Posted by Travis Rodgers on Jul 21, 2010

Dodgers Disaster #MLB

Dodger blogs, SportsCenter, and anyone else who writes/talks about sports is piling on Don Mattingly this morning for tanking his trip to the mound last night against the Giants.

Mattingly, who had taken over as manager after Joe Torre got ejected, made a trip to the mound to talk to All-Star reliever/eater Jonathan Broxton in the ninth. Broxton was in the process of gagging a Dodger lead and was facing a bases loaded situation.

Mattingly spoke to Broxton, stepped off the dirt surrounding the mound, and then returned to the dirt to answer a question from uber-slappy James Loney.

Giants' manager Bruce Bochy, who knows his way around rule book minutiae, immediately went to the umpire, pointed out that Mattingly leaving the dirt and then returning constituted two trips to the mound and not one, and the umpires forced Mattingly to remove Broxton from the game.

BF George Sherrill, who is so bad that not a single MLB team tried to claim him off waivers earlier in the week, presumably put down his meatball sub, came into the game, promptly surrendered three runs, and the Dodgers went on to lose the game, their sixth straight.

While stupid, this is not on Mattingly. This does not mean that he is incompetent or that he shouldn’t be the next manager when Joe Torre leaves town. What it means is, Bruce Bochy actually won a game for his team.

That never happens. Managers don’t win games. Managers deal with egos, deal with the media, and fill out line-up cards. They change a pitcher, call a hit and run or a double steal, but at the end of the day, the players decide who wins and loses.

Not last night. While the move may be considered horse-bleep by some, it worked. Broxton could have escaped that jam; Sherrill only eats jam. Getting Broxton out of that game was a masterstroke, even if it was a bit weak.

The Giants don’t have a single player that is ‘must-see’. They don’t have one offensive player who is going to keep you in your seat and away from the beer line. Their only chance to win is if their manager can catch someone on a technicality and that is what he did last night.

Bochy’s eight inch head is stuffed with baseball rules and he is going to use every last one of them to win a game if he has to, and why the hell not?

Don Mattingly may have that very 'this was cool in 1997' soul patch working, and Joe Torre may have all those World Series rings courtesy of Derek Jeter, but the guy with the giant melon just played them both.

And one last observation. Tim Lincecum, the joke is over. The 'emo' look may have been OK when you were racking Cy Youngs, not so much when you are getting beat up more often than not. Find a barbershop.