All the fuss over whether Joe Torre will keep his job as Yankees manager reminded me of commentator Kevin Kennedy’s hilariously saying Torre’s a good manager because “he lets his players do their job”. (In effect saying he does nothing.) More importantly, I wonder if anyone who fills out the lineup and doesn’t rock the boat could manage a good baseball team. Unlike football, players can simply go to the plate without a manager telling them what play to call. True, a manager can can call bunts and hit-and-runs, but those plays are rare in today’s homer happy game. The only really difficult decisions are player changes, and (1) 99% of managers make the same pitching change decisions (2) good teams are so talent laden they won’t need to resort to backups that much. So could the Yankees take just any decent baseball guy and get decent results? I’d especially like replies from anyone who’s played sports.
Yes!
(cf.Jim Leyland)
A good manager Plays well to his teams strengths. As a rule these guys are pretty dimwitted. They had to be dragged into using computers to chart tendencies. They still bunt a man to 2nd ,giving an out for a base. I believe statistics have shown it to be wrong ,but history runs them. Lineups are made just like 70 years ago.
Sparky had an impact in Detroit in the 80s. This is Lelands first year. I will wait a couple.
No manager is able to win with a bad team but gets credit for running a good one.
The saying is that a manager gets too much credit when a team wins and too much blame when it loses. I think that’s true. The manager makes some strategic decisions that matter, but doesn’t win or lose many games. He can be a stabilizing influence on the team, I think - and Torre was that for the Yankees this year, when things were going badly - but again, they can only do so much.
Whitey Herzog (who was considered a pretty good manager during the 1980s) said that a major league baseball team will win about 65 games and lose about 65 games whatever anyone does. It’s the other 30 or so games where the manager makes a difference.
The mananger is crucial. Some managers can inspire their players to perform to the top of their abilities, to make teams become more than the sum of their parts.
Others are just hacks.
It’s unquestionably true that “in game” tactics usually have little impact on the outcomes of games. Small-ball tactics like bunting and such generally do not help, and done in excess will hurt; basestealing only works if you have runners who are really good at it.
Managers, however, have a lot more impact on their teams than just those sorts of decisions. A manager’s job can, I think, be broken up into three categories:
- Personnel management. Like ir or not, managing 25 pro athletes, plus coaches, is not necessarily an easy job, and teams can and do go off the rails if improperly managed. It is probably not entirely coincidence that the Toronto Blue Jays collapsed and fell out of contention around the same time their manager was trying to get into fistfights with his players. Teams have been known to openly rebel against really bad or irritating managers - Ted Williams cost himself his manager’s job by being an ass, for instance.
A few years ago Baseball Prospectus did a study that showed that hitters tended to get better when they starting playing for Dusty Baker, and prompty got worse once they went somewhere else. It was almost certainly not a coincidence; it was a persistent, repetitive thing. I dunno if it’s still happening but at the time it was a rather remarkable phenomenon. Now, why it happened I don’t know, but there was something about Baker’s approach with his hitters that seemed to improve their performance. I can certainly believe this sort of thing is possible; anyone who’s played sports remembers some coaches who helped their game and some who did not.
- Player selection. While a team’s personnel decisions are technically made by the GM, selecting the players who will make up the team and the roles they will play is still something the manager affects.
To continue my use of the Blue Jays as an example, that’s why Cito Gaston ended up losing his job. Gaston was very personable, and he was a good in-game tactician, but once the team needed to begin rebuilding itself it became obvious he was not the man for the job. He chose, in all cases, to play veterans (especially right handed hitters with power but not a lot of plate discipline - in other words, hitters just like Cito Gaston) above rookies, thereby seriously retarding the team’s rebuilding efforts.
Contrast this with Bobby Cox. Gaston beat Cox in the 1992 World Series in part because he was a better tactician, but Cox continued to manage winning teams in part because he was very good at assisting John Schuerholz in player selection and in properly using players in roles they could succeed in.
- In game tactics.
There HAVE been very bad managers, beyond any doubt or question. Buck Martinez is a very good announcer but he was amazingly bad as the Blue Jays’ manager. And he wasn’t one fifth as bad as Maury Wills.
Depends on the team. Jim Leyland was able to spark a team that lost 119 games a couple of years back to a series victory over the talent-superior Yankees. Joe Torre, with a lineup that stacked, really shouldn’t have to do anything but fill out the lineup card, sit back and watch the victories pile up. However, once he saw the team wasn’t up to the task, at that point he has to actually manage (change lineup, bench underachievers, etc.) and that’s where he failed.
My previous reply in this thread was obviously glib… maybe to the point of being totally inscrutable.
I think Mitch Albom explains my point in a much more literate manner than I’m able to do. Leyland’s influence on this team cannot be over-stated.
