Ned Yost is leading the Royals to another deep playoff
appearance while Alcides Escobar and his career 74 wRC+ bats leadoff. Alex
Gordon, tied for 60th in wRC+ among 290 qualified hitters from 2012-15, is
batting eighth. Meanwhile, Terry Francona, widely regarded as an exceptional
manager, drives past a dark, empty Progressive Field every time he leaves
downtown.
It’s unfair. It’s inexplicable. It’s also reality.
A couple of weeks ago, I was on my way to my weekly trivia
night when I heard Joe Sheehan on Bleacher Report Radio on Sirius XM. The
discussion segued into managers and the talk was about Don Mattingly, who,
coincidentally, was fired on Thursday by the Los Angeles Dodgers in a “mutual
parting of ways”. Mattingly has had issues with his team, some public, some
private, and has been a massive underachiever in the postseason.
Sheehan, who writes a great newsletter and has worked for
Baseball Prospectus and Sports
Illustrated, among other well-respected baseball publications, said some
interesting things about managers. Because I’m getting old, I’ll have to
paraphrase the best I can now more than two weeks after the fact. Essentially,
Sheehan said that managers are mostly there to manage the personalities in the
clubhouse. It’s not about making the correct tactical decisions. Anybody from
home can do that. It’s about keeping up morale and also being a liaison between
the team and the media. He likened MLB managers to college football head
coaches, in that they get all the glory and are there to talk to the media. The
only difference is that college football head coaches have coordinators.
Managers do not, although there are plenty of people in the dugout and behind
the scenes that get involved on a day-to-day basis.
My opinion of Terry Francona as a tactician is very clear.
I’ve spoken in private with beat writers who, like me, have questioned some of
his decisions, however, they are fully behind the skipper. Why? Because they
see how he interacts with the team. They like how easy it is to talk to him. They
like interviewing him. He’s mostly candid, always good for a laugh, and, to be
frank, seems like the kind of guy you’d want to have a beer with. He’s an
endearing person. He’s likable. He’s “Tito”.
Francona supporters have a much different perspective than I
do. I can only judge a manager based on the results on the field. Others that
are privy to the inside can see the full package. Perhaps, because of that, I’m
wrong. Perhaps, because of the biases of these media members, they are blinded
to his tactical errors. Perhaps we’re both right and both wrong.
My views on sports are very cut and dry. Almost
business-like and likely far too serious. You win and you lose. You cover the
spread or you don’t. It’s a results business. Managers, no matter how beloved
they are, get fired when the results are not there. Players, good clubhouse
guys or not, are traded or waived or become free agents based on performance.
They price themselves out of one team’s price range and hit the open market.
They don’t play well enough to validate their salaries or to validate a spot on
the payroll. The good guys that don’t produce always seem to find jobs,
however.
I’m not interested in the people side of the business. I
played sports in team settings growing up, where leadership roles do tend to
emerge from a young age. I didn’t play professionally. Neither did you. Neither
did the people that cover the team for a living. We all interpret the personal
side of sports in very different ways. I choose to value it less than the tactical
side, therefore, I don’t like Terry Francona and I would abhor Ned Yost.
Talking with some people on the other side and hearing
Sheehan’s thoughts on this radio segment I just happened to catch has altered
my perspective to a degree. A manager’s job isn’t to win games. That’s a
player’s job. A manager job isn’t to make the right decision 100 percent of the
time. It’s the player’s job to execute regardless of the situation. It’s a
necessary evil in Major League Baseball. Just because a player is set up for
success doesn’t mean that he’s going to have it. Just because the manager makes
the wrong decision doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to work out.
In the grand scheme of things, Mike Aviles batting second
instead of eighth or playing center field instead of second base isn’t going to
make a huge difference in a game more often than not. A manager having
confidence in his player, and expressing that to the media and to his peers, is
probably going to do more to help than improper usage will to hurt. That’s a
concept that I have a hard time wrapping my head around, but it’s probably
true.
