Mr. Piniella respectfully disagrees with your judgment

The author vividly remembers the first American League playoff series featuring a wild card team. Ken Griffey, Jr.'s Seattle Mariners got the best of the pre-Jeter Yankees in Game 5 at the now deceased Kingdome. It may have even been on ABC. ABC used to show baseball. Now they show this.

The point is -- besides getting a chance to fondly remember Jay Buhner -- is that Lou Piniella was the skipper of that Mariner team. And he counteracted the laid-back, chill vibe of the Emerald City by periodically just losing his mind. He'd throw a base, kick dirt, kick his hat and just generally get in the face of any umpire he deemed fit.

With one well-documented exception, his tenure here in Chicago has been void of those tirades. But don't think old Lou has lost his fire or his willingness to fight for his team. That was evidenced by what happened tonight. When the dust settled Lou was ejected and the author's one-time favorite baseball player, bench coach Alan Trammell, assumed the coaching duties. So when a bang-bang call at first went against the Cubs, the former Tigers shortstop went out to argue and almost got tossed himself. What would have happened if he had got the heave-ho?

Several salty sports copy editors agreed pitching coach Larry Rothschild would be third in the coaching command. But is that written down somewhere? Is it in the media guide? Is there an organizational flow chart in the bullpen that someone would have pulled out and studied has we gotten down to the sixth- or seventh in command? These were all questions the author wondered to himself and is now posing here.

Sixth-grade civics taught us that there's a system in place for filling the president's role if he were to be killed or is under anesthetic during surgery or he just feels like taking a day off and hitting the links. It's been a long time, but the author thinks this is accurate. There's some weird choices on there when you get down the list. Under what horrid circumstances would the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development become the commander-in-chief of our armed forces? It sounds like a movie starring Will Smith as the underdog Cabinet member ascending to the nation's highest post in a time of great peril.

Oh, yeah. Trammell's Cubs lost by the way. Big surprise.