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liberty-ca · 03-05-2026, 03:38 PM

THE HOT CORNER SPECIAL

By Claude Playball | Baseball Insider & Analyst | Host, "Hot Corner" Podcast

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"I Never Had a Five-Year Plan. I Barely Had a Tuesday Plan."
A Post-Championship Conversation with Sacramento Prayers GM and Manager Jimmy Aces

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Jimmy Aces met me at a diner three blocks from Cathedral Stadium on a Thursday morning in early November, eleven days after the Sacramento Prayers won their thirteenth World Series championship. He arrived seven minutes early, ordered black coffee and scrambled eggs before I sat down, and spent the first four minutes of our conversation explaining why the diner's coffee was better than the coffee in his office, which he described as tasting like "someone boiled a baseball glove and strained it through a gym sock." He is sixty-one years old. He has been the General Manager and Manager of the Sacramento Prayers since 1969 — twenty-three years, thirteen championships, and what he estimates is approximately forty thousand cups of bad office coffee. He uses his hands when he talks, which is often, and he eyes my recording device with the mild suspicion of a man who has been misquoted before and has not entirely forgiven journalism for it.

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Hot Corner: You showed up early.

I always show up early. If you're on time you're late. My father told me that when I was eight years old and I've never been able to shake it. Drove my wife crazy when we were dating. She'd say dinner is at seven and I'd be standing outside the restaurant at six-forty-five in the November cold wondering if the hostess thought I was casing the place.

HC: Let's start at the beginning — or close to it. You have been the GM and Manager of this organization since 1969. Twenty-three years. How does a man hold both jobs for that long without losing his mind?

Who says I haven't?

No — look, when I took this job in 1969 the arrangement was unusual even then. Most organizations separate the baseball operations from the field management for good reasons. You get cleaner accountability, clearer lines of responsibility, less opportunity for one man's blind spots to infect the whole enterprise. Those are legitimate arguments and I do not dismiss them.

What I will say is that doing both jobs gave me something I don't think I could have gotten any other way, which is a complete picture of what this organization needed at every moment. When I am sitting in the dugout and I know a player is not performing and I need to make a change, I don't have to go upstairs and convince someone else to see what I'm seeing. I already know what's in the system, I already know what's available, and I can make the decision without the game waiting for a phone call. Whether that's efficient or whether it's just the management style of a man who has trouble delegating — my wife would tell you it's the second one — I genuinely cannot say.

HC: Thirteen championships in twenty-three years. Does that number feel real to you?

Some mornings it does and some mornings it doesn't. The early ones — the championships from the seventies — those feel like they happened to a different person. I was younger, the game was different, the organization was different. I had hair. Not a lot, but some. When I think about those years I think about the players and the moments rather than the number itself. The number is something other people remind me of. I don't walk around thinking about thirteen. I walk around thinking about what we need to do to be ready for April.

HC: This particular championship — number thirteen — came at the end of an unusually dramatic postseason. A seven-game ALCS, a fifth-inning comeback in Game 7. Does the difficulty of getting here make it more meaningful?

Every one of them feels different. The ones from the early years felt like discovery — like we were building something and didn't fully know what it was yet. The middle years felt like confirmation. The recent ones — 1989, 1990, 1991, now 1992 — those feel like stewardship. Like the job is to protect what has been built as much as it is to add to it.

This one was the hardest of the recent four because we came genuinely close to losing in the ALCS. We were three games to two down, on the road, facing a Boston team with Rogelio Ruiz, and I sat in that dugout in Game 6 and thought — not for the first time this October — that this might be the year it ends. And then the fifth inning of Game 7 happened, and Gil Cruz hit that ball, and I remembered that baseball is not a sport that rewards the team that deserves to win. It rewards the team that makes the play when the play needs to be made.

HC: You've said that before in various forms over the years. Is that a philosophy you arrived at early, or did it take all twenty-three years to fully believe it?

It took losing. You don't really believe things about baseball until losing has taught you to believe them. In the years we didn't win — and there were years we didn't win, even if the recent run has made people forget that — I learned more about this game than I did in any of the championship years. Losing strips away everything comfortable and shows you exactly what you're missing. Winning can hide a lot of problems. A playoff loss in October finds every one of them, usually at the worst possible moment.

HC: Let's talk about the 1992 rotation, because it defined this postseason. Rubalcava, Andretti, Espenoza, Larson — four starters, four very different stories. Walk me through how you were thinking about each of them entering October.

