Looks like LaRussa is going to take Isringhausen out of the closer role for the time being so he can work on whatever is causing his ineffectiveness. The Cardinals will be going to somewhat of a bullpen by committee, with Ryan Franklin getting the majority of the opportunities. If Izzy can get back on track, he should regain the closer role by the end of the month.
The Pads were the likeliest place for the Sox to trade Coco Crisp. But if he’s not simply going to patch a hole in a good team, forget it - he’s staying in Boston.
Could we interest you in Julio Lugo or Julian Tavarez, maybe?
They’ve drafted really, really badly since Ricciardi became the GM. Aaron Hill has panned out and that’s about it.
I don’t know WHY their drafts have been so awful; the general consensus is that they spent a lot of draft picks on college juniors and seniors who were safe mid-level talents, instead of getting higher-potential players. It’s worth nothing the team fired most of the scouting staff, and hasn’t gotten a lot of talent from the Carribbean. But of course, that’s all “maybe this is the reason” stuff. It could just be that Ricciardi and his team aren’t very good at judging amateur talent.
They were rained out today, so they scored the same number of runs they usually do.
Maybe they stoled away those geniuses in Tampa that forced Gene Michaels out of the role in the Yankee organization.
When he supervised the drafts, we built a team out of prospects with several hall of farmers and many all stars. Once he got pushed out we developed Soriano and no one else. Then Cashman got control and had Michaels as his chief adviser and suddenly the farm system is producing again. I see absolutely no pattern there though. 
Jim
Terry Ryan, who built years of contending teams in Minnesota, is still jobless, I believe. If they made me King of the Blue Jays I’d call him up and tell him to name his price.
It’s funny how people blame managers for winning and losing. I don’t think managers have much to do with it at all. GENERAL managers, though, have eerything to do with it.
Just not a good weekend for my teams.
Oakland beat the Rangers in a typical Sunday wild game.
I wish the D Backs and Cubs would have been rained out. But, alas they played the game in lousy Midwestern weather in May!
I think managers have more to do with post season success than regular season, but don’t sell them short on the impact of the good and the bad.
Some are great at in game decisions. They have the tactics down and don’t make foolish mistakes or overuse the pitching staff. Some are great communicators and make it easier for the players to just play. Some can motivate through a combination of fear and rah-rah. A few just have a strange feel for the game and make the right decisions even when it does not follow baseball logic.
Then there are managers that lose their team, throw their own players to the wolves or consistently make tactical blunders. Most don’t last long, but Ozzie Guillen appears to be beloved by ownership if not the fans as did Isiah Thomas in another sport.
I think a good GM with a good plan is as important as a good manager, but managers can mean a +/- 5 games during the season and have a huge impact on the post season where every decision is magnified and impact many future decisions. By this point the GM is little more than another spectator.
Jim
About the last comment above.
What do you think of Lou Pinella as a manager?
I have to say I fall into the failure category. He’s a great baseball guy and I’d love to drink a beer with him. However, he has not shown himself as a great manager in my opinion.
Not sure which comment you mean but I’ll weigh in.
The difference between managers in terms of their in-game decision making is so small as to be undetectable. There are two things no reasonable baseball person can deny:
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Most ballgames are not won or lost by virtue of strategic decisions. The vast majority of games are won or lost purely by one team outhitting/outpitching the other team, and no tactical move could make a difference.
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Most managers at the major league level, given the same personnel, manage essentially the same way. There is really very little variation today. No managers today has the balls to use a 4-man pitching staff through the entire year, or to try a shifted pitching system, or to bat his highest OBP leadoff if the guy hits home runs.
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The one area where a manager CAN make a huge difference is in the players he selects to do certain jobs, but to be honest, that decision rests in the GM’s hands to a large extent.
Lou Piniella is about as successful as you would expect a manager to be given the teams he’s been entrusted with. Managers who are legitimately BAD at the job - and there have definitely been those - simply don’t last long enough to matter.
