Posted by Bill Baer on Tuesday, September 8, 2009 at 12:39 pm

In baseball, the manager at times can be the most overrated and the most underrated member of the team. When things are going poorly, he shoulders all of the blame and can sometimes lose his job. When things are going well, the players take all of the credit. It’s a thankless job to say the least. So thankless that few have taken the time to study them in-depth.

Chris Jaffe took it upon himself to fill that void and find out as much as he could about them and report it back to us in a book, Evaluating Baseball Managers: A Comprehensive History and Performance Analysis, 1876-2008. I wanted to pick his brain a bit as I couldn’t wait until the end of the year. He was nice enough to take some time out to answer some of my questions.

The first half of the questioning can be found below. The latter half can be read tomorrow.

Being a Phillies fan, I had to get his thoughts on Charlie Manuel first.

. . .

Considering the incredible success the Phillies have had in recent years, where does Charlie Manuel rank on the list of the Phils’ best skippers? Who’s the franchise’s best, in your esteemed opinion? The worst?

Huh.  Well, by and large I think managers are underrated.

That said, I never thought that much of Charlie Manuel.  Hey – he’s the defending World Series champion manager and I’ll give him credit for that, but when it’s all said and done I’m not sure if he’ll go down as anything more than a latter-day Danny Ozark whose shit worked in one postseason.

Charlie Manuel’s had the good fortune to run two teams with considerable talent – especially offensive talent.  He took over an Indians club that had won five consecutive division titles immediately prior to his arrival.  They were on the downswing, but that was one hell of a team.  Now he’s come to a Philadelphia team with a fearsome lineup

I first seriously started to look at managers prior to the 2008 season.  At that time, I could look at the team Manuel had – I don’t mean looking at the stats his players produced under him.  I mean look at who the players were, how talented they were, and how old they were.  I couldn’t believe this team kept winning less than 90 games.  They finally got over that hump last year and then claimed The Title, and are pace for an even better record this year, but overall his teams strike me as moderate underachievers.

Manuel is certainly one of the most successful skippers in franchise history.  I don’t know if he’s one of the best, though.

I will say a few things for the guy, however.  I’ll give him credit for surviving what had to be a difficult experience in 2007.  I remember preseason rumors that year that he wasn’t long for the job if things went poorly, especially since the club hired some sort of failed manager version of the Super Friends League of Justice to serve as his coaches.  A lot of guys would’ve melted down and/or self-destructed in that environment, but Manuel managed to survive and lead the team to its first post-season appearance in years.

I can think of one thing Manuel does that helps the Phillies: he heavily relies on his frontline talent.  As I write this answer, Philadelphia’s starting eight position players have accrued 80.5% of the team’s plate appearances.  That’s the most by any club since the 1989 Cards (who also had 80.5% of plate appearance gobbled up by the starting eight).  You have to go back to the 1978 Expos to find a team with an even higher percentage taken up by the starting position players.

Yeah, that’s a sign that they have a highly talented starting eight.  Yeah, it’s a sign they’ve been healthy.  Still, that’s the most by any team in 31 years.  That has to tell you a little something about Manuel.  Admittedly, the percentage will likely drop as the season goes on and the callups get some playing time, but they have an excellent shot to have the highest percentage of PA by the front eight by any team this decade.

One random comment about Manuel: he got a very late start for a manager.  He was 56 when he made his managerial debut.  Of the 89 managers I profile in my book (no, Manuel’s not one – I did all guys who lasted a decade as a team’s primary managers plus a handful of others), only one guy was older when he made his MLB managerial debut, Felipe Alou.  Almost everyone else was under the age of 50.  Manuel is 65 this year – that’s four years older than Sparky Anderson was when he retired.

Oh, to actually answer your question, I’d say Philadelphia’s best skipper is probably Pat Moran.  I know on one’s ever heard of him, but he would’ve entered Cooperstown as a Hall of Fame skipper had he not drank himself to death after nine seasons on the job (four in Philly, five in Cincy).  Both teams won their first pennant immediately upon his arrival, and declined noticeably upon his departure.

