Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 111: How Do Major-League Managers Differ from Non-Baseball Bosses?

Episode Date: January 3, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss Joe Maddon’s value and the ways in which managers might have more or less impact than the typical non-baseball boss.

Good morning and welcome to episode 111 of Effectively Wild, the Baseball Perspectives Daily Podcast in New York, New York. I am Ben Lindberg and in Long Beach, California, you are Sam Miller. Good morning, Sam. Good morning, Ben. You have a topic that someone asked you about or brought to your attention or something last week, maybe? Somebody let me know about a podcast by the Freakonomics Radio, I guess, in which Joe Madden of the Tampa Bay Rays was interviewed. And the topic of the show was leadership and the value of a boss. And so we both listened to it. And I think that the reason that I guess I wanted to talk about it

was not so much because of that podcast itself, which I think I took a couple things from and maybe you did as well, but because it seems like you and I both have a little bit of a longstanding fascination with the idea of manager assessment and the ambiguity therein. And it occurred to me while thinking about this that we know how writers assess managers in the course of a year. They say, how many wins did I think that team was going to win? How many did they win? Do the math.

And then there's your manager. And it's sort of a hysterically simple way of doing it, but at least it is a method. I actually don't really have any idea how people assess managers over a longer period of time. And the only thing I can think of is winning World Series. Yeah, I think over a long period of time, you can't really do the expectations thing. I guess you kind of can if it's a manager of the Yankees or something who have great teams every year. But I think after a certain point, you just start adding up playoff appearances and deep playoff appearances particularly. Yeah, like do you have any sense of whether the general consensus is that

like Bud Black or Eric Wedge is a better manager? My sense is that Bud Black is a better manager and i have nothing to back that up mine is too and i couldn't tell you one reason why i mean the padres had a good year once right uh and eric wedge is i don't know it's almost like eric wedge is more forgettable maybe yeah or older and he's i I mean, Bud Black. I guess we knew Bud Black as a player. Maybe that helps. Maybe.

Him standing. I don't know if that's it. I don't know. I feel like Eric Wedge has maybe gotten more negative publicity on websites that I read over the years or something like that. But, yeah, it's just kind of a gut feeling that I can't really back up without looking somewhere. So anyway, this Freakonomics thing was centered around an economics study that tried to measure the value of a good manager in the workplace.

And they went deep inside some corporate entity. They would not say which one. The researchers did. And looked at how much a manager affects worker production in this environment. And what they found was that it's about a 10% boost in productivity by a good manager. That's really significant. a good manager. It's really significant. If that were the case in every industry, you would say that the managers were really important. They alluded to the idea that baseball managers probably have less impact than that, but perhaps some. I guess that's kind of the idea behind a manager

is that they boost productivity and that's what makes it so hard to measure because we don't actually know I mean there are all sorts of ways that make that hard to measure one of which is that we don't actually know what players productivity should be it's so fluid and anyway so 10% would be huge. It's probably not that

much for a baseball manager. Joe Maddon was asked how much he thought managers could impact productivity. He wouldn't really say. He suggested more for a young team. He says that veterans generally leave to their own devices, both in terms of managing their own behavior and also during a game itself. You don't really get very involved in what a veteran is doing during a game. And he said that he suspected that his bosses knew better than he did,

but he doesn't think too much about it, and he would be worried to think about the games that he has cost his team in that equation as well. And I think the most interesting thing that he said is that he described his role as a manager as intellectualizing the day, which is a fascinating way of looking at a manager. The idea being that he comes in early and he is the only one who really has a plan that bridges both the front office and the players and he has to figure out a way to to create a plan to make a plan to keep things going in a sort of systematic way so that you're not just wasting things you're

not just kind of standing around waiting for home runs to happen or whatever, but to actually have a kind of an intellectual attack to the front office and the information that the Rays provide him. And so I was kind of wondering how much credit you give him for just his willingness to use that information. Because it seems like if Joe Madden were kind of left to his own devices and were not fed that information every day. He said he gets up every morning and he studies a stat report that he's fed by his front office. And I guess Joe Maddon kind of distinguishes himself by his willingness to embrace that information and apply it. But how do you compare that to the benefit of actually finding that information and providing it? I mean, it seems like just because of the way the manager role has been historically, we give him so much credit for just accepting those things and using that information, which you'd think would not be that huge an accomplishment.

You'd think it would be kind of the bare minimum that a manager would be expected to make use of that information. It hasn't been. But I don't know how you weigh his willingness to utilize the information against kind of just the ability to actually dig up that information. Yeah, you wonder whether in 10 years, a manager like Joe Maddon would be distinguished from the pack at all. I mean, right now there's a, I mean, he's being measured against managers who, um, who kind of, uh, I don't know that the, the public perception at least is that they're closed off to it, which doesn't make a lot of sense. My guess is that probably all managers are more open to stats than we appreciate. In the same way five years ago, front offices were more open to stats than I think the general public appreciated,

and now kind of the general public does appreciate it, I think, or maybe not the general public, but the general reading public. But yeah, I mean, Madden stands out more for his, when you compare him to other managers than when you compare him to like humanity in general. Yeah. Intellectually curious people throughout the world and throughout various industries. And I don't think that Joe Maddon is exemplary for his curiosity, but he is compared to 29 other managers that he manages against. I don't know that I don't expect him to necessarily be, in fact I explicitly don't expect him

to be doing the sort of work that his front office statistical department is doing. I mean, are you suggesting that he should be a statistics major and have these databases and be doing his own work? No. Even if he could, I doubt he would have the time to do that and everything else he's expected to do. that and everything else he's expected to do. We had originally planned to talk about this last week and I had made some notes which are just disjointed lines in a Word document that I'm trying to decipher. And by the way, we will link to this podcast. It's just a 15-minute or so thing.

