If you were to google the words "Jim Riggleman" over the last 72 hours, I would say ninety percent of the articles you would find would be somewhere between "negative" and "complete character assassination". Well, I finally found a positive piece about the now departed Washington Nationals manager, courtesy of former big leaguer and Riggleman player Doug Glanville.
Riggleman has been called "selfish," and I get why that would be said. In baseball, you are never supposed to quit anything, even if you feel that everyone is waiting for you to fall on your face to justify their itch to push you out the door. Riggleman would say all the time, "Play for the name on the front, not for the name on the back." It mattered to him that he could feel proud to carry the banner of the team's name. But when he felt that instead of his name on the back of that jersey, he had a knife sticking out of it, the name on the front mattered less to him. He fought for me during my career, and from that experience, I know he will put his neck out there to follow what he believes to be right, even if he risked drowning in the river he was trying to get us all across in the process.
That is the closing paragraph of Glanville's post, and as he notes, he is biased towards Riggleman in a positive way, from his rookie platoon playing days on the Chicago Cubs. I don't necessarily agree with Glanville's assessment of Riggleman in the article, but maybe that's just because I don't like a mediocre manager quitting on his team halfway through the season WHEN THEY ARE THE HOTTEST TEAM IN BASEBALL.
Riggleman should print this out, laminate it and stick it on his fridge, because this is probably the nicest thing that is going to be written about him for a long time.