He is an odd one. He is great at in game tactics to score extra runs, but he has always been hard on bullpens and unrealistic.
He appeared to be a good motivator for the Yanks, Reds, Mariners and even Tampa. I don’t have any feel for his Cubs time.
He seemed to be a good post season manager. I think this is where the Xs and Os of baseball are seen the best.
Overall he did great by three teams and could not do much of anything with the minimal pitching talent he had in Tampa. I would say he is a good manager with some obvious flaws. This includes not being great with the press and being such a hothead that he did call out several player in front of reporters and fans.
RickJay, you don’t think a manager makes the +/- 5 game difference in a season? That is often the margin of making it into the post season.
Jim
Oh, gosh, no. I really don’t think tactics could possibly add that many wins in a season. I can’t see any way that could be true.
You mention you think Lou Piniella was effective at using tactics to score extra runs. It’d take me awhile to run some numbers to see if there’s any evidence that is true, but just at a glace I can’t see how it would be possible for a manager to add five wins by virtue of offensive tactics; that would be FIFTY runs, an absolutely immense number. Even half that (assuming that your +/- 5 wins would have to include both offense and defense) strikes me as being unlikely. 25 runs is a lot of runs; it’s a run about every six games. At the major league level there are no proactive tactics that will let you score that many more runs; bunting men to second costs runs, bunting men to third doesn’t come up very often and is only useful in a limited number of situations, and the value of basestealing is largely determined by your personnel, not your manager, since only high-percentage basestealers are worth a damn.
This is probably not true in lower levels of baseball. I’m just talking about the majors.
A particularly inept manager could certainly SUBTRACT five or more wins by doing remarkably stupid things, but he wouldn’t last a season. It’s also possible that a manager may add many wins by virtue of what he does behind the scenes to keep things going smoothly, prevent the GM from doing something idiotic, keep George Steinbrenner happy, etc., but
a. It’s not possible for us to kjnow for sure what impact that has and
b. In most cases it probably doesn’t matter.
Well, he’s a step up from Dusty Baker, that’s for sure!!! 
Oh, did I say the obligatory “CUBS WIN!”? <getting out the broom> 
Why would adding 5 wins be that many runs? You don’t have to add that many runs in a game to win, you just have to add as many as needed not to have lost those games. Since they are likely games where there were close outcomes, you wouldn’t need to add more than, say, 7 or 8 runs, as long as they occurred at the right time.
This is an incredibly pig headed train of thought. I know it’s en vogue to argue that Managers are meaningless in baseball and it’s certainly true that they get far too much blame and credit for losses and wins, but to argue that it is negligible is crazy. I agree that it’d be very difficult to statistically quantify it, and that in-game strategy is a dubious and inconsistent mistress but they DO make a difference.
Piniella on Cubs is a prime example. He’s doing a poor job by having Soriano lead off. Soriano does indeed decide the games he’s in and Piniella doesn’t deserve the credit of blame for when he succeeds or fails but the managers job is to optimize the output of a specific likelihood. He’s doing a good job of playing his utility/role players at optimal times. Getting Reed Johnson and Ronny Cedeno into the lineup versus the right opponents has been something he’s been damn near prescient at. These might not be “tactical” decisions in the vein of making a pitching change versus a lefty, stealing a base or bunting a runner into scoring position but filling out the lineup card and understanding the strengths of your personnel is not something that every manager does the same. I’ll agree that the difference between the best and 3rd best manager is essentially nil, the difference between a good one and a average one does equate to wins. At the same time, there are assuredly average managers out there who will excel with specific lineups because they might have an inherently better relationship with a certain subset of players.
Well if we base it on 10 run per win or even 5 per, I understand why you disagree. I was thinking that a good manager makes a difference in up to 5 close games where it take 1-2 runs to get the extra win or to save the bullpen from being exhausted by an extra inning game and thus being available in early in the next series in a close game.
