



View photos





LOS ANGELES – They've moved Matt Kemp's left foot back in the batter's box. It's just a few inches but still enough, they hope, to allow Kemp to clear quicker on the harder stuff inside. Over time he'd nudged that foot toward the plate, probably so he'd have a more reasonable shot at sliders on the far side of the strike zone, though it may have been unconscious. Either way, Kemp's setup had become closed, and now his stance is, while not open, at least sneaking up on neutral. The techies upstairs report the ball is coming off Kemp's bat well enough, presumably with the kind of velocity and trajectory that suggest better than one home run, eight extra-base hits and a .277 batting average through more than 150 plate appearances.





This, anyway, is what Dodgers manager Don Mattingly said.

There's more, actually. About balls being top-spun or back-spun and how they carry, about Kemp's habit, Mattingly said, of, "Putting the weight of the world on his shoulders," in which case it wouldn't matter where his feet were, and about that surgically-repaired front shoulder, the role that carries in all of this.

View photos

It's small stuff – an inch or two of dirt or bat or ballpark that are the difference between an offensive anchor in the three-hole and a five-tool superstar in the National League West. Then, you take that inch or two, spread them over a roster, over a disabled list, over a stadium-full of expectations, and they amount to something.

Currently, they add up to the relative instability of Mattingly's employment, or at least the daily public referendum on his employment, because the Los Angeles Dodgers – as a result of all those misplaced inches – have been nothing like anyone figured they'd be.









Therefore, when Mattingly looked across the field this weekend at the Miami Marlins – the 11-win Marlins, the $40 million Marlins, Jeffrey Loria's Marlins, the six managers (including an interim) since mid-2010 Marlins – he might have concluded that of the two jobs, his and Mike Redmond's, his own was less stable. That is, if Mattingly thought about things that way.

[Photos: Strong show of pink in MLB on Mother's Day]

Generally, the conclusion to fire a manager is the call of the uninspired. The domain of the simple-minded. These are the same people who rail against the waiter when the fish of the day runs out. That is, of course, part of the gig, particularly when the gig includes a $230 million payroll, a lot of new season-ticket holders and an ownership group that didn't spend $2.1 billion for a last-place ballclub.