Never a quitter, Hargrove's exit at midseason prompts questions

Nothing about this makes sense.

Mike Hargrove isn't a quitter.

He worked hard for everything he got in this game. Grew up with a small-town ethos that believed your word was your honor and you saw things through, no matter how difficult the circumstance.

He got to the big leagues the hard way, with calluses and skinned knees, bruises and sweat. He made it from Perryton, Texas, through NAIA ball, to the big leagues. Hit .290 in 12 Gibraltar-solid seasons. He played in an All-Star Game. He was the consummate pro.

There's no quitting in baseball. And Hargrove isn't a quitter.

But Mike Hargrove managed his final game for the Mariners on Sunday. He quit, abruptly and without warning.

"I don't expect anyone to understand this. I really don't," Hargrove said after Sunday's typically taut 2-1 victory over Toronto, the Mariners' eighth win in a row. "Sometimes I don't understand it myself."

It doesn't make sense.

If he were a quitter, Hargrove would have run from that crabcake circus in Baltimore. He managed there for four seasons through personnel decisions by meddlesome owner Peter Angelos that grew curiouser and curiouser. He wouldn't have kept fighting that good fight with those really bad teams.

Hargrove made his reputation in the game as a grinder, and real grinders don't walk away in the middle of the season. Real grinders don't leave the game when they're only 57. They don't leave before the job is done.

Real grinders don't cause this kind of distraction for their team at this point in the season. They demand their players never quit on them and they never quit on their players.

At nearly the halfway point in the season, Hargrove should be the leader in the clubhouse for manager of the year. Why quit now? Why leave this team in the lurch when it is making a serious and surprising run toward its first playoff appearance since 2001?

The Mariners are playing too well for Hargrove to feel burned out, but in this Sunday-morning shocker, he announced he was leaving.

He left his team, which hasn't had a winning season since 2003, a mere four games out of first in the American League West and only 2 ½ games out of the wild card.

He left this team when it was 12 games above .500 and playing the most exciting, sound baseball we've seen in this city since 2001.

And the nature of this leave-taking begs too many questions.

Did Hargrove want a three-year contract extension the Mariners were unwilling to give him? Did he want more of a voice in personnel decisions? Is it possible Hargrove got tired of the tango he had to play with the front office and felt there were no options left for him?

At an emotional morning news conference, he emphatically dispelled all of these conspiracy theories.

"You can't control what people think. I'm just telling you the truth," he said. "There's nothing sinister."

Hargrove said he had been feeling this slow burn since the middle of June, but he should at least have waited until the All-Star break. He should have taken those days away to think about whether he really wanted to walk away.

"The highs weren't high enough and the lows were too low," Hargrove said.

That quote sounds as if it's coming from a man who is depressed. And maybe that depression caught Hargrove by surprise. This announcement could be as simple and as complicated as that.

Let's face it, he never seemed happy here. He wasn't embraced by the fans, who wanted more emotion from him. Regular calls for his firing started midway through his first season.

He suffered, as did his predecessor Bob Melvin, from all the unfair comparisons to Lou Piniella.

But why leave now, when the team has turned around, when the city finally is warming to him?

His team is playing the game the right way. Small ball. Long ball. Serving notice to the rest of the American League.

In the bottom of the ninth of a 1-1 game, Jose Guillen singled under the glove of Toronto third baseman Troy Glaus, scoring Adrian Beltre with the winning run.

Hargrove turned and hugged each one of his coaches, then in front of the dugout, he hugged each one of his players. Guillen held him so tightly, it looked as if he wouldn't let his manager leave.

Isn't this why managers manage? For wins like this? For the shared feeling of success a game like this brings? For this kind of joy that can't be duplicated in the real world?

But on the first of July, when his team and the city were beginning to feel the fever of a summer-long playoff run, Mike Hargrove, a baseball lifer, left.

It didn't make sense.

Steve Kelley: 206-464-2176 or skelley@seattletimes.com.