Well, I can’t answer this here.
Now, What Exit! and DSYoungEsq make good points. However, even acknowledging that managers will tend to make tactical decisions only in high-impact situations - nobody bothers to bunt when it’s 14-1 - if you’re going to convince me that it can make a 5-game difference, I have to be convinced there’s a five-game difference between two major league managers, not a 5-game difference between what one manager does and a theoretical manager who does nothing at all. I’m not sure - absent real evidence - that there’s really that big a difference. No manager’s THAT different in his approach from another one.
In fact, conformity is the rule; look at how all managers have adopted the “Closer” role for their relief ace, which is, strategically, really stupid; it would make more sense to use your best reliever as a “Fireman,” the way they used to use them. But they’ve all conformed to the approved method. A manager who would break away from that could, at least briefly, make a big difference.
I agree that there are isolated cases where a manager could make a big tactical impact. A manager who was brave enouh to say “Closer? Fuck that. My main man is now a fireman” could easily put five extra wins on the board; “Closers” are the dumbest idea in fifty years.
For another example, What Exit? has already hinted that a big difference could be made in the postseason, and it’s been argued that Joe Torre had a lot to do with the Yankees’ postseason success in the late 90s. It’s hardly remembered anymore, but for a long time managers managed in the postseason more or less the same way they did in the regular season, except for maybe shortening the starting rotation. You’d often hear announcers talk about how old Mike Manager was keeping his starter in, even though he was in trouble, because you couldn’t use the WHOLE bullpen today, you had to worry about Game 2. Torre was the first manager, that I remember, to just completely dump that; the saying about him, which he might have coined but if he didn’t someone else did for him, was “the best preparation for tomorrow’s game is to win today.” What, Rivera’s pitched two days in a row? Fuck that, I need to win today, bring him in. Torre, I think, recognized two facts:
- In the postseason you get a dramatically greater number of off days.
- Managing like you did in the regular season just doesn’t make any sense. In the regular season you HAVE to take it slowly and rest guys, and if you lose four games in one week it’s not a big deal. In the playoffs if you lose four games in one week, you’re out. There is no room for a marathon approach; you are always on the edge of doom.
Now, however, that advantage is gone, because now every manager manages that way; Torre’s approach became the accepted one. But for a few years there he gave his team a big edge.
It also helped that he could (in the beginning of his run as Yankee skipper) pull up some of the finest righty and lefty setup men in front of the best closer in baseball history.
I agree with you, though. Hell, if it were all up to me, I’d have a hard time not bringing up youngsters for a week, even if they’re just on the pine. Get them in, get them involved, throw them in for a pinch hit or a inch run every now and then. Of course, you can’t necessarily do that because of all the egos in the clubhouse, but I would like to see more people get seemingly random callups. It also “hurts” not having a bigger bench.
Took the Brewers long enough to end the Gagne as closer debacle. 10 million dollars for this guy?
Anyone think Ned Yost is on the hot seat? Brewers haven’t been as good as they should with all of that talent.
The Cards moving Isringhausen out of the closer role was also expected.
I’m actually liking the NL Central race now. Even the Astros are playing better.
Now, if the Cubs can join the other two and end the Kerry Wood as closer experiment, we might actually have three teams playing to their potential.
This brings up a good point. The bullpens have creeped up to a huge size now. Many teams have 13 pitchers, leaving only 4 bench players on AL teams. The days of three catchers are long gone now. You rarely even see the old generalist of C-1B-LF.
Is it time for baseball to work some deal with the Union to expand the team size upwards by 1 or 2 players?
What is not happening in the minors that the multipurpose catcher has disappeared from the game? They use to be common.
Would the Union trade the DH for a 26 man team? This would add two bench spots to the AL squads.
Would the owners want to do away with the DH at this point?
If not a DH, what would the owners want back from the Union for a 26 or even 27 man major league teams.
Jim