“What’s wrong with Tommy?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, Tommy needs to get his ass back out there.”

Rodon doesn’t remember that little tempest. “Jirsch probably was so good,” he says, “he would have just seemed like a normal manager. I probably didn’t even realize he was out there.”

Now Jirschele stood in the coach’s box in Kannapolis. In lieu of the statistical bibles available to his major-league counterparts, he had to do his own scouting. He pulled a stopwatch from his back pocket, measuring the time it took Lakewood’s starting pitcher, JoJo Romero, to deliver the ball to the catcher. The average pitcher takes about 1.3 seconds to complete his motion. If a pitcher is quicker than that, it’s harder to steal on him; a slower pitcher becomes a target. Romero was inconsistent, sometimes taking 1.1 seconds to deliver, sometimes taking as long as 1.5 when he really put his body into it. Jirschele was in the middle of filing away that fragment of future intelligence when his leadoff hitter, Joel Booker, beat out an infield hit. Jameson Fisher, batting second, then laced a double to center. Booker’s fast, and as he raced around second he was thinking he might score. But Jirschele elected to hold him up at third. Some of the fans in attendance booed. Jirschele had received his first catcalls.

His father’s first season with the Royals ended with a similar decision under far different circumstances. In the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 7 of the World Series, Kansas City was trailing the San Francisco Giants, 3-2. With two out and nobody on, Alex Gordon lifted a ball that fell just out of reach of center fielder Gregor Blanco. After the ball skipped by Blanco, left fielder Juan Perez, who was out of position because he thought Blanco was going to make the catch, kicked it around the warning track. Gordon kept churning around the bases, nearly tripping over second on his way to third. Perez finally corralled the ball and threw on a hop to Brandon Crawford, San Francisco’s strong-armed shortstop. He turned just as Gordon rounded third. Jirschele held him up. The next hitter, Salvador Perez, popped out. The game, series and season were over, the tying run stranded 90 feet from home.

I was at the game, watching it with the extended Jirschele family. I’d written about Mike’s long journey to the majors that spring and committed the cardinal journalistic sin of falling in love with my subject. It was crushing, seeing Mike walk around the Giants’ celebration to get from third base to the Kansas City dugout. By the time he emerged from the clubhouse, he had already been asked several times about his call. He was baffled by the emerging debate about it. Later that night, the family piled into a hotel room near the ballpark for a commiseration drunk, and Mike explained his decision again and again, trying to figure out whether he had been wrong. (Future independent analysis proved that he had been right.) I was stunned by everything he considered in the 13 seconds it took Gordon to reach him. He based his call, at least in part, on how cleanly Crawford received that hop from Juan Perez, exactly where the ball ended up in his glove, in the heart of the pocket. Mike also looked at Crawford’s feet, how well positioned he was to make the throw home. In some ways, 36 years of experience factored into that fateful stop sign.

For Justin Jirschele, his first decision — to hold Joel Booker in the first inning of his first game — was equally justified. He can make a case for everything he does, which is one of the things the White Sox like about him: He’s a rational actor. He might not always be right, but he always has his reasons, and even baseball’s most feel-driven reactionaries like to think that at least a little logic is at work. There was nobody out (“That’s the biggest one, nobody out,” he said after), and seeing his lead runner gunned down at the plate for the first out would be no way to start his career. “We had the chance for a huge inning,” he said. Booker eventually made it home when the Kannapolis cleanup hitter, Brandon Dulin, grounded a ball to second.

Booker’s run proved to be the only one of the inning, but it will always be Jirschele’s first. The lead it provided was temporary. Everything else about that run was permanent. His managerial career was no longer potential, or only potential; now he had the beginnings of a history, which meant he could start being judged.