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5:47:00 PM EDT
Do Managers Matter?
Dan Le Batard, Miami Herald columnist and national personality has an interesting take on the Joe Girardi firing: it’s no big deal (http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/sports/baseball/15672616.htm). The Girardi saga has been a mystery this year – he took a team with by far the lowest payroll in the majors and a rookie-laden lineup to a 78-84 record, a good fifteen games better than expected. By the usual standards, such a performance ought to result in the manager receiving praise and a contract extension. In Girardi’s case, it got him fired. Given that we’ve all known for weeks that Girardi was going to be let go at the end of the season, even when the Marlins were unexpectedly in the thick of the wild-card chase in the National League, it was reasonable to surmise that off-the-field issues were mainly responsible for whatever disfavor Girardi had fallen into with Marlins’ management. Because, it certainly seemed impossible to impugn Girardi for his on-field performance and, by all accounts, his players loved him.
Well, Le Batard is having none of it:
“Girardi didn't matter enough, regardless of how much outrage there is about his Tuesday firing. He wasn't the reason the surprising Marlins won more than they should have, though he will be incorrectly credited for that, and he wouldn't have been the reason they lost more than they should have, though he would have been incorrectly blamed for that.”
Le Batard’s quarry here isn’t really Girardi, in particular. Instead, it’s the very notion that managers really matter in general:
“Girardi, a rookie manager, is a millionaire, and he earns about as much as his champion general manager. It is some of the dumbest math we do across sports -- giving more money to the guy who coaches the talent than we do to the guy who acquires it. Beinfest is more important to the organization than Girardi -- by a lot. But our Us Magazine culture of coach worship creates an environment that pays better to be the voice and face of a team than to do more valuable work in the shadows. You are paying the more famous guy, in other words, not the more important one.
Doesn't help that we, the fans, can be intellectually lazy when it comes to this stuff. A team wins more than we expected, and we credit the manager, as if he has some magic wand that allows him to be appreciably wiser than the bumbling dope in the other dugout. The Marlins won this season because they hit more homers than any Marlins team ever and their starting pitching staff was far better than anyone expected, one of the best in baseball. Girardi had nothing to do with that. And if you insist on crediting him for that, then do you also blame him because Dontrelle Willis, the second-best pitcher in the National League last season, had a down year?
''I've seen a lot of bad managers win the World Series,'' reigning champion manager Ozzie Guillen of the Chicago White Sox said recently. ``You are talking to one.'’”
I agree with Le Batard that we are witness to a “culture of coach worship” though I am not sure how new that is (Vince Lombardi is spoken of in tones normally reserved for deities, not men). It’s surely true that Marlins’ management, even when over a barrel financially, consistently gets good value in trades – the Beckett deal, in which the Marlins got Hanley Ramirez, Anabel Sanchez and two other well regarded prospects being a noteworthy example. Furthermore, systematic studies of the things that managers can control, like lineups, and one-run strategies (bunting, hit and run, stealing bases) end up either finding that the manager’s decision makes no difference (in the case of lineups) or can hurt their team’s chances more than help.
Le Batard specifically criticizes Girardi for his inappropriate reliance on one-run strategies:
“Girardi won, but he also made a ton of rookie mistakes. He would bunt power man Dan Uggla for a run in the first inning against pitchers with ERAs of 6. Giving away an out, in other words, in an at-bat about as unlikely to end up as an out as any in the lineup in a game not likely to be low-scoring. It was flat-out dumb, and he did it all season. But the Marlins won anyway because the manager's decisions aren't that important.”
More generally, in a comprehensive analysis of the effect of managers on their teams’ record in Baseball Prospectus’ excellent book, Baseball Between the Numbers, James Click concluded that “no evidence of managerial evidence has been found.” In fact, Click’s piece quotes Earl Weaver, surely one of the all-time great managers (and realists) as saying that “a manager’s job is simple. For 162 games, you try not to screw up all the smart stuff your organization did last December.”
Last night’s Tigers-Yankees game was a good illustration of Le Batard and Click’s conclusions.Both Joe Torre and Jim Leland are spoken of reverently by sports media. But, by Torre’s own admission, he’s doing very little with this team, other than writing his all-stars’ names onto a lineup card. In fact, Torre acknowledged, he tried one thing last night – a hit and run that got botched and resulted in Derek Jeter being picked off. Torre also neglected to mention his bullpen maneuverings last night, which surely did not helped his club, either last night or going forward. Leyland also ran his team out of a potential second-inning rally, when Ivan Rodriguez swung threw a Chin Mien-Wang sinker and Magglio Ordonez was gunned down at third base on a blown hit-and-run – helping to snuff out a first and second, nobody out situation.
Click concedes that what managerial influence might exist is “hidden somewhere beneath the numbers” and not, therefore, readily accessible to the sorts of analysis that the BP guys typically use. But, that difficult-to-grasp quality is one of Le Batard’s points:
“if you buy that [Girardi] was indeed better than anyone else in baseball at his job, he was so in a way that has no quantifiable measure except standings that were affected by things (home runs, pitching) over which he had precious little control.
If an employee in any other line of work had a value that was so abstract as to be either negligible or unquantifiable, would anyone be outraged if the bosses decided to fire him?”
Click’s article also quotes the legendary Sparky Anderson, who once proclaimed managers “a necessary evil.” One of the best things Torre has done in his rein has been, well before this season and contrary to popular opinion, to get out of his team’s way. Even in the late 1990s, when Torre had the reputation of a ‘National League style manager’ whose teams “did the little things,” the Yankees consistently ranked last in the league in attempted sacrifice bunts. To his credit, Torre understood that both American League ball and the Yankees’ lineup dictated giving up one-run strategies.
Jeffrey Loria is a profoundly unlikeable guy, and in my humble and reckless opinion, does not deserve to own a major league franchise. But, Le Batard’s posing a worthwhile, and seldom raised question – do managers matter and, if they do, how do we know?
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