We'll put a link to it in the BP post. But I was kind of wondering about the ways in which a manager is different from your typical boss or the typical boss in the study that was cited. They didn't name the company that they use, but they did say that it was just sort of a giant place that was kind of a call center. It did many things, but it was a call center and insurance claims, that sort of thing, which is different in a number of ways, I guess. If you think about what a boss does or what a boss could potentially do. I guess there are two or three things. A boss can teach an employee to do something new or different or better, which is

not something I think a manager does a whole lot of. It seems like when a player does kind of make a mechanical change or something, it's typically a coach who is credited for that change. Like when Jose Batista became Jose Batista, it was a change that Dwayne Murphy, his hitting coach, suggested. You don't often hear about a manager kind of tweaking something like that, although I'm sure it happens. And a boss can also be a motivator and not teach an employee to do something new, but teach them to do the same thing better or encourage them to do the same thing better, which a manager does. Or I guess a boss can just delegate tasks more efficiently or assign roles more efficiently so that people aren't necessarily working harder or

working in a different way, but they're working on something that they're just better at. So that's something that a manager does also, I think. So maybe a manager does two of the three things that a boss at this giant company would be expected to do. But the fact that it is a giant company that is a call center and works on insurance claims seems dramatically different to me in that I don't know how much a manager has to be a motivator in the major leagues in that everyone who's there is highly motivated. Just to get to that point, you have to be extremely motivated. And there's a lot of incentive to work hard because there's a big financial payoff and a payoff in fame and notoriety.

of a major league team has to pump his players up compared to a manager at a call center who might hate his job and just be doing it for a paycheck instead of a vocation and possibly not a very big paycheck. It's kind of like if you worked at Inateck, the company from Office Space, and your boss is Bill Lundberg, you might hate your life. And if you have a great boss, you might hate your life a little less. But it doesn't seem to be the same thing as a manager and a major league job. And another thing is that a baseball player is always auditioning for every other team. Everything he does is extremely visible. So I don't know that he has to curry favor with the boss quite as much just because he's kind of a citizen of baseball in a way.

Whatever he does, if it doesn't work out with one team, every other team can see that and potentially reward him for it. So I wonder what the impact is in those senses compared to a typical workplace. Yeah, it's really hard to talk about this, partly because we don't, I mean, the very basic building blocks of this discussion are unknown to us. We don't know how much hard work matters to major league baseball players. I mean, if it does an extra, um, it does an extra workout actually show up on the field is, does, you know, running extra laps actually show up on the field and how much,

and does being happy matter when you're playing and how much and does wanting to win more actually matter at the big league level and how much um and so if you theoretically give the the manager um some credit for being able to inspire those three things even if like you say it's not as much credit as you would in an insurance company. You need to figure out how much that actually matters. I mean, the idea that a team playing together with the drive to win will have better results than a team not playing together with a little bit less drive to win is not something

that I think we take too seriously because we are not qualified to measure it, to even observe it, to see it happening. But players are really unanimous in their faith in that idea. And I forget who it was, uh, recently someone, a ballplayer who I, um, who I think a lot of, uh, like it probably wasn't Brandon McCarthy, but somebody like Brandon McCarthy, um, made some statement that every team that he's ever been on that one had these attributes and that no team that he ever played on that didn't have these attributes ever won and you could easily imagine that this athlete who isn't brandon mccarthy but who i remember respecting like i respect brandon mccarthy you could imagine the um this player

selectively remembering or that these ideas about his team's ex post facto, but it's pretty unanimous. The players whose job it is to do this believe in it, and so it's hard to completely disregard it. And I don't know. I mean, I guess maybe one question that I would like to see answered is players get paid $5 million a win or so, and so if a player is seen to be worth three or four wins, he gets paid $15 or $20 million.

Managers get paid $3 to $6 million. So you would think that that would mean that the consensus that a manager is worth about a win more than a replacement-level manager. I would be interested in knowing from players what they think a manager is worth, in terms of wins. I'd be interested in, do the Orioles think that Buck Showalter earned them 15 extra wins last year or two? extra wins last year or two um because i don't know i feel like in in this in this case i doubt players have kind of thought about it all that much and done the sort of internal calculus to have a reasonable answer but some of them probably have and they probably have a lot better sense of

the manager's role in the team and in their own success than we ever would and really then even the front office would. This might be a case where the players actually have an information advantage over the GM. I guess you'd have to get them to answer off the record if you wanted an honest answer. Yeah, I mean everybody would think managers matter. Everybody but Tori Hunter would probably just tell you. Yeah. All right. Well, so have we answered nothing? Yeah, which is what we set out to do.

Great. So you can listen to this thing. We'll link to it, and we will be back tomorrow. You can start sending us questions for next week's email show at podcast at baseballperspectives.com.