If you have a few free minutes today, go to YouTube.com, type “Hal McRae” into the search engine and watch the first video that comes up. It’s amazing. McRae, at the time the footage was shot, was the manager of the Kansas City Royals. Some poor baseball writer asks whether he had considered pinch-hitting George Brett for slap-hitting Keith Miller with the bases loaded earlier that day, and the manager completely loses it, launching into a long, obscene tirade and throwing everything on his desk, including tape recorders and a fairly heavy telephone set, at the assembled press corps. At one point, you see an ink-stained wretch staggering out of the manager’s office with blood trickling down his cheek, trying to stifle laughter at the ridiculous and idiotic display.

This came to mind yesterday as the sports shows replayed, over and over again, the footage of Philadelphia Phillies manager Charlie Manuel’s embarrassing Tuesday night meltdown. With the worst record in the National League, and coming off the latest in a series of brutal thrashings at the hands of the Mets, nominal rivals to the Phillies, one understands Manuel throwing a hissy fit. Still, the quality of the fit was utterly laughable. After being goaded by a worthless sports talk goof called “The King of Bling,” the kind of guy who uses the word “smack” and leads campaigns to have players traded, Manuel hooted and hollered about how he was more than willing to motivate his men by acting like a toddler. After he did so, of course, the radio goof told him to grow up.

“I’ve been growed up,” the out of shape, middle-aged manager shouted in the locker room, while coaches held him back from assaulting the King of Bling. It was a the kind of scene you’d see at a dive bar at 2 in the morning, with a guy who doesn’t want to fight and is too sheepish to admit it, pretending he’s trying to break free from constraining friends who don’t have to try very hard to do the constraining.

With the Phillies already 5.5 games out of first at the start of last night’s action, it makes sense that Manuel would pick a fight in an attempt to wake up his club. Managers do this sort of thing all the time and certainly not just in baseball. When you’re in charge of people and they’re not producing, sometimes you have to make a big show of being angry to fire people up. You can start a prearranged fight with a loyal patsy and put on a big show, pick out a malingerer and dress him down, or take up your chance when a blowhard tries to push your buttons. It all amounts to the same thing, a bit of kabuki to change a stale atmosphere and get everyone fired up to go do whatever it is that you want them to do.

If you’re going to try this ploy, though, you have to make it effective, or you’re just going to make things worse. A big tirade with violence and shouting and clamoring and “hold me back” posturing probably isn’t a very good idea if you’re running a ballclub, but if you’re going to do it, send some bloodied-up writers out of your office. Everyone knew before Tuesday that Charlie Manuel was an ineffectual and probably none too bright guy. Now he looks like an ineffectual and probably none too bright clown. This of course didn’t stop the country’s various Kings of Bling from praising the pathetic performance; the execrable Jim Rome, the arch-Bling King, went out of his way to laud Manuel for doing something to shake up his club. But the truth was plain.

The truth is that the Phillies are an exceptionally badly run team, one that for many years has gotten less out of more, better than any other team in baseball. The crowning bit of idiocy came yesterday, as the team responded to its seasonlong bullpen meltdown (the season being all of two weeks old at this point, but hey, whatever) by taking its best starting pitcher, Brett Myers, out of the rotation and giving him a new job as a set-up man. This is comparable to the Chicago Cubs responding to some bullpen misadventures and a bad start from their ace by taking Carlos Zambrano out of the rotation and making him a reliever, or the Florida Marlins doing so with Dontrelle Willis. And whose decision is it, in the end? The same guy who’s “growed up.” Forget him dressing down a guy who was asking for it, no matter how badly he did so. The Phillies ought to fire him because he’s bad at his job. They probably won’t for a while yet, though, and I’m sure Mets fans will be too busy snickering to complain.

tmarchman@nysun.com