Before we pile too much dirt on Jim Riggleman ...

I’m not going to change my view of Jim Riggleman’s move -- I think it was the wrong move to make and a bad one for his future for him to resign like that -- but I’m also hesitant to bury the guy too deeply. The reason? We don’t know what brought the situation to a head with the Nats’ front office. Riggleman has never done a rash thing in his professional life, and all of a sudden he snaps? There’s got to be more to the story, right?

Ken Rosenthal helps shine a bit of light on that this morning. In his column -- which starts out by noting that Riggleman’s resignation was not the right way to handle this -- Rosenthal reports that the communication from the Nats’ front office was poor at best and not in keeping what people expect to go on behind closed doors with a major league team:

Most GMs talk with their managers every day; Rizzo rarely spoke with Riggleman, according to numerous sources. Most teams understand that a manager’s authority is compromised when he is in the last year of his contract; the Lerners proceed along their merry way, seemingly ignorant of conventional baseball wisdom ... Stan Kasten worked 24 years for Ted Turner, one of the most eccentric owners in sports history. He lasted only four years with the Lerners. Gee, wonder why.

Apparently Nats’ scouts have complained about Rizzo’s lack of communication skills too.

Again, none of this makes Riggleman’s move the right one. But even if he was still wrong to quit like he did, it’s not totally inexplicable either.