Like all major sports baseball has a “Guy in charge” on
the field. In baseball he/she is of course called the “Manager”. Football uses “Head
Coach”, basketball uses the term “Coach” and in growing up in an area where
hockey was way down the totem pole, not sure what the sports calls it – perhaps
“Ice Captain”?
Back in the good old day’s life was simpler in a many
ways. Rants about cell phones and cable TV are a few, but they don’t apply to
baseball. In baseball back then the buck kind of started and stopped with the
manager. He reported up to a general manager who reported up to an owner. There
wasn’t much more in terms of additional levels or other baseball people coming
in on a 45-degree angle. The manager managed the team, the GM took care of the
player roster and the owner paid the bills.
The physical attributes of a manager back then were
typically the same through the league. Of course there were some outliers and
slight differences, but generally they were the same. A stereotypical manager was
an old short guy with a beer gut. He had an “Average” career as a player back
in the day and for some reason or another was never in a good mood. This guy
would waddle out to the mound to make pitching changes and usually held his job
for a long period of consecutive time. Lastly
- he made all the baseball field decisions.
Today managers come in all shapes and sizes. Many of them
are “In shape” physically and tend to be a little younger than the managers of
old. In the past a manager would typically work his way up from the “A” level
to the major leagues just like a player does. Current trends are that retired
players get popped right into managing a major league ball club. Mr. Clutch
doesn’t understand the philosophy behind that, but it is becoming ever popular.
That said, a number of these green managers end up getting fired before
completing one cycle through the season.
Of those, some of them never return to managing.
The baseball player to manager fraternity has been pretty
solid. There are practically no managers in the history of the game that didn’t
play the game at some professional level. Most, as noted, had major league
careers of sorts. An interesting one is current Mets manager Terry Collins
(shout out to Long Island City!). Terry kind of fits two of the modern and
non-normalized molds. He never played in the bigs, though he did have a minor
league career, and the Met’s hired him though he had limited to no big league
managerial experience. He actually came to the Mets via the Orix Buffaloes of
the Japan league!
In addition to the dynamic of the manager profile
changing so has the responsibilities. One day out of nowhere came this new
position called a “Bench coach”. This new position is considered second in
command and is the manager’s right hand person. They take over when he gets the
boot and typically whispers general advice in the manager’s ear during a game.
It’s Clutch’s guess that the bench coach also handles other duties like keeping
the players in order, etc. This just seems like an unnecessary layer and more
of a “Friend” of the manager and assisting in times of need.
Teams have also more recently added other egghead
executives who sit up in the press box in front of a laptop and think they are
playing a modern day version of strat-o-matic baseball. These guys have all the
advanced analytics at their disposal along with more charts and graphs than you
would ever want to see. Mr. Clutch is studying some of the underlying methods
and language (“R”) that generates these values, and there is certainly some
validity to the output. Not to be confused with is seen on the idiot box, i.e.
how many times Cecil Cooper hits a line drive to right field, this information
goes ions deeper.
These guys are looking at information (for one example) like
speed in which the ball goes from the hitters bat to a certain point on the
field and how long it takes a fielder to react to that and get to that position
for one. Weather, see Mr. Clutch’s friends at Playanlytics.com for more details
on this, factors into that equation along with many other measures and
components. The end result is that a guy
in street clothes literally calls down to the dugout and informs the manager
that the left fielder needs to move three steps to the right when a certain hitter
digs in to the batter’s box. It’s just an additional case of the machines
taking over.
General Managers who typically make trades have in recent
times gotten more involved on the day-to-day activities going on between the chalked
lines. For a good example of that, fused with some early day analytics, take a
look at the movie “Moneyball”. Though the crux of the movie was how Billy
Beane, as GM of the A’s, built a winning team with little money, one of the
subplots was how he was trying to force manager Art Howe to start a certain player
at first-base over another. Billy was
basing this on analysis done by Paul DePodesta. Paul was an assistant who crunched
numbers and recommended decisions to the GM who fought over them with the
manager. Just more layers to the layers.
Regardless of how one looks at it – computer controlled or
decisions made with gut of a true baseball person, it’s a Clutch opinion that baseball
is the furthest from other major sports on results being decided by managerial choices.
Yes, decisions are made on pitching matchups (kind of important) a lineup (not
really important) and moving players around on the field (even less useful),
but the players still need to play the game and execute. Of course the same can
be said for all sports, but baseball is certainly not as micro-managed with
play calling. With all the additional cast of characters some human and some
robotic helping managers these days – major league baseball ownership certainly
doesn’t share that opinion!
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