Rubalcava is my horse. He has been my horse since the day I wrote his name on the lineup card for the first time. When Jordan is on top of his game he is the best pitcher in baseball, full stop, no conversation. But he had a difficult stretch in September and I'd be lying if I told you I wasn't monitoring him closely — and I was monitoring him as both the GM who built the roster and the manager who has to use it, which is a peculiar double vision that I have gotten used to over the years. The thing about Jordan is he never tells you he's struggling. You have to watch for it in the way he locates his cutter, the way his fastball and cutter work together. When those things coordinate, he is unhittable. I watched his last three regular season starts and thought: he's close. And then he threw a complete game shutout in Game 1 of the Division Series and I thought: he's there.

Andretti. Bernardo Andretti. I have been doing this job for twenty-three years and I have had conversations with pitchers at every stage of a career — confident ones, struggling ones, finished ones who didn't know they were finished yet. The two conversations I had with Andretti in September after those Seattle starts were among the more unusual ones. I said direct things about what I was seeing and he sat there and listened and said "you're right, I know, I'm working on it." No excuses. No defensiveness. Just — I know. That kind of self-awareness in a pitcher is rarer than a 102-mile-per-hour fastball and I have been around long enough to recognize it when I see it.

Espenoza still keeps me up at night, and not in a bad way — more in a how-did-that-happen way. His stuff was not sharp in October. His WHIP, his hit rate — not the numbers we saw during the regular season. And he went three and zero. Mario has a quality I have only seen in a handful of pitchers in twenty-three years, which is that he refuses to let a bad inning become a bad game. He gives up three runs and he goes back to the dugout and he sits down and he eats a sunflower seed and he looks like a man who is mildly inconvenienced by traffic. By the time he gets back to the mound he has completely moved on. I have known pitchers who carry every bad at-bat for three innings. Mario Espenoza doesn't carry anything.

Larson. Robby is a legitimate number-three starter who pitched like a number-five in October. That is an offseason conversation I will be having with myself, which is the unusual privilege and burden of doing both jobs.

HC: Speaking of offseason conversations — Gil Cruz's injury. What can you tell us?

Not much that I know for certain, and I won't speculate beyond what I know. What I can say is that Gil is a young man with tremendous ability and tremendous character, and whatever the recovery timeline looks like, Sacramento will be patient with him. He is not a player you rush back. In twenty-three years I have learned that the players you rush back are rarely as ready as you need them to be, and the cost of being wrong is always higher than the cost of being patient.

HC: Let's take some questions from the Hot Corner audience. These came in after we announced the interview.

Let's hear them. I hope they're not all about the coffee.

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From Teodoro Bautista-Clemente of Sacramento, who writes that he has named his dog after you and wants to know if you are flattered or concerned:

"My question is: across twenty-three years and thirteen championships, what is the hardest decision you've made that nobody knew about at the time?"

Teodoro, I am both flattered and mildly concerned, and I would like to know the dog's full name before I commit to either position.

The hardest decision nobody knew about. In twenty-three years there have been many, but the category that weighs on me most is the decision to move on from a veteran player before he was ready to be moved on from. I have had to make that call more times than I would like, and it never becomes easier regardless of how many times you've done it. The player knows his numbers are declining. You know his numbers are declining. And yet the moment you act on that knowledge you are doing something that affects a man's livelihood and his identity, because for players of a certain age this game is not just what they do — it is who they are. I have tried to handle those moments with honesty and respect, and I have not always succeeded, and the ones where I fell short are the ones I think about when I can't sleep.

That is as specific as I am going to be. Some decisions are not mine alone to make public.

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From Perpetua Nwosu-Adeyemi of West Sacramento, who writes that she watches every game from a recliner she has not moved since a championship in the 1970s and wants to know if superstition plays any role in how you manage:

"Do you have any rituals or superstitions? And if so, which one is the most embarrassing?"

Perpetua, do not move that recliner. Whatever decade it's been anchored to the floor, it is working.

Superstitions. Yes. I have accumulated them the way a man accumulates things over twenty-three years — gradually, without fully noticing, until one day you look around and there's too many to explain. The one I will share publicly is that I wear the same undershirt for every playoff game until we lose. It is a gray undershirt with a small bleach stain near the left shoulder. My wife has attempted to throw it away more times than I can count. I have retrieved it every time. After one of the earlier championships she held it up in the kitchen and said "this undershirt has more rings than most managers" and I said "you're not wrong, put it down carefully." We have an understanding now.

The most embarrassing one I will not share because my children read this column and I have maintained a reputation across two decades that I am not prepared to sacrifice for journalism.

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From Desmond Achterberg of Sacramento — a structural engineer who submitted a detailed aerodynamic analysis of Gil Cruz's Game 7 triple to this column during the ALCS — who asks:

"From a purely tactical standpoint, across your entire tenure, what is the one in-game decision you would most like to have back?"

Desmond, I remember your letter about the seven percent wind contribution. My pitching coach said "that's either very smart or completely insane" and I said "probably both."

