Three paragraphs on Jim Riggleman

It would seem that the Nationals intend to bring back Jim Riggleman for another year of exciting Washington Nationals Baseball. At 34 games under the .500 mark over the past season-and-a-half, Riggleman has had a moderate amount of success in the Nats' managerial seat, at least relatively speaking -- Manny Acta's group was 35 games under .500 when he was canned half-way through last season. If you're roughly as far below .500 in 1 1/2 seasons as Acta was in a half-season, then you're doing pretty okay, once you input the Acta normalization factor.

Riggleman has his positives and his negatives. On the one hand, the Riggler has "brought accountability back into the clubhouse" for the first time since the somewhat gruff days of Frank Robinson. On the other hand, it appears impossible to demonstrate from an absence of evidence that Riggleman handled Steven Strasburg absolutely perfectly. Balancing the equities here, I think most agree that John McGraw would be a better choice, but that would require a time machine.

My thought on Riggleman is this. Late last week, Bruce Chen racked up his 10th victory of the season. That leads the Royals, which means Chen has more wins on the season than Zack Greinke, which means pretty much nothing. Still, it does give Chen a second season of double-digit victories, five years after his first. Chen's seasonal won/lost records since his debut in 1998: 2-0, 2-2, 7-4, 7-7, 2-5, 0-1, 2-1, 13-10, 0-7, 0-0, didn't pitch in MLB, 1-6, 10-7. Chen now has 46 career wins, exactly half in the aforementioned pair of double-digit-victory seasons. What this means is that Chen is always available, is sometimes the choice of a team with a dire need and nothing better available, and is vaguely capable of competency when he does get the chance. That's why Chen's been around 12 seasons, and that's why the Royals brought him back this year despite the fact that he went 1-6 for them last year. And Jim Riggleman is essentially the manager's version of Bruce Chen.