I think Bill James also touched upon this issue in one of his old Abstracts years ago with respect to Billy Martin. Martin seemed to have a knack in helping some players be better hitters in certain circumstances (I think the example James gave was regarding Dave McKay). James speculated that maybe Martin was able to pass on some of the things that he learned when he was a player.
He also mentioned that Martin had a knack of getting the most out of his pitchers as well (James made a comment regarding an incident when Martin was managing the A’s. I believe Dave McCatty was the pitcher, and Martin went to the mound and chewed him out for throwing two balls in a row to the first batter of the game. Afterwards, McCatty settled down, began throwing strikes, and eventually earned a complete game win).
Of course, Martin eventually burned out his pitching staff (Remember BillyBall and all the complete games they pitched)? But he seemed to be able to get the most from the players he inherited (especially marginal players) for at least a year or two. James also tracked the won-lost percentage of teams before Martin became manager and his first year the team he managed. In all cases, IIRC, the team increased their won-lost percentage from the previous year the first year Martin managed the team.
In short - James concluded that if you wanted to win NOW, Martin was the type of manager best able to get the most from his players for a short period of time. However, if you were building for the future, Martin wasn’t necessarily the best choice.
See, this is where I simply don’t agree.
Joe Torre isn’t a failure. He’s a HUGE success. You say he didn’t do anything, but that’s just not true; his 2006 team was absolutely racked by injuries. Two of the team’s outfielders and hitting stars missed pretty much the whole year, and the pitching rotation was a wreck half the time. Not that he doesn’t have a lot of talent to work with anyway, but if you’d told me in April that Hiedki Matsui and Gary Sheffield would play 80 games between them and the team’s best starter would be Wang I’d have picked them to miss the playoffs. Instead they had the best record in baseball.
I know the Yankees think not winning the World Series is failure, and hey, fair enough. In a sense it is. But here’s the fact: **If you make the playoffs six years in a row there is a pretty good chance you won’t win the World Series in any of those years no matter how good you are. ** Short series are heavily dependent on luck.
I have to put my vote in on the side of the manager having an effect on the team…both during the year(s) they manage, and possibly afterwards. An example - The Chicago Cubs managed by Dusty Baker. Baker loves to leave his starting pitchers in the game much too long. Many Cubs fans would say that this habit is partially responsible for the many injuries to their pitching staff over the past couple of years, especially Mark Prior and Kerry Wood. Take a look at the number of pitches those guys threw in each of their games before they got injured but while Dusty was managing. 120+ was the norm. Dusty also showed a strong aversion to starting younger players when a “seasoned veteran” was around, even when the veteran was horrible. Holding aside any “inspirational” influences, just making different starting lineup choices and using his starting pitchers for fewer pitches each game, I’m sure the Cubs would have done much better the last 2 years than they did under Dusty. Glad to see him gone.
Not talent superior. Hitting superior, Pitching inferior.Perhaps managing inferior too.
The manager has a huge influence, from setting the pitching rotation to setting the tone in the locker room.
Your grandmother could set a pitching or batting lineup. Billy martin set tone?
The only tone Billy Martin was familiar with was the dialtone after Steinbrenner fired him again.
Well that would be something to see because both of my grandmothers are deceased. 
As for your point, before you persist in your incorrect belief that that manager makes no difference, do yourself a favor and read these articles:
Thomas Boswell: “Why Baltimore Wins More Games Than Anybody Else”, in How Life Imitates the World Series, Penguin Books, New York, 1982, pp. 60-68.
Thomas Boswell: “The Big Bang Theory and Other Secrets of the Game”, in How Life Imitates the World Series, Penguin Books, New York, 1982, pp. 69-78.
Thomas Boswell: “The Best Manager There Is”, in How Life Imitates the World Series, Penguin Books, New York, 1982, pp. 150-157.
Base ball is an old game. When you play ,you know the situational plays. You know every possibility when the pitch is made. Ypu know where to throw if its a ground ball or a fly. In short ,you dont need anyone to tell you what to do.You have seen it and done it a million times.
I think a bad manager could screw up a team for a short time. They quickly get fired.
really good teams are self operating. Sparky could have managed the old reds by phone.
Do you suppose the manager will put a 3rd baseman in left field. Cmon ,they sign the players and give them to him.
Lineup 1 fast player good on base %
2 fast ansd singles hitter
3 power hitter to bring in single hitters
4 best power hitter on team
5 less power stilldrive in runners
6 thru 9 weaker as it goes on til # 9 weakest hitter
Whats new
I agree. I kept reading that the Yankees thougt that anything short of a WS win was failure. I took that to mean that Yankees = George Steinbrener and thought “well, that just means that George needs to get his head out of ass”.