Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 328: Chris Jaffe on Evaluating Managers and the Latest Trends in Managerial Hiring

Episode Date: November 13, 2013

Ben and Sam talk to Evaluating Baseball’s Managers author Chris Jaffe about how to assess managers and what the latest managerial hirings mean.

You think that should Bobby Valentine have this job, it would be a much different looking spring training? Well, this is the great thing about hiring him because you're going to get slapped in the face right off the bat. You know, and that's exactly what this team and this organization needs right now. I mean, long term is long term. I don't know what's going to happen long term. But right now, whack, Bobby Valentine. Good morning and welcome to episode 328 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg, joined as always by Sam Miller. We have another guest today. His name is Chris Jaffe. He is a writer for the Hardball Times. He is also going to be contributing

to the BP Annual this year, which, by the way, is available for pre-order and which Sam is co-editing. He also wrote the book Evaluating Baseball's Managers, which came out in 2009 and was just a retrospective of really the entire history of managing. And I've written a bit about managing recently, and he's written about managing, and there's been a lot of news about managing. So I wanted to have him on and ask him a few questions about it. So I guess the basic one is how should we be evaluating baseball's managers? Because it's a topic that I feel like Sam and I sort of avoid as much as possible when we have to do a vote on manager of the year at bp at the end of the season we we both abstain usually i i was on clubhouse confidential today so i had to talk about it and just try to come up with something to say but i i find it difficult

so how how do you go about doing it well first off i'd agree it's definitely difficult it's so much easier to evaluate players so we've got them's definitely difficult. It's so much easier to evaluate players if you've got them so much hard data. It's so much easier to analyze how many doubles or how many triples they hit or whatever it might be. With managers, it's much more murky because there's about two main aspects of managers. First part, the easy part, the in-game strategy,

the decisions they make. That's the part we can kind of quantify. The willingness to have intentional walks or sacrifice hits or how they handle the bullpen. All that's the part we can kind of quantify. The willingness to have intentional walks or sacrifice hits or how they handle the bullpen. All that kind of stuff we can kind of gauge. But the problem is, though, when you ask a lot of people, sabermetric or otherwise, you kind of put them in a corner

and ask them what matters most about managers. Most people will tend to agree. What matters oftentimes isn't what happens on the field, but what happens where we can't see. What happens either in the clubhouse, handling players, whatever. Most people I've found over the years tend to think that managers are more managers of men rather than managers of the game. And how the heck do you quantify something like that?

I mean, I've had no method to not try a little bit, but all my methods are based upon the feeling that we can't ever perfectly quantify that or really get it down best. We can only settle for the least imperfect methods we can find. You know, even with looking at just a one season sample size, that's really awkward because, you know, basically you're asking dealing with human interaction and how people really get along with each other. I mean, there's a couple of key things that, you know, managers might try to do. I was actually at a Sabre convention a couple of years ago and they asked, they had try to do. I was actually at a Sabre convention a couple of years ago, and they had a GM panel. I was actually with Shapiro, the Indians' GM at the time. I asked him what he looks for in a manager, what sort of things he wants.

He mentioned three things. First, communication, how he will make his mind meant to his players. Two, sort of self-awareness. Is he coming off how he wants to come off? Is the goal, is the impact what he wants it to be? And third, prioritization.

He said every clubhouse has like 100 fires that need to be put out at any given time. It can only sit on the two or three that matter most. And you've got to figure out which ones to prioritize.