We cannot quantify a manager’s performance because it’s
solely in the grey area. We can look at tactical blunders, like bunting in the
wrong spot or picking the wrong matchup reliever, and assign values to them. We
cannot quantify what happens when the manager pulls a guy aside amidst a
2-for-20 slump and he goes out and collects three hits and plays good defense
the next day. Did the brief conversation have any tangible impact on the change
in performance? We don’t know. One side says yes and probably leaves it at
that. One side says no, emphatically, and explains why. The actual answer is
that we don’t really know.
Terry Francona has managed a winning team for 11 straight
seasons. Some of those teams have been more talented than others. Some of those
teams should have gone farther. Some of them should have been below .500. All
of those teams would sing the praises of Francona as a manager.
To circle back to Sheehan’s comments, he also expressed a
desire to see more managers have a “numbers guy” or a game theory expert in the
dugout. Some won’t, because it undermines their authority. Others won’t because
the numbers don’t adjust for “the feel of the game”. Others, like Clint Hurdle,
do have one and they rely on them in key spots.
As the game progresses and as a new generation of players
that are more in tune with sabermetrics comes to the forefront, perhaps this
will be a change. Perhaps the “nerd” label will be gone from these stat guys
that “never played the game”. Maybe they will get the respect that they
deserve, both from old school hard-ass managers and players that turn their
noses up at their Ivy League educations.
One thing I’ve always noticed about teams is that they adopt
the identity of their manager. Teams with laid back coaches or managers often
seem unflappable, calm in the face of adversity. Teams with high-strung coaches
or managers play all out, every night. A lot of teams have a solid combination
of both. The Indians don’t take themselves too seriously as a team. Sometimes
that pisses me off. Other times, it can be kind of fun to watch. Francona, for
all of his faults with the tactical side of his game (in my opinion), is
strikingly adept at dealing with people, or so it would seem.
Why am I writing this? Because I may need to reevaluate my
expectations of managers. The quantifiable aspect of a manager’s performance
could be negligible in comparison to the parts of the job that we cannot assign
a value to. The ideal manager is a guy that can make the right tactical
decisions, manage a clubhouse, keep everybody happy, and handle the media like
a PR professional. There aren’t many, if any, that fit this description.
While writing this, I went back and looked at something
I wrote during Spring Training in 2013, just a few months after Terry
Francona was hired. You’ll note that all of that was written before I saw
Francona manage a single, meaningful regular season game for the Indians. The
lack of practicing
what he preached around that time has soured my opinion of him as well.
Others continue to have the same opinion because of what he does behind the
scenes or between innings.
Managers will remain one of MLB’s mysteries. How much do
they help? How much do they hurt? Is winning games secondary to keeping everybody
happy and having a functioning clubhouse? Where is the line drawn? When does
the tactical become more important than the personal? My opinion is different
from yours, which is different from people with intimate knowledge of the team,
which is different from the players themselves, which is assuredly different
from the manager’s.
I can’t promise that I won’t get pissed off when Francona
calls for, or allows, a player to bunt in the wrong spot. I can’t promise that
I won’t get pissed off when a defensive replacement is not made or a reliever
is left out there too long. The margins for this team are razor-thin, in this
market, with the nature of the game. These decisions matter. A manager
executing the gameplan properly isn’t as important as a player executing, but
it is valuable.
But, I can also acknowledge that I need to keep the right
perspective about a manager’s job description and the hierarchical order of his
duties. The most important task in Terry Francona’s job appears to be managing
the personalities, the egos, and the individuals in that clubhouse. He’s done a
good job overall. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about the other side of
the job.
As I sit here and watch a tightly-knit Royals clubhouse have
success with obvious managerial blunders, it makes me question a lot of the
things I thought I knew about baseball. As predictive as certain stats are and
as much as we can quantify about the game of baseball, at its core, it’s still
layered with unpredictability. It is both frustrating and compelling. It is,
unfortunately, a grey area.
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