Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo is real good at getting ejected from a baseball game. A fellow ought to get his dang money's worth; there are too many managers out there—sleepy, retiring types, or the constitutionally frail—who do not or cannot make a truly cinematic moment out of an argument. Fans and players alike appreciate a manager who kicks huge ass. At least one Washington National, for example, is reportedly chafing at the recent passivity of the team's cardiovascularly challenged head guy. Lovullo will not leave his men wanting: When he marches out there, odds are someone is going to take a reaming for the ages.
And Lovullo, God bless him, doesn't need much of an invitation. Only seven active managers have been tossed more; Lovullo, in his ninth season as a manager, is already in the top 100 all-time, with 22 career ejections. By way of comparison, it took Hall-of-Famer Hughie Jennings 16 seasons to get to 24. Lovullo may not have Bobby Cox's prodigious, historic pace—a fantastic 162 career ejections in 30 seasons—but then this is a different era. As broken down in a 2019 New York Times story, the manager meltdown is considered somewhat déclassé in the modern game. "I tell [today's umpires], 'You guys are lucky you weren’t around 20, 30 years ago," said Reds manager Terry Francona, who has been run just 51 times in 23-plus major-league seasons. Giving a volcanic helping of The Business to those antagonists in the blue shirts was, in earlier times, considered an important part of the job, not just to address umpire performance but to inspire one's own team out of mid-summer ennui.
Your garden-variety nerd-ass Statcast merchant of the modern game struggles to imagine solutions to on-field problems that are not solved by a freshly calibrated Trajekt machine. Certainly he lacks the juice for fully penetrating an umpire's battle-tested emotional armor. "They come out to argue, and they have no clue what to actually say," recalled retired umpire Dale Scott, who issued 90 ejections over 32 seasons, of today's flustered calculator casuals. Pathetic!
Certainly no one could level this withering own at Lovullo. Whatever else must be said about the man, he's got moves. Back in April, after infuriatingly terrible and confrontational umpire Laz Díaz made a horrible call from first base and then all but taunted Lovullo's pitcher, the Arizona manager stormed over there and unleashed total hell, bug-eyed and frothing, bellowing and waving his arms in the manner of one who is bent on discouraging a stubborn grizzly. It wasn't personal, according to Lovullo: Díaz simply stumbled into the trip-wire, and it was Lovullo's role to freakin' kerplode. "I go back a long way with Laz; I've known Laz since, probably going on 30 years," said a calmed Lovullo, after his team secured a win. "I'm just fighting for space, fighting for what I think is right ... It's a very emotional game."
Lovullo was even better on Wednesday. The Diamondbacks recently called up baseball's fourth overall prospect, infielder Jordan Lawlar. Lawlar had a rough time as a call-up last season, batting .129 with a hateful .335 OPS in 14 games, and he has not had very much joy so far this season, reaching base once in two games and committing an error in one of his first three chances with the glove. He had a tough moment in the field against the Giants yesterday, colliding on the basepaths with San Francisco's Christian Koss, who overran second base advancing on an infield single and was tagged out while lying in the dirt in the fetal position. The umpires huddled and decided that Lawlar interfered with Koss by, uhh, hip-checking him while standing where he really had no business.
Without the benefit of replay, and wanting both to protect his rookie and to preserve his team's precious two-run lead over a division rival, Lovullo jogged out there seeking confrontation. Triple-A call-up umpire Edwin Jimenez was closest to the controversial play and would've made sense as the focus of Lovullo's fury, but fill-in crew chief Mark Ripperger intercepted Lovullo near Arizona's dugout, in the manner of Tom Hallion heroically putting his own ass in the jackpot to deflect a seismically unhappy Terry Collins in the greatest baseball thing that has ever happened. Naturally Lovullo let Ripperger have it, and was tossed. It was then that Lovullo decided that, no, in fact it would be the entire damn crew of umpires getting tossed. You're outta here! All of you!
"In the heat of the moment, it wasn't adding up to me," Lovullo said in the postgame. "I felt like they were just trying to cover themselves a little bit." And no two-bit makeshift crew of trumped-up hall monitors is going to cover themselves at the expense of Lovullo's boys! Hit the bricks! I admire in particular that Lovullo managed to pull in a totally innocent Nic Lentz, who showed an exasperated, open-palmed What did I do? to the Diamondbacks manager before letting loose with some cathartic retaliatory hell-raising of his own.
By now you know that it is not a manager's responsibility in these moments to be right. Sometimes a kick of pure collective angst needs to find an available ass, and just as it is sometimes the job of the manager to wield the boot, it is sometimes the job of the umpire to provide the buttcheeks. Matters of fact can be sorted in the aftermath. In this case, Lovullo is big enough to acknowledge that, hey, it's a good thing (this one time) that he does not in fact have the authority to eject umpires. "They got it right," Lovullo admitted after the game, which Arizona eventually won, 8-7. "They're really good. Umpires are good. And I stand corrected." Corrected, but hopefully not dissuaded. Give 'em hell, chief.
