Don Zimmer's little discussed legacy

When a man spends 66 years in baseball, everyone will have a story. Here's mine.

There used to be such a thing as "colorful" characters in baseball. Men who added something to the game that couldn't be measured sabermetrically, or with any other metric. Typically, I have little use for such judgments as I feel they often attempt to measure something that by definition is unmeasurable, and there's a built-in contradiction from the get-go.

Don Zimmer was one of those guys -- not a particularly gifted player or manager, but still an historic one. He compiled over 3500 plate appearances in the major leagues. Not mentioned among the most brilliant managerial tacticians, he also managed four teams and over 1700 games.

Here's my addition to the oeuvre of Don Zimmer stories -- the number of times he was ejected as a player, manager or coach:

Clearly, Zimmer was a man of strong opinions and had a willingness to share them with umpires no matter his role. Being tossed 12 times as a coach is something remarkable, the third-highest total of coaching ejections for as long as Retrosheet has data, which goes back to around 1900 (behind Cal Ripken Sr. with 23 and George Myatt with 13).

Oddly enough, last night both Rick Renteria of the Cubs and Robin Ventura of the White Sox were ejected, only the seventh time managers of both Chicago teams were ejected on the same day. With 12 hours of hindsight, I'd like to think both did it as an homage to Zimmer. Thanks for the memories, Don, I'll never forget the pleasant surprise that were the 1989 Cubs.

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