As a sort-of member of the media, I always appreciate it when athletes and coaches give thoughtful, interesting, and non-canned responses to questions.
But there is at least one case when a canned response is absolutely necessary, and that's when things aren't going well (I'm referring to team sports here).
Inevitably, a member of the press will ask a player or coach a question that amounts to, "who is to blame for this slump?" The answer should always be something like this:
It's on all of us to do better. The players, the coaches, the front office, everybody. And I believe we will. But we all have to look in the mirror and be accountable to each other.
If you are going to stray from script, the only acceptable way to do so is to put more blame on yourself. You should never, ever blame others within the organization for the struggles of your team.
Well, that's not the tact Dave Martinez, manager of the Washington Nationals, took when someone asked him about the coaches during a recent 7-game losing streak. He said:
"Never on coaching. Coaches work their asses off every single day. We're not going to finger point here and say it's on coaches. It's never on the coaches. They work hard. The message is clear. All the work is done prior. Sometimes, they gotta go out there and they gotta play the game. It's always been about the players. Always. I played this game a long time. Never once have I blamed the coach for anything. We worked our asses off to get better. They gave us information and we used it. These guys understand what the game is, man. I've never had such a group of coaches that works as hard as they do. They're here due diligently. They go over everything. They sit with players every day. These coaches, they work their assess off. I know every coaching staff is like that. And the players know, sometimes you gotta put the onus on the players. They gotta go out there and they gotta play the game, and play the game the right way. We can't hit for them. We can't catch the ball for them. We can't pitch for them. We can't throw strikes for them. They gotta do that."
Emphasis mine. There you have it, Nationals players. This is all your fault. Your manager decidedly does not have your back. Martinez's coaching staff is "working their asses off" (why, they are there "due diligently!") and you lot are screwing it all up by not hitting, pitching, or fielding well.
This is such a classless thing for Martinez to say that it actually makes me angry. When players criticize coaching, it is treated as a controversy if not an outright scandal, but not so much when it's brass of one kind or another punching down.
To address the elephant in the room, yes of course he is correct that the coaches can't hit, pitch, or throw. That does not mean that, tactically, coaching is making all the right moves, no matter how due diligently they are working. When your season is going sideways it is important to look everywhere for solutions, as opposed to just, "well, they players are sucking."
Martinez's comments aren't just dumb in that it narrows the focus of the problem and therefore the fixes to the problem. It's also dumb in that it's an incredibly demoralizing thing to say. I've seen people defend Martinez' comments as an attempt to light a fire under the players, but while negative reinforcement might help some players, that certainly doesn't make it true for all 25 guys.
I normally dislike it when something I want to write about happens shortly after I've submitted a column and have two weeks to go before I write another one, but in this case, it gives me a little pool of data, and guess what?
You're not going to believe this, guys, but Martinez throwing his players under the bus did not galvanize the players into proving him wrong and straighten the Nationals' ship. The 7-game losing streak became an 11-game losing streak, and all told they are 3-7 since Martinez made his comments.
Martinez is not the first coach to say something like this. In 2023, Pat Fitzgerald, then-head coach of the Northwestern football team, said after a loss after a journo asked about the coaching staff's role in the loss,
"Well, we just take 90 hours and play Wii golf all week, what do you think? Yeah, I go in every game plan and expect it to work, to be quite honest with you. I understand there's 40,000 experts on Twitter that can call plays for me. My e-mail address is #IDontCare, so shoot that out."
You could argue that Fitzgerald's comment was worse, because a whole more coaching goes into football than into baseball. On the other hand, Fitzgerald implicitly blamed the players, while Martinez explicitly did.
Either way, it's important for teams to present a united front when facing the public. We're preached to about this all the time, how fractures and discord need to be kept in the locker room rather than litigated in public.
Martinez's comments were the antithesis of that ethos, and dumb and mean besides. I think the Nats should hire a manager who deals with the press more due diligently.
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