One decision across twenty-three years. That is a question that assumes I have ranked them, which I have not, but there is one from this postseason that is fresh enough to answer honestly. Leaving Prieto in to face Hernandez in the eighth inning of Game 5 of the ALCS. I had a two-run lead, Prieto had just gotten two outs on fly balls, and the numbers said he could handle one more batter. The situation said be conservative. I chose the numbers and Hernandez hit it four hundred feet.

The broader lesson — which twenty-three years has been teaching me with varying degrees of subtlety — is that sometimes trusting your instincts means ignoring a number you like because the moment is telling you something the number cannot see. I did not listen. I know better. I should have done better. Lesson noted, again, for the forty-seventh time.

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From Aurelio Fontaine-Guerrero of Sacramento, age nine, who previously wrote to this column to ask if the Prayers would win the World Series and received a cautious answer that earned him full credit from his teacher:

"Mr. Aces, my dad says you are the greatest manager in baseball history. Is he right?"

Aurelio, your father is a man of outstanding judgment and I hope he knows it.

As for whether he is right — in twenty-three years I have learned to be suspicious of superlatives, including the ones applied to me. What I will say is that I have been fortunate to spend twenty-three years in an organization that allowed me to build something over time, to learn from the years that did not go well, and to be surrounded by players who were better than the manager who was writing their names on the lineup card. Jordan Rubalcava has made me look smart. BigMac MacDonald has made me look smart. Andretti this October made me look like a genius, and all I did was write his name down and get out of the way.

The best managers in baseball are the ones who know when to get out of the way. That is my complete theory of management and after twenty-three years I have not found a reason to revise it.

Tell your teacher I said full credit was the right call. Both times.

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HC: Let's talk about roster construction. As GM you built this team. As Manager you deploy it. Does wearing both hats create tensions, or does it create clarity?

Both, depending on the day. The tension comes when I have built something as GM that I then have to live with as Manager — when I've made a transaction that seemed right from the front office and then I'm standing in the dugout wishing I had someone different in the sixth inning of a playoff game. The clarity comes from knowing exactly why every player on my roster is there, what I saw in them, what I believe they can do. There are no surprises for me in my own clubhouse, which is either an advantage or a sign that I have been doing this too long to be surprised by anything.

The Cruz situation this offseason is a version of that challenge. As GM, I need to address the possibility that his recovery extends into the season. As Manager, I know exactly what I lose if it does, because I watched him play fourteen postseason games. As both, I need to find a solution that doesn't compromise what this roster already is while filling a gap that Gil Cruz is not a gap — Gil Cruz is a cornerstone, and you don't replace cornerstones, you protect them.

HC: Carlos Orozco was on the IL for the entire postseason. What does his future look like?

Carlos is a Sacramento Prayer and he will be treated with the respect that designation demands. His back has been a concern and the medical staff will determine what 1993 looks like. What I will say as both his GM and his manager is that this organization does not discard players who have given what Carlos has given. He has been a professional and a teammate and a good man in this clubhouse. You don't just walk away from that. You work through it together.

HC: The bench contributions this postseason were significant — Perez, Marcos, Iniguez all delivered in important moments. As GM, how do you build a bench? And as Manager, how do you keep those players ready when they might go ten days without a meaningful at-bat?

As GM: you look for players who accept their role without resenting it. That is rarer than it sounds. Players who are good enough to believe they should be starting, who are sitting on a bench instead, and who make peace with that situation without letting the resentment affect their preparation — those players are genuinely difficult to find and genuinely valuable when you find them. Marcos, Perez, Iniguez — these are men who compete in batting practice the way other players compete in playoff games. That is not an accident of personality. It is a product of the culture this organization has built over twenty-three years, and I am prouder of that culture than I am of most things I could name.

As Manager: you use them. You find situations in the regular season where you can give them meaningful at-bats, real moments, so that when October arrives they are not playing their first important game of the year. A player who has not faced pressure since April is not ready for the ninth inning of a playoff game. That is not a complicated idea, but it requires discipline across a 162-game season to execute.

HC: You've been at this for twenty-three years. Is there a type of player you find most difficult to manage?

The talented ones who know they're talented and have decided that knowledge excuses them from the details. I have managed players who could throw a baseball through a wall and couldn't tell you what the batter they just faced did against left-handed pitching in day games. Talent covers a lot of mistakes in April. October finds every one of them.

The player I find easiest to manage — and I have managed hundreds of them across twenty-three years — is the one who understands that this game humbles you eventually, no matter how good you are, and prepares accordingly. BigMac MacDonald is the best example I have worked with of a player who never let four championships convince him he was finished learning. Every spring he shows up and he works like a man with something to prove. After thirteen championships together, I still find that remarkable.