These weren’t coincidences.  Moran plied the trade at a time when the ability to coach was at its all-time importance.  Basic fundamentals everyone now takes for granted had been worked out just a generation previously.  For instance, the relay play was first begun barely 20 years before Moran’s managerial debut.  They’d been worked out, but one couldn’t assume that the players automatically knew them before coming to the majors.  (If the first MLB team does it in 1896, that doesn’t mean all the Pennsylvania coal kids will know it immediately, and if one had got a good bat he’d play no matter how sloppy his fundamentals, which means players had a widely variable level of knowledge of fundamentals in the 1910s).

When Moran arrived in Philadelphia in 1915, he stressed fundamentals and the team’s error total dropped by over 100.  At the same time, their Defensive Efficiency flipped from a league-worst .666 to an NL-topping .715.  That’s a lot of extra balls getting caught.

Harry Wright deserves a mention as a great skipper, but his best days were elsewhere.  Ditto George Stallings.  Gene Mauch is Moran’s main competition for best Phillie skipper.

Worst Philadelphia skipper?  I guess Jimmie Wilson. He finished his career 242 games under .500, the worst in MLB history.  His teams sucked, but so did other managers – but he’s the furthest below .500.  Actually, the worst manager is probably some guy that barely lasted a season, perhaps less.  Wilson had to be good enough to last as long as he did (and get hired by another team, the Cubs, after the Phillies fired him).  In terms of career value, though, it’s Wilson.

In which area can managers make the most impact in a baseball game?

Actually, I’m not sure what they do in a game is when they have the most impact.
I think they’re fundamentally managers of men rather than of the game.  What they do in a game matters, but what they do before a game to prepare the players and club matters more.

Years ago Rob Neyer wrote a column at ESPN where he asked a GM (or GMs) what they ask men in interviews to become managers.  It’s not stuff about in-game tactics, but communication – how well they handle and deal with people.  Last year at a panel discussion at the annual SABR convention, Cleveland GM Mark Shapiro said the most important traits for a manager are communication, self-awareness, and prioritization.  You have to know how to deal with players the best way to get each one in the best mental status for the game, a manager had to be aware how he came off so his impact was what he wanted it to be, and had to know which issues were the most important to address.

It’s impossible for the general public to get anything better than a hazy picture of these parts of the managerial jobs, but that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant.  Managers are like icebergs: most of what matters is beneath the surface and out of view.

As for what they do in the game itself, probably how they handle the bullpen makes the most difference.  If I recall correctly, Bill James figured that the difference between the best and worst lineup is only 5% runs per year (and no one uses the worst possible lineup).  You can have much bigger differences by knowing who to put in the bullpen, how each role is assigned, how clear each pitcher is in the role, and how they are used throughout the season to avoid burnout.

The game has changed a lot over the years: integration, expansion, a smaller strike zone, etc. Do managers adapt at the same speed, or is there lag in that respect?

They adapt to the needs of their job, which isn’t necessarily as the same thing as the game’s changes, and as a result isn’t necessarily the same pace.  One thing I found out when researching my book is how much the job of managing has changed over the decades.

At first, in the nineteenth century, a manager was mostly a business manager.  Someone with that job title generally took care of the sort of responsibilities one would currently expect from someone like the club secretary.  Managers counted receipts, tracked inventory and handled all the general mundane affairs of business.  The game wasn’t advanced enough economically to have separate positions take care of those things.

About the only thing they didn’t do was handle in-game affairs.  Well, some did – especially former players like Harry Wright or player-managers like Cap Anson.   Others just let team captains handle the game.  By and large there wasn’t much in-game strategy in the early years.  That said, being a baseball man wasn’t a primary necessity for being a baseball manager in those early years.  If you look in at 19th century managers, you’ll see an unusually large proportion had exceptionally short careers.  This is why: it was a very different job compared to what it later became.  Heck, even guys like Wright and Anson were still expected to handle the mundane affairs.

