Rany:
It’s too soon for a proper inventory of Brenly’s mistakes. I just submitted my ESPN.com column on Game 4, and there I mentioned some or perhaps even most of his gaffes, but I suspect that tomorrow I’ll have a few score e-mail messages from readers pointing out stuff that I missed. Essentially, here’s what it comes down to … Bob Brenly deserves an immense amount of credit for getting the Arizona Diamondbacks to the World Series. But in the World Series, he hasn’t done a single thing to help his team actually win.
In Games 1 and 2, Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson made Brenly look like a genius, assuming of course that your definition of “genius” ain’t too strict. But he left Brian Anderson in Game 3 for too many innings—in a similar situation in the 1979 Series, Chuck Tanner removed Jim Rooker after five innings, Tanner being smart enough to not push his luck—and in Game 3 Brenly didn’t make any real effort to score more than a run at a time. In Game 4, the move that everybody talked about, starting Schilling on three days rest, worked out better than anything else that Brenly did. And in the end, that didn’t work so well, did it?
Larry Dierker was basically run out of Houston because he couldn’t win a postseason series in four tries, but we all know how little that actually says about Dierker’s abilities. I mean, I thought he made at least one truly horrible move in the Division Series, but I doubt if Dierker has ever managed a postseason game as poorly as Brenly managed Game 4. You think Dierker would order a No. 2 hitter with the platoon advantage to bunt three times in one game? I don’t.
The Diamondbacks scored three runs in Game 4, and Brenly didn’t have a damn thing to do with any of them. Well, that’s not precisely true. It was smart to pinch-run Midre Cummings for Erubiel Durazo, because Cummings scored Arizona’s third run and Durazo might not have. But the Snakes could easily have scored more than three runs, if Brenly hadn’t been so obsessed with scoring one run so many different times.
Even after the Diamondbacks won the first two games, I didn’t make any bold predictions about the outcome of the Series. These are, after all, the Yankees, and it was easy, even then, to imagine the champs coming back. Now they’re in the driver’s seat, and the best I can hope for at this point is an exciting Game 7.