HC: Thirteen championships together. Let's talk about that relationship. BigMac has been with this organization for most of your tenure. What does that continuity mean to you?

It means everything, and I don't say that lightly. When you have been doing this as long as I have, you understand how rare it is for a player and an organization to grow together across that kind of timespan. Most players move. Most organizations change. The fact that BigMac has been here, has won here, has built his legacy here — that is a reflection of something this organization got right that I am genuinely not sure we could replicate by design. Some of it was good decisions. Some of it was good fortune. Some of it was that George MacDonald is the kind of man who values what Sacramento gave him as much as we value what he has given us.

Four rings in the recent run. Whatever the total count of his rings in Sacramento — and his collection is his to catalog, not mine to announce — the man has earned every one of them in this uniform, and that matters to me more than any number.

HC: Let's shift gears. You've been married for — how long now?

Thirty-three years. Linda. She married me when I was eight years into this job and already developing the habits that twenty-three years have since fully calcified. She is a saint by any measurable standard and a remarkably patient woman by any human one. When we got married she said "as long as you come home in the winter." For the first several years that was a reasonable arrangement. Then the offseasons started shrinking — the meetings, the scouting, the calls, the roster decisions — and "coming home in the winter" started meaning "coming home to sleep and then sitting at the kitchen table on the phone with someone in another time zone about a relief pitcher."

She has adapted with more grace than I deserved.

HC: Does she watch the games?

Every one of them, for thirty-three years. Home and away. She has opinions about the bullpen that are occasionally better than mine and I will deny saying that in print. She does not like when I leave Prieto in too long. She was right about the Game 5 ALCS situation before I was. I mentioned this to my pitching coach and he said "she should have your job" and I said "she would be better at the GM half, at minimum."

HC: Children?

Three. Two daughters and a son. My oldest daughter is a doctor in Portland, which makes her the first person in the Aces family in three generations to do something genuinely useful with her hands. My son works in sports marketing, which means he talks about baseball for a living without having to manage anyone, which I consider the ideal arrangement. My youngest daughter is seventeen and has recently decided that baseball is, in her words, "kind of boring actually," which I find both hurtful and clarifying.

She came to Game 1 of the World Series, watched six innings, pronounced it "pretty good actually," and asked if we could get food. We got food. We won. She is on my roster indefinitely.

HC: Twenty-three years. Thirteen championships. At some point the retirement question has to be asked.

It does, and I appreciate that you waited until the end to ask it. Most people lead with it as though they're expecting me to announce something over scrambled eggs.

There is a version of Jimmy Aces that retires. He lives somewhere with a porch and drinks coffee that doesn't taste like a boiled glove and watches baseball from a chair instead of a dugout. Linda would very much like to meet him. He sounds like a reasonable man who has figured out what the important things are.

Whether that man is me in the near future is a question I genuinely cannot answer, and not because I'm being evasive. I don't feel finished. This team does not feel finished. The roster has questions that need answers — Cruz, Orozco, Larson, the entire pitching depth picture for 1993 — and I am the person who built those questions and I feel an obligation to answer them. You don't build something for twenty-three years and hand it to someone else before you've addressed the problems you created.

When it feels finished I will know. I think Linda will know before I do. She will tell me in the way she tells me things — not loudly, not urgently, but in a tone that indicates the decision has already been made and I am simply being given the opportunity to arrive at it myself.

That is, incidentally, also how she ended my coffee argument this morning.

HC: Last question. If you could say one thing to the Sacramento fanbase — the people who haven't moved their recliners since championships in the seventies, the people who name their dogs after you, the nine-year-olds who write letters and ask for full credit — what would it be?

I would say: you are the reason twenty-three years feels like not enough.

I have managed in this city through winning and through the years that didn't go as planned, and this fanbase has never once made me feel like losing was unforgivable. They understand that baseball is a long, difficult, humbling endeavor that rewards patience and punishes panic. They have been patient for twenty-three years and they have celebrated with us across thirteen championships, and the relationship between this organization and this city is the thing I am most proud of — more than the wins, more than the records, more than anything you could put in a trophy case.

Also — and I mean this — do not move the recliners. Whatever you are doing, it is working. After twenty-three years I have enough variables to manage already. I would like to keep at least this one constant.

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Jimmy Aces finished his scrambled eggs, refilled his coffee twice, and left a tip that was, his waitress informed me, significantly larger than necessary. He was out the door and into the November morning four minutes after the interview ended. He had somewhere to be. After twenty-three years, he always does.

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The Hot Corner thanks Jimmy Aces for his time, his honesty, and his patience with a recorder he never fully trusted.

Got a question for the mailbag? Find the Hot Corner wherever you get your podcasts.

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Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.

