While Walkoff Walk’s Kris Liakos corrently points out Trey Hillman and Fredi Gonzalez recently lost their jobs managing clubs with lower payrolls (and presumably lower expectations) than Lou Piniella’s brutally bad Cubs, MLB Network analyst Kevin Millar revealed he’s been a mentor of sorts to recently suspended Chicago P Carlos Zambrano (above). The Chicago Tribune’s Paul Sullivan caught a bit of Millar’s act yesterday, and with all due respect to the Dancer In The Dark, Dr. Bruno Bettleheim’s got nuffin’ to worry about.
“The main thing he wanted to get across was that at times guys like Carlos, they don’t know how to handle or how to fire up a team,” Millar said on “MLB Tonight.” “There wasn’t one play that made him mad, it was just the whole team and the way they’ve been playing made him mad and then he was frustrated, he said, after his inning and came in and was basically trying to pump all the guys up.”
Millar said Zambrano told him last week he wanted Carlos Silva “to do something to the team because he’s doing well and Carlos Zambrano said that he knew he wasn’t the right guy to do this at this time because of his struggles.”
Millar said he told Zambrano: “Straight up, I said… ‘You can’t say the team’s playing like girls … You can’t say that this whole team that’s not clicking for some reason’ or ‘We’re not playing hard’ because he’s a big part of that problem.
“Now him (Zambrano’s) going to anger management counseling…I think this is the new fad that we’re trying to show that at least there’s an effort there.”