Jim Riggleman’s abrupt resignation shows how impulsive men can be if they feel disrespected.
When a man feels disrespected, rational decision-making is often overwhelmed by an impulsive need to ratchet up his sense of self-worth, an attempt to bring the perceived order of things back into equilibrium. It’s hard-wired into men’s central processing units and helps explain why Tommy shot Spider in Goodfellas, why men get into road-rage incidents, and why Tom Riggleman quit as manager of the Washington Nationals on Thursday, the same day he’d boxed himself into a corner by telling general manager Mike Rizzo that if the team didn’t pick up his contract option for 2012 by the end of the work day, he was walking away from his $600,000 job. The Nationals won the day’s game, and when Riggleman met with Rizzo afterwards, Rizzo said the team wasn’t prepared at this juncture to offer Riggleman job security beyond 2011. So Riggleman quit.
“I’m 58,” Riggleman told reporters after his resignation. “I’m too old to be disrespected.”
Riggleman had a record of 140-172 in Washington, and has a career mark of 662-824.
“I know I’m not Casey Stengel,” he said, “but I do feel like I know what I’m doing. It’s not a situation where I felt like I should continue on such a short leash.”
He walked away from the hottest team in baseball, a squad that had just won 11 of its last 12 games to push the team’s record over .500 in the competitive National League East. Naturally, his resignation prompted a lot of passionate reaction.
♦◊♦
Joe Lemire of Sports Illustrated wrote, “Riggleman, who has been a major-league manager for 12 years and for four clubs, leaves the Nationals post with little chance of ever managing in the big leagues again. He deserted his team, and it’d be hard to imagine this seeming publicity stunt will be received well in front offices.”
National outfielder Jason Werth said, “It’s not going to change anything in here. We’re the ones that have been making the pitches and hitting the balls and winning the ballgames, so we’re going to keep going.”
Werth’s reaction comes from the issue of respect: Riggleman felt disrespected by the Nationals’ front office, so he quit in an effort to reassert some sense, however perverted, of control. Werth obviously feels that Riggleman disrespected his players by walking away, so Werth makes the catty remark that managers don’t really win games anyway; it’s ballplayers like him that are truly important.
A decision like Riggleman’s summons mixed emotions. On one hand, his impetuous act seems childish, irrational, and self-wounding. On the other hand, most of us can relate to that urge to lash out when we feel dissed, to salve our bruised ego by attempting to hurt others to the same degree that we’ve felt wronged. Representative of this type of response was the headline on The Big Lead, a prominent sports blog, which read, “Jim Riggleman Resigned. He’s a Man of His Word. And Gangster.” The subhead read, “Jim Riggleman pulled off one of the best ‘I quit’ moves in MLB history Thursday.” The story itself included this riff:
Jim Riggleman, coach of the surprisingly-hot Washington Nationals (won 11 of 12!), resigned this afternoon in the coolest way possible: He told his general manager, Mike Rizzo, that if his contract issue wasn’t resolved today, he was resigning after the game.
The Nationals won this afternoon, 1-0, on a Lance Nix walk-off sacrifice fly.
Then, Riggleman resigned.
Bad.
Ass.
Riggleman’s interview, just shown on ESPN, went this way: “You have to feel like there’s a commitment to you. I just didn’t feel that way.”
Some of us will look at the reaction, “Bad. Ass,” and think, “Oh, grow up. Riggleman isn’t some paragon of admirable masculinity. He showed himself to be a selfish little boy who was lashing out when he didn’t get his way.”
And yet others will look at that reaction, “Bad. Ass,” and nod their heads in affirmation. Maybe you’ll experience both of these reactions in quick succession.
Riggleman’s managerial salary was among the lowest in baseball, and his decision to abruptly resign is not something that can really be discussed rationally or dispassionately. Too much emotion was involved in his decision, and an equal amount is demanded of observers who want to make some sense of it—who want to bring some sense of balance back to a situation that was created when a man felt disrespected.
Is this dynamic unique to men? No, women obviously experience similar emotions when they feel unappreciated. And so it’d be interesting to know what a woman thinks of Riggleman’s decision. If you can find a female (sportswriter or otherwise), who has a strong reaction to Riggleman’s move, please send it along.
—Photo MissChatter/Flickr
Conceivably ironic twist: one of the most commented-on moments of Jim Riggleman’s tenure was a press conference last year in which he was hounded for being indecisive. He admitted to having a hard time deciding on whatever the issue was, and then “explained” himself by saying, “I am a woman.”