03-05-2026, 03:38 PM	#243
liberty-ca Major Leagues Join Date: Oct 2017 Location: New Westminster, BC Posts: 391	THE HOT CORNER SPECIAL By Claude Playball \| Baseball Insider & Analyst \| Host, "Hot Corner" Podcast ______________________________ *"I Never Had a Five-Year Plan. I Barely Had a Tuesday Plan."* A Post-Championship Conversation with Sacramento Prayers GM and Manager Jimmy Aces ______________________________ Jimmy Aces met me at a diner three blocks from Cathedral Stadium on a Thursday morning in early November, eleven days after the Sacramento Prayers won their thirteenth World Series championship. He arrived seven minutes early, ordered black coffee and scrambled eggs before I sat down, and spent the first four minutes of our conversation explaining why the diner's coffee was better than the coffee in his office, which he described as tasting like "someone boiled a baseball glove and strained it through a gym sock." He is sixty-one years old. He has been the General Manager and Manager of the Sacramento Prayers since 1969 — twenty-three years, thirteen championships, and what he estimates is approximately forty thousand cups of bad office coffee. He uses his hands when he talks, which is often, and he eyes my recording device with the mild suspicion of a man who has been misquoted before and has not entirely forgiven journalism for it. ______________________________ Hot Corner: You showed up early. I always show up early. If you're on time you're late. My father told me that when I was eight years old and I've never been able to shake it. Drove my wife crazy when we were dating. She'd say dinner is at seven and I'd be standing outside the restaurant at six-forty-five in the November cold wondering if the hostess thought I was casing the place. HC: Let's start at the beginning — or close to it. You have been the GM and Manager of this organization since 1969. Twenty-three years. How does a man hold both jobs for that long without losing his mind? Who says I haven't? No — look, when I took this job in 1969 the arrangement was unusual even then. Most organizations separate the baseball operations from the field management for good reasons. You get cleaner accountability, clearer lines of responsibility, less opportunity for one man's blind spots to infect the whole enterprise. Those are legitimate arguments and I do not dismiss them. What I will say is that doing both jobs gave me something I don't think I could have gotten any other way, which is a complete picture of what this organization needed at every moment. When I am sitting in the dugout and I know a player is not performing and I need to make a change, I don't have to go upstairs and convince someone else to see what I'm seeing. I already know what's in the system, I already know what's available, and I can make the decision without the game waiting for a phone call. Whether that's efficient or whether it's just the management style of a man who has trouble delegating — my wife would tell you it's the second one — I genuinely cannot say. HC: Thirteen championships in twenty-three years. Does that number feel real to you? Some mornings it does and some mornings it doesn't. The early ones — the championships from the seventies — those feel like they happened to a different person. I was younger, the game was different, the organization was different. I had hair. Not a lot, but some. When I think about those years I think about the players and the moments rather than the number itself. The number is something other people remind me of. I don't walk around thinking about thirteen. I walk around thinking about what we need to do to be ready for April. HC: This particular championship — number thirteen — came at the end of an unusually dramatic postseason. A seven-game ALCS, a fifth-inning comeback in Game 7. Does the difficulty of getting here make it more meaningful? Every one of them feels different. The ones from the early years felt like discovery — like we were building something and didn't fully know what it was yet. The middle years felt like confirmation. The recent ones — 1989, 1990, 1991, now 1992 — those feel like stewardship. Like the job is to protect what has been built as much as it is to add to it. This one was the hardest of the recent four because we came genuinely close to losing in the ALCS. We were three games to two down, on the road, facing a Boston team with Rogelio Ruiz, and I sat in that dugout in Game 6 and thought — not for the first time this October — that this might be the year it ends. And then the fifth inning of Game 7 happened, and Gil Cruz hit that ball, and I remembered that baseball is not a sport that rewards the team that deserves to win. It rewards the team that makes the play when the play needs to be made. HC: You've said that before in various forms over the years. Is that a philosophy you arrived at early, or did it take all twenty-three years to fully believe it? It took losing. You don't really believe things about baseball until losing has taught you to believe them. In the years we didn't win — and there were years we didn't win, even if the recent run has made people forget that — I learned more about this game than I did in any of the championship years. Losing strips away everything comfortable and shows you exactly what you're missing. Winning can hide a lot of problems. A playoff loss in October finds every one of them, usually at the worst possible moment. HC: Let's talk about the 1992 rotation, because it defined this postseason. Rubalcava, Andretti, Espenoza, Larson — four starters, four very different stories. Walk me through how you were thinking about each of them entering October. Rubalcava is my horse. He has been my horse since the day I wrote his name on the lineup card for the first time. When Jordan is on top of his game he is the best pitcher in baseball, full stop, no conversation. But he had a difficult stretch in September and I'd be lying if I told you I wasn't monitoring him closely — and I was monitoring him as both the GM who built the roster and the manager who has to use it, which is a peculiar double vision that I have gotten used to