As we noted earlier former Seattle Mariners manager Lou Piniella retired from baseball this week.
Alex over at Seattle Sportsnet offers a premier Piniella sendoff, focusing on the manager’s honesty and candidness.
Lou Piniella was different than most of us. He was what we aspire to be, at least from a human perspective. We conceal and deceive and mislead and fake our way through the everyday. We put on happy faces when we’re dying inside. We scoff when what we’re really trying to do is relate. We play coy when all we want to do is shout our feelings from rooftops, and we always say we’re okay when we’re anything but.
Lou didn’t operate the way the rest of us do. Taught to behave like robots, he couldn’t have been farther from the synthetic. He was real. He caught people off-guard with his candor. But should anyone ever be caught off-guard by the truth? Only in a mixed-up environment, maybe.
The world would be a better place if there were more Lou Piniellas. It’s not a stretch to admit that. And love him or hate him, you can’t deny that he lived and breathed with the type of passion that most of us can only dream of possessing. He made his job an adventure. He kept his coworkers and employees on edge, always expecting the unexpected and never quite knowing what might happen next.
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