When former Phillies shortstop Jimmy Rollins came to town yesterday, the media was pretty eager to ask Rollins what he thought about a number of topics. One topic that got a good deal of attention was Rollins' relationship with departed Phillies manager Ryne Sandberg. To Rollins, Sandberg was simply a quiet person who never really was able to manager the various personalities in the clubhouse.
Rollins told reporters, including John Finger of CSN Philly, that Sandberg had trouble dealing with various personalities:
“I talked about that with Ruben after the season that it was something that he needed to work on because he is Ryne Sandberg and he is the manager,” Rollins said. “So as a manager, you have to deal with 25 personalities. Actually, it’s more because guys get hurt and guys come up (from the minors).
"So it isn’t just about the X's and O's and executing the game plan. When you manage, you have to manage the players. You manage the game during the game time. In the meantime, you have to manage the players. That’s something that I spoke with Ruben about before I got traded over, and I know he said that that was something that he wanted to mention to Ryne.
“Hopefully, that was a tip. But obviously whatever happened over here (in Philadelphia), he took it upon himself to say he didn’t really want to be a part of it anymore.”
What about Rollins' own relationship with Sandberg? Rollins found Sandberg to be "very quiet", and alluded to personality differences with Sandberg:
“It was a rough place,” Rollins said. “But that is where communication comes in, when you are able to talk things through and fix those rough patches or not even have them. But it just didn’t work out that way.”
One of former Phillies manager Charlie Manuel's greatest strengths was managing the various personalities in the clubhouse, though often Manuel was criticized for not being a strong in-game manager.
Mike Sielski of the Philadelphia Inquirer summed it up this way: being a Hall of Famer, Sandberg expected the respect automatically.
In essence, Rollins painted a picture of Sandberg as a manager who expected players to comply with what he said or did, if he said anything to them at all, merely because he was Ryne Sandberg.
We saw the quiet Sandberg eventually erupt after Ken Giles pushed back at a managerial decision to intentionally walk a batter on June 13 in Pittsburgh.
That was when we all knew: Sandberg did not have the players' respect. In a lot of ways, the modern player is much different than Sandberg's era. The players probably should have shown Sandberg respect for all he did for the game, and for riding the buses through the minor leagues to have his shot to manage. But we know Jimmy Rollins all too well, and in 2015, Jimmy Rollins gets to be Jimmy Rollins in Major League Baseball. And the managerial Ryne Sandbergs of baseball do not work out.