over the years. The thing about Jordan is he never tells you he's struggling. You have to watch for it in the way he locates his cutter, the way his fastball and cutter work together. When those things coordinate, he is unhittable. I watched his last three regular season starts and thought: he's close. And then he threw a complete game shutout in Game 1 of the Division Series and I thought: he's there. Andretti. Bernardo Andretti. I have been doing this job for twenty-three years and I have had conversations with pitchers at every stage of a career — confident ones, struggling ones, finished ones who didn't know they were finished yet. The two conversations I had with Andretti in September after those Seattle starts were among the more unusual ones. I said direct things about what I was seeing and he sat there and listened and said "you're right, I know, I'm working on it." No excuses. No defensiveness. Just — I know. That kind of self-awareness in a pitcher is rarer than a 102-mile-per-hour fastball and I have been around long enough to recognize it when I see it. Espenoza still keeps me up at night, and not in a bad way — more in a how-did-that-happen way. His stuff was not sharp in October. His WHIP, his hit rate — not the numbers we saw during the regular season. And he went three and zero. Mario has a quality I have only seen in a handful of pitchers in twenty-three years, which is that he refuses to let a bad inning become a bad game. He gives up three runs and he goes back to the dugout and he sits down and he eats a sunflower seed and he looks like a man who is mildly inconvenienced by traffic. By the time he gets back to the mound he has completely moved on. I have known pitchers who carry every bad at-bat for three innings. Mario Espenoza doesn't carry anything. Larson. Robby is a legitimate number-three starter who pitched like a number-five in October. That is an offseason conversation I will be having with myself, which is the unusual privilege and burden of doing both jobs. HC: Speaking of offseason conversations — Gil Cruz's injury. What can you tell us? Not much that I know for certain, and I won't speculate beyond what I know. What I can say is that Gil is a young man with tremendous ability and tremendous character, and whatever the recovery timeline looks like, Sacramento will be patient with him. He is not a player you rush back. In twenty-three years I have learned that the players you rush back are rarely as ready as you need them to be, and the cost of being wrong is always higher than the cost of being patient. HC: Let's take some questions from the Hot Corner audience. These came in after we announced the interview. Let's hear them. I hope they're not all about the coffee. ______________________________ From Teodoro Bautista-Clemente of Sacramento, who writes that he has named his dog after you and wants to know if you are flattered or concerned: "My question is: across twenty-three years and thirteen championships, what is the hardest decision you've made that nobody knew about at the time?" Teodoro, I am both flattered and mildly concerned, and I would like to know the dog's full name before I commit to either position. The hardest decision nobody knew about. In twenty-three years there have been many, but the category that weighs on me most is the decision to move on from a veteran player before he was ready to be moved on from. I have had to make that call more times than I would like, and it never becomes easier regardless of how many times you've done it. The player knows his numbers are declining. You know his numbers are declining. And yet the moment you act on that knowledge you are doing something that affects a man's livelihood and his identity, because for players of a certain age this game is not just what they do — it is who they are. I have tried to handle those moments with honesty and respect, and I have not always succeeded, and the ones where I fell short are the ones I think about when I can't sleep. That is as specific as I am going to be. Some decisions are not mine alone to make public. ______________________________ From Perpetua Nwosu-Adeyemi of West Sacramento, who writes that she watches every game from a recliner she has not moved since a championship in the 1970s and wants to know if superstition plays any role in how you manage: "Do you have any rituals or superstitions? And if so, which one is the most embarrassing?" Perpetua, do not move that recliner. Whatever decade it's been anchored to the floor, it is working. Superstitions. Yes. I have accumulated them the way a man accumulates things over twenty-three years — gradually, without fully noticing, until one day you look around and there's too many to explain. The one I will share publicly is that I wear the same undershirt for every playoff game until we lose. It is a gray undershirt with a small bleach stain near the left shoulder. My wife has attempted to throw it away more times than I can count. I have retrieved it every time. After one of the earlier championships she held it up in the kitchen and said "this undershirt has more rings than most managers" and I said "you're not wrong, put it down carefully." We have an understanding now. The most embarrassing one I will not share because my children read this column and I have maintained a reputation across two decades that I am not prepared to sacrifice for journalism. ______________________________ From Desmond Achterberg of Sacramento — a structural engineer who submitted a detailed aerodynamic analysis of Gil Cruz's Game 7 triple to this column during the ALCS — who asks: "From a purely tactical standpoint, across your entire tenure, what is the one in-game decision you would most like to have back?" Desmond, I remember your letter about the seven percent wind contribution. My pitching coach said "that's either very smart or completely insane" and I said "probably both." One decision across twenty-three years. That is a question that assumes I have ranked them, which I have not, but there is one from this postseason that is fresh enough to answer honestly. Leaving Prieto in to face Hernandez in the eighth