather watch an interesting player than a good one, and Ankiel's about the most interesting non-Cuban ballplayer out there.