What I thought was interesting about that is in the GM about the hires and fires managers, none of the three main things he said are the things we can quantify. None of that's in-game stuff. You know, the in-game stuff is kind of like the tip of the iceberg. We can only get a little bit of it and most of it's kind of beneath the water. So, I mean, there's no great way of quantifying it, no. So, in your book, you kind of develop some proxies for that. I guess you kind of look for, you know, you look at surrounding seasons and how a manager did in a certain season compared to what that team did before and after. And you look at sort of the, you take the long view with guys who've been around for a while and look for trends. So if someone asks you, say, to weigh in on manager of the year voting, and we're talking about a single season

of managerial performance, do you feel like you have something to add to that? Or do you just throw up your hands and say, I'll tell you at the end of this guy's career how he did that year? Well, part of me is tempted to do the latter because, you know, like i said i just ran down trying to quantify a manager i do have my method of doing it you kind of briefly summarize

it yeah you compare how players do in one season compared to the surrounding season see what teams and what players tended to overachieve or underachieve i mean that's a very oversimplification that's the main way to do it for a one season sample size though that tells you not too much about a manager it tells you more about, maybe luck or happenstance or health or whatever else. I mean, there are trends, like Bobby Cox, Liam Mazzoni, Braves. Pitch is overachiever. Probably it's just luck.

But looking for one-season sample size, you know, I do try to offer some kind of answer because, I mean, while I can't just throw my hands in the air and say, you'll never know for sure, okay, fine. We will never know for sure. What can we know with some degree of reasonable uncertainty? We may not have a perfect answer, but, you know, imperfection is not a synonym for horrible. It's not a synonym for useless.

So what's kind of the better answer we can kind of get to and gather at? I'm curious. I'm willing to offer an answer, though. I'm willing to admit my answer, though. I'm willing to admit my answer might be totally wildly off the mark. So I'm curious, though, when we talk about things that are unmeasurable, sometimes they're unmeasurable because they can't be measured. And sometimes they're unmeasurable because the effect is so small that it doesn't really show up. And so do you get the feeling that these kind of unmeasurable leader of men areas are places managers make a huge difference and we're just sort of, you know, it's hard for us to isolate it?

Or do you get the feeling that it's sort of small beans in the grand scheme of things? I think it's more that we can't really isolate it. I mean, it can be on occasion, certainly with the managers, the impact can be pretty small. I mean, not every manager's got the same impact. Some guys got really small impacts. I do think it's, I'm not saying any manager's like a giant 27-game swing. It's usually maybe a handful of games,

even with your best and worst managers. But I do think that there is something, too, just being unmeasurable. We're ultimately looking at human interaction, what you do, how people respond to it. One guy might be... I remember an interview with Kim Leland years ago when he first came to the Tigers and took them to the pennant, took them to the World Series with 06, I think. He asked, how come we successfully had trouble in Colorado earlier, all this stuff.

He said, a lot of the managers, it's just a fit. You know, who the guy is, who the players are, where the players are at in their career, where the manager's at in his career mentally or whatever else. Sometimes it's just how things kind of fit together. So, yeah, I mean, I do think it does matter. But it's kind of one of those things of how do you gauge and how do you quantify office-place relationships? It can be kind of weird that way.

So I guess to put you on the spot, then, having acknowledged that it's really hard to say anything about a single season, before we get into the trend stuff, which I think is probably more interesting to all of us, did you have any quibbles with the results of the Manager of the Year awards? It was Terry Francona and Clint Hurdle, right? Right. That sounds reasonable. I mean, Clint Hurdle and the Pirates, I'm not really so sure what they're going to sustain. They may just over-shoot in general.

I might just boo and go more Mike Matheny myself because I'm really impressed with the team going for a few years in a row. But really, I can't really... The guy just got the Pirates a winning season. You know, that's... If I mentioned earlier how you handle a bullpen matters, that Pirates bullpen was handled fantastically. I got no... They're both

defensible picks. Sorry, to cut in, that was one of the few things that I was able to seize on and say and hopefully sound like I had something useful to add was that their pitch count for their starters was below too easy on them, but it's kind of a bullpen-oriented game today, and I feel like having a quick hook, given what we know about how starters' effectiveness declines the second time through the order, the third time through the order, if you have a good bullpen like he did, then you might as well make the most of it.