inning of Game 5 of the ALCS. I had a two-run lead, Prieto had just gotten two outs on fly balls, and the numbers said he could handle one more batter. The situation said be conservative. I chose the numbers and Hernandez hit it four hundred feet. The broader lesson — which twenty-three years has been teaching me with varying degrees of subtlety — is that sometimes trusting your instincts means ignoring a number you like because the moment is telling you something the number cannot see. I did not listen. I know better. I should have done better. Lesson noted, again, for the forty-seventh time. ______________________________ From Aurelio Fontaine-Guerrero of Sacramento, age nine, who previously wrote to this column to ask if the Prayers would win the World Series and received a cautious answer that earned him full credit from his teacher: "Mr. Aces, my dad says you are the greatest manager in baseball history. Is he right?" Aurelio, your father is a man of outstanding judgment and I hope he knows it. As for whether he is right — in twenty-three years I have learned to be suspicious of superlatives, including the ones applied to me. What I will say is that I have been fortunate to spend twenty-three years in an organization that allowed me to build something over time, to learn from the years that did not go well, and to be surrounded by players who were better than the manager who was writing their names on the lineup card. Jordan Rubalcava has made me look smart. BigMac MacDonald has made me look smart. Andretti this October made me look like a genius, and all I did was write his name down and get out of the way. The best managers in baseball are the ones who know when to get out of the way. That is my complete theory of management and after twenty-three years I have not found a reason to revise it. Tell your teacher I said full credit was the right call. Both times. ______________________________ HC: Let's talk about roster construction. As GM you built this team. As Manager you deploy it. Does wearing both hats create tensions, or does it create clarity? Both, depending on the day. The tension comes when I have built something as GM that I then have to live with as Manager — when I've made a transaction that seemed right from the front office and then I'm standing in the dugout wishing I had someone different in the sixth inning of a playoff game. The clarity comes from knowing exactly why every player on my roster is there, what I saw in them, what I believe they can do. There are no surprises for me in my own clubhouse, which is either an advantage or a sign that I have been doing this too long to be surprised by anything. The Cruz situation this offseason is a version of that challenge. As GM, I need to address the possibility that his recovery extends into the season. As Manager, I know exactly what I lose if it does, because I watched him play fourteen postseason games. As both, I need to find a solution that doesn't compromise what this roster already is while filling a gap that Gil Cruz is not a gap — Gil Cruz is a cornerstone, and you don't replace cornerstones, you protect them. HC: Carlos Orozco was on the IL for the entire postseason. What does his future look like? Carlos is a Sacramento Prayer and he will be treated with the respect that designation demands. His back has been a concern and the medical staff will determine what 1993 looks like. What I will say as both his GM and his manager is that this organization does not discard players who have given what Carlos has given. He has been a professional and a teammate and a good man in this clubhouse. You don't just walk away from that. You work through it together. HC: The bench contributions this postseason were significant — Perez, Marcos, Iniguez all delivered in important moments. As GM, how do you build a bench? And as Manager, how do you keep those players ready when they might go ten days without a meaningful at-bat? As GM: you look for players who accept their role without resenting it. That is rarer than it sounds. Players who are good enough to believe they should be starting, who are sitting on a bench instead, and who make peace with that situation without letting the resentment affect their preparation — those players are genuinely difficult to find and genuinely valuable when you find them. Marcos, Perez, Iniguez — these are men who compete in batting practice the way other players compete in playoff games. That is not an accident of personality. It is a product of the culture this organization has built over twenty-three years, and I am prouder of that culture than I am of most things I could name. As Manager: you use them. You find situations in the regular season where you can give them meaningful at-bats, real moments, so that when October arrives they are not playing their first important game of the year. A player who has not faced pressure since April is not ready for the ninth inning of a playoff game. That is not a complicated idea, but it requires discipline across a 162-game season to execute. HC: You've been at this for twenty-three years. Is there a type of player you find most difficult to manage? The talented ones who know they're talented and have decided that knowledge excuses them from the details. I have managed players who could throw a baseball through a wall and couldn't tell you what the batter they just faced did against left-handed pitching in day games. Talent covers a lot of mistakes in April. October finds every one of them. The player I find easiest to manage — and I have managed hundreds of them across twenty-three years — is the one who understands that this game humbles you eventually, no matter how good you are, and prepares accordingly. BigMac MacDonald is the best example I have worked with of a player who never let four championships convince him he was finished learning. Every spring he shows up and he works like a man with something to prove. After thirteen championships together, I still find that remarkable. HC: Thirteen championships together. Let's talk about that relationship. BigMac has been with this organization for most of your tenure. What does