By the early 1890s and early 1900s, the position began to come into its own as in-game strategy and maneuvers became more important.  The manager became the man architect of the franchise.  Managers in this period were more likely to ascend into the ranks of ownership than any other time in MLB history.

By the 1920s, the game continued to evolve, causing the rise of the GM.  Initially, the GM had to look after the farm system and development of players, and managers still had primary authority over the roster’s veterans, but that gradually eroded.  By around 1950, the modern day position of manager was emerging.

In many ways, the position of manager’s develop is similar to things like expansion.  The same underlying variable affects both: the business of baseball.

How much credit should Jim Tracy get for the Colorado Rockies’ turnaround? Staying in the NL West, what are your thoughts on the controversial hiring of A.J. Hinch?

I’ll personally give Tracy a good chunk of credit, but I frankly don’t follow the Rockies closely enough to say how much credit he should get.

He doesn’t deserve the full credit as some of it is the Plexiglas Principle as an underachieving team reverts to the mean.  However, the Rockies haven’t merely reverted to the mean, but gone way past it.

With Hinch, I find it amazing that a guy only 364 days older than me is a MLB manager.  I’m used to players being younger than me, but a manager almost as old?  Jeepers.

The Hinch hiring also completely cuts against trends toward specialization and standardization in the hiring of managers.  In this day and age there is an increasingly fixed line separating managing jobs from front office jobs.  This wasn’t always the case.  As noted above, managers used to become owners.  Many others bounced between front office to dugout.  For example, Hall of Fame GM Ed Barrow managed the Red Sox despite never playing pro baseball himself.  It wasn’t that long ago a person would bounce back-and-forth from dugout to front office.  Jack McKeon went from manager to GM back to manager, for instance.  Hinch’s hiring stands in opposition of this trend toward compartmentalizing people as front office men or dugout dwellers.

I find it especially interesting that prior to becoming manager he was involved in player development from the franchise.  That seemed like it was Arizona’s real problem over the last few years: a bunch of their young players have either spun their wheels or fizzled in the majors.  It could be that they were overhyped, but the trend is disconcerting.  Player development isn’t something that only occurs in the minors.  The only real Arizona prospect to enjoy much success was Carlos Quentin – who had an All-Star season immediately upon leaving the franchise.  That doesn’t help the impression that Arizona can’t get as much out of their players as they should.

As an added bonus, Hinch’s hiring is odd even aside from his route to the dugout because he’s so young.  He took command of the dugout a week before his 35th birthday.  In recent decades the youngest debut came from Eric Wedge at age 35.  (He narrowly beats out former Phillie manager Nick Leyva).  Looking it up, the last 34-year-old to fill out a lineup card was Tony LaRussa.  Hinch was in kindergarten when that happened.

Of the managers you studied, which had the most Sabermetric-oriented approaches? The least?

Ya know, I’m not sure what that means.  Does it mean pitch counts?  Then no managers were sabermetric until 10 years ago and in the last five they pretty much all are.  Does it mean encouraging his hitter to draw walks?  Well, Earl Weaver loved the three-run homer.  Does it mean avoiding the bunt?  Weaver bunted more than one would suppose – it was only after 1977ish that he turned away from it.  John McGraw loved getting on base and hated the bunt.

I never really looked at managers through a prism of sabermetric/non-sabmertric.  Sabermetrics is a nice way to view the game but I don’t see it as a central axis upon which the game revolves.  Plenty of successful managers do things sabermetricians would hate: Bill McKechnie played small ball, for instance – but he might be the greatest manager in NL history.

. . .

Thanks to Chris for taking time out of his busy schedule to enhancing our understanding of the skippers. Check back tomorrow for the Part II, and be sure to get your hands on a copy of Evaluating Baseball Managers.