Talkin' Baseball: Fire Ken Macha!

We’re almost two weeks into the ’09 season, and things have proceded as many fans expected. Through the first 12 games, the Brewers scored an average of 4.1 runs, which is good. We’ve also given up an average of five runs, which is significantly less good. We all figured that this team would hit like Ali and pitch like your grandmother on glaucoma medication, but to see the team perform exactly as it appears on paper has been more than a little alarming. Yes, it’s early, but it’s not like Jeff Suppan is going to suddenly morph into Jake Peavy by May. And when Brewers hitters take their inevitable dive in the dog days of July and August, things could get really ugly.

I know I’m getting way ahead of myself here. The baseball season lasts approximately 57 years, so drawing any conclusions from what we’ve seen so far is a fool’s game at best, and comically misguided at worst. Then again, I am an enormous fool, and on my best days I’m comically misguided, so I can’t help extrapolating what we’ve already seen to the rest of the season. I’m totally one of those dopes who started dreaming of Rickie Weeks—Rickie Weeks!—leading us to the promised land after that dramatic 4-3 victory over the Cubs in the home opener April 10. Then I began to dread a six-month siege of desperation and depression when the Crew followed up the win with a four-game losing streak. Intellectually, I realize this is dumb, but emotionally I can’t imagine anything about this team being different from the all-hit and no-pitch status quo we have now.

Part of my problem is that I’m an obsessive planner; just as I like to plot out my week with the kind of precision normally reserved for presidential visits and OCD patients, I’d like to know how I’m going to feel about my baseball team in September by the middle of April. For instance, am I going to hate Ken Macha’s guts by then? The new manager hasn’t done much thus far to influence my opinion one way or the other—I certainly don’t blame the Brewers' struggles on him (yet), and while he seems like an amiable guy, so far he has stirred my emotions like a heaping glass of lukewarm water.

Looking for guidance, I decided to check out "Ken Macha Is A Moron & I Hate Him", a charmingly vulgar—is there any other kind?—blog written by seriously disgruntled Oakland Athletics fans “Roman, “Greg,” and “Adam Gretz” from 2005 to 2006. Actually, “seriously disgruntled” might be underselling the blog a bit—imagine if Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver wrote in his journal about baseball instead of murdering pimps and hating Cybil Shepherd, then you get a sense of its psychotically angry tone. (Also insert about 2,395 more “fucks.”) 

As the title suggests, "Ken Macha Is A Moron & I Hate Him" is a tad critical of the manager not so lovingly referred to as “Cacha.” I’m not sure why the blog is still up, since Cacha—sorry, Macha—hasn’t been with the A’s since October 2006. (The blog has been updated once since then: When the Brewers hired Macha, they posted the acronym “Manager And Complete Horse’s Ass.”) But I’m glad "Ken Macha Is A Moron & I Hate Him" is there because it offers a handy preview of what Brewers fans might be feeling if our early stumbles turn into a season-long slog.

Based on what I’ve read of "Ken Macha Is A Moron & I Hate Him," here are three reasons why I (and you) might be screaming for his head in a just few short months.

1. He’s not very smart
Actually, “not very smart” is an overly nice way of saying that Macha is “mostly retarded, instead of completely.” Unfortunately, there’s little in the way of evidence on the blog supporting this claim of marginal mental retardation: no IQ numbers, no test scores, not even a multitude of hilariously dumb-ass quotes. The best “Ken Macha Is A Moron” can muster is the “Ken Macha Holiday Song Contest”, which includes heart-warming tunes like “Macha The Red Nosed Asshole” and “Macha Ride.” (Sample lyric, presumably sung to the tune of “Sleigh Ride”: “Listening to your interviews makes me want to spew turds / my world crumbles as you stumble and mumble your words / what did we ever do to deserve a fuck like you, Ken? / every September you engender our pitiful chokejobs again.”) Speaking of chokejobs …

2. He totally fucks up the post-season
Wait a minute: Macha’s teams actually play in the post-season? In a city where baseball fans hang their hats on making the playoffs once since Ronald Reagan left office, we should dream of being in a position to fuck up in October on a regular basis. But “everywhere Macha goes, his teams disappoint, underachieve, and just plain don't meet expectations,” mostly by exiting the playoffs in the first round.

Apparently, the problem with Macha is that he doesn’t do enough managin’ and shit. “DO SOMETHING!” pleads one post. “Don't just stand there chewing on your Juicy Fruit while we're getting our asses handed to us. I hate you so damn much. Everything you do pisses me off. I want to punch you in your gut. I want to kick you in your shin. I want to swing you in circles by your waistband. I want to squirt lime juice in your eyes.” (It goes on for a while after that, but I think you get the idea.)

3. He won’t go away
The worst thing about Macha, according to “Ken Macha Is A Moron,” is his steadfast refusal to get hit by a bus, be trampled by elephants, or suffer some other horrible fate that would prevent him from being a baseball manager. “Seriously, I would rather exhume Thomas Malthus' 200 year old rotting corpse and repeatedly skullfuck the bastard than ever see Macha the moron mismanage more games, lineups, and pitching staffs. And I'm straighter than a damn line.” Obviously.

So, there you have it. We laugh at this display of spittle-spewing rage now, but will Macha drive Brewers fans to sexually assault dead people in the near future? We shall see.