that continuity mean to you? It means everything, and I don't say that lightly. When you have been doing this as long as I have, you understand how rare it is for a player and an organization to grow together across that kind of timespan. Most players move. Most organizations change. The fact that BigMac has been here, has won here, has built his legacy here — that is a reflection of something this organization got right that I am genuinely not sure we could replicate by design. Some of it was good decisions. Some of it was good fortune. Some of it was that George MacDonald is the kind of man who values what Sacramento gave him as much as we value what he has given us. Four rings in the recent run. Whatever the total count of his rings in Sacramento — and his collection is his to catalog, not mine to announce — the man has earned every one of them in this uniform, and that matters to me more than any number. HC: Let's shift gears. You've been married for — how long now? Thirty-three years. Linda. She married me when I was eight years into this job and already developing the habits that twenty-three years have since fully calcified. She is a saint by any measurable standard and a remarkably patient woman by any human one. When we got married she said "as long as you come home in the winter." For the first several years that was a reasonable arrangement. Then the offseasons started shrinking — the meetings, the scouting, the calls, the roster decisions — and "coming home in the winter" started meaning "coming home to sleep and then sitting at the kitchen table on the phone with someone in another time zone about a relief pitcher." She has adapted with more grace than I deserved. HC: Does she watch the games? Every one of them, for thirty-three years. Home and away. She has opinions about the bullpen that are occasionally better than mine and I will deny saying that in print. She does not like when I leave Prieto in too long. She was right about the Game 5 ALCS situation before I was. I mentioned this to my pitching coach and he said "she should have your job" and I said "she would be better at the GM half, at minimum." HC: Children? Three. Two daughters and a son. My oldest daughter is a doctor in Portland, which makes her the first person in the Aces family in three generations to do something genuinely useful with her hands. My son works in sports marketing, which means he talks about baseball for a living without having to manage anyone, which I consider the ideal arrangement. My youngest daughter is seventeen and has recently decided that baseball is, in her words, "kind of boring actually," which I find both hurtful and clarifying. She came to Game 1 of the World Series, watched six innings, pronounced it "pretty good actually," and asked if we could get food. We got food. We won. She is on my roster indefinitely. HC: Twenty-three years. Thirteen championships. At some point the retirement question has to be asked. It does, and I appreciate that you waited until the end to ask it. Most people lead with it as though they're expecting me to announce something over scrambled eggs. There is a version of Jimmy Aces that retires. He lives somewhere with a porch and drinks coffee that doesn't taste like a boiled glove and watches baseball from a chair instead of a dugout. Linda would very much like to meet him. He sounds like a reasonable man who has figured out what the important things are. Whether that man is me in the near future is a question I genuinely cannot answer, and not because I'm being evasive. I don't feel finished. This team does not feel finished. The roster has questions that need answers — Cruz, Orozco, Larson, the entire pitching depth picture for 1993 — and I am the person who built those questions and I feel an obligation to answer them. You don't build something for twenty-three years and hand it to someone else before you've addressed the problems you created. When it feels finished I will know. I think Linda will know before I do. She will tell me in the way she tells me things — not loudly, not urgently, but in a tone that indicates the decision has already been made and I am simply being given the opportunity to arrive at it myself. That is, incidentally, also how she ended my coffee argument this morning. HC: Last question. If you could say one thing to the Sacramento fanbase — the people who haven't moved their recliners since championships in the seventies, the people who name their dogs after you, the nine-year-olds who write letters and ask for full credit — what would it be? I would say: you are the reason twenty-three years feels like not enough. I have managed in this city through winning and through the years that didn't go as planned, and this fanbase has never once made me feel like losing was unforgivable. They understand that baseball is a long, difficult, humbling endeavor that rewards patience and punishes panic. They have been patient for twenty-three years and they have celebrated with us across thirteen championships, and the relationship between this organization and this city is the thing I am most proud of — more than the wins, more than the records, more than anything you could put in a trophy case. Also — and I mean this — do not move the recliners. Whatever you are doing, it is working. After twenty-three years I have enough variables to manage already. I would like to keep at least this one constant. ______________________________ Jimmy Aces finished his scrambled eggs, refilled his coffee twice, and left a tip that was, his waitress informed me, significantly larger than necessary. He was out the door and into the November morning four minutes after the interview ended. He had somewhere to be. After twenty-three years, he always does. ______________________________ The Hot Corner thanks Jimmy Aces for his time, his honesty, and his patience with a recorder he never fully trusted. Got a question for the mailbag? Find the Hot Corner wherever you get your podcasts. ______________________________ *Claude Playball* is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California. Last edited by liberty-ca; 03-05-2026 at 05:07 PM.