Yeah, I mean, that's one of those things where it also helps he got a great bullpen, obviously. But then again, actually the best bullpen in the league was Freddie Gonzalez and the Atlanta of it. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things where it also helps he got a great bullpen, obviously. But then again, actually the best bullpen in the league was Freddie Gonzales and the Atlanta Braves. I mean, for American League, I could see arguments for Joe Girardi because he actually did, I know it's strange to say the Yankees not making the playoffs in the year that made it to the year award, but their talent was just down this year. Too many of the old guys are too injured.

And a few other guys you can make arguments for as well. Ned Yost, who back in Milwaukee was terrible with the bullpen, had a fantastic bullpen. Was that luck or did he learn? I don't know yet, but I'm pretty impressed with how things worked for him. And, of course, with Bob Melvin in Oakland. So, I mean, we all know how this voting goes, right? I mean, it's the team that overachieves

or that wins more games than it did last year. And so, like, Hurdle next year, if he wins the same amount of games, he won't win, you know, and just like Bob Melvin didn't win this year, even though he basically had the same results that he had last year. And I wonder, you've actually quantified manager performance more than anybody in history ever has attempted. Do you see fluctuation for managers from year to year comparable to a ball player's performance fluctuation, or are good managers fairly steadily good year in, year out? Because it seems like they would be.

I mean, it seems like it would be a fairly persistent skill managing. Well, I'll tell you a couple of things. First off, doing all my quantifications I really wasn't trying to look too much at the single season stuff because a lot of times like you're talking earlier here you just that one season be so many other the only way you can quantify managers is to get a really big enough sample size you know for example you talk about how guys under a chief or manager one year well one year doesn't play too much about a manager you gotta look at maybe I was looking for more guys like five or ten years

managing their career in that regard. That way, if you get a guy like Bobby Cox, if you keep overachieving, maybe there's something to it. Or a Weaver hitter, if you keep overachieving, maybe there's something to that. But for one-year sample size, there is some fluctuation. I mean, it's one of those things where, in part, it can be age. Usually, a manager can get one of their first start-offs near the end of their career.

It can be much worse, if you think about it. That makes some sense. There's a little bit of aging curve going on. There's also a little bit of, what was I going to say, just, you know, kind of ups and downs. Just you can have one fluke a year. Like I said, you try and evaluate a manager based on what the players are doing. What allows a year for the team?

I mean, there's a lot of those. The signal-to-noise ratio in one season can be kind of weird. But usually, especially when you get the best or the worst guys, whether it be Earl Weaver or Bobby Cox or Tony LaRouche or whoever you are, those guys do pretty well year in, year out, which is why they become some of the best managers ever. But you get other guys like, say, Don Baylor, they suck every year, which, yeah, that's Don Baylor.

Okay, so last week I was writing something about Brad Ausmus and it seemed to me like there had been a lot of turnover in the managerial ranks lately. But whenever I think that something is new or unprecedented, I usually find, you know, baseball history is long and often it's happened before the exact same thing, and people have written about how it's a new amazing thing, and probably it wasn't even new that time. So before I wrote it, I traded a few emails with you to ask whether this turnover really was something truly historic, and then you wrote about it yourself at Hardball Times earlier this week. So can you, I guess, tell everyone what you told me and then wrote about as far as people coming and going at

this point? I'm a little fresher in what I wrote myself for the Hardball Times this week. The main thing I noticed is that right now, for next year, we're going to have something of a golden age of sort of medium-age managers. There's not very many really young managers. There's not really many very old managers. There's not going to be an opening day 2014, not a single manager at the senior citizen. That hasn't happened. I think it's happened like for two months.

I mean, let's say we're at 65. It hardly ever happens. It was in 97 before Jack McKean got hired for the Reds. But, you know, it hasn't happened in a long time. Last year it was like three or four. And, in fact, four of the five oldest managers from last year are now gone. Charlie Manuel, Davey Johnson, Dusty Baker, Tim Leland. The oldest guy left is Terry Collins.

There's only two other managers in their 60s. There's Terry Collins and Ron Washington. I think Joe Maddon's going to be 60 next year. At the other end, there's only like four guys in their 40s. And most of those guys are in their late 40s. Matt Williams is going to be 48 as a rookie. Joe Dry is going to be 49. You've got to have, I think, 20 managers, if I recall correctly,

that are going to be in their 50s. You're going to have like 20, about 24 between ages 40 to 61. They're all around the same rough age. Usually it's a bigger, wider spread. I mean, Eric Wedge, he's now managed 10 years now, got started at age 35. Even though he's got over 1,600 games managed,

he's younger than almost everyone out there. In fact, most of the new hires are actually older than he is and with 10 years under his belt. He needs to be a bigger... When you look back at like Tori or La Russa or Cox, they get elected forever in part because they all started in their thirties.

Not even like age 39, they're age 35 and 36 at most parts. Yeah. I put a graph in my article of the average age of, of major league managers going back to 1889, which was I think the first year for which we had birthdates for everyone. And at, at that point it was like mid-30s was the average age, and last year it was like, or this year it was like mid-50s.

And I guess part of that is probably just the population getting older and people living longer and player managers going away. That's a big one. Yeah, but it does seem that there's something to this. And I wrote about this, what seems like a new trend toward managers with no managerial experience, really, and no coaching experience even in the minors or anywhere, really. And that was one of the things I asked you about. And you at the time said that that sort of seems like a new thing. I mean, obviously you had player managers,

so they were coming right from their playing career. They didn't have any coaching experience. But that was sort of a separate thing that we haven't seen for 25 years or so. And now we're seeing this, what seems like a trend, towards teams just hiring people completely fresh. What do you make of that? It is definitely a recent trend. I mean, obviously, like you mentioned, people had that happen in the past.

You know, Joe Torre was actually a player manager for a week. Tim Fregosi was hired to manage the Angels the day after his last game with the Pirates. They used to have him back in the 70s, even. But the more recent times, yeah, it's, I mean, you've got Robin Ventura, Mike Muffini, now Brad Ausmus. All these guys with limited, at best, coaching experience managing of any sort. I think Ventura had, like, a high school team he managed. That's about it.

But, and I can't seem to be focusing on more GMs. It's just what they think of the personal strength of character, what they think of his own personal demeanor. Like I said earlier, if it's true that people are primarily managers of players rather than of the men, or of the game, more of men than of

the in-game strategy, it kind of makes sense. You might want to find guys you think are better leaders than men just naturally. You still think they might want to have guys spend think are better leaders than men just naturally. And you still think they might want to have guys, you know, spend some time in the minor, spend some time serving, you know, getting ready for wetting their feet with that aspect of managing men

in the minor leagues or whatever else. But I think well enough of a guy, I remember hearing the interview when Kenny Williams introduced Robin Ventura. Even Ventura seemed surprised he was going to be a manager in that interview. But Kenny Williams said that we knew this guy, always thought very highly of him, always thought he'd be a great manager, he'll fit, and he'll learn.

In some cases, you know, with the White Sox, they already had a pitching coach down Cooper. It's like, okay, he'll handle that part of the game for the team. And Ventura sort of handles some of the other aspects. It might be just one thing I can also point out, and I'm always kind of wondering if I'm overstating, if we overstate this sometimes

due to the tape or metric influence, but there is definitely a trend in the last 10 years or so where to listen more to the numbers, listen more to this stuff, and it creates more of a similar feel about how some teams can manage the games. Obviously not all teams do this. Not even saying all the teams are hiring new managers to do that.

But I do wonder if it maybe plays a role as a greater similarity of approach, maybe, to make it easier to hire a guy that has less experience. Yeah, that was kind of the case I tried to make in my article, that there's been this greater specialization. You know, there are more coaches. Coaching staffs are bigger. So in that sense, there's maybe less for managers to do,

although they also have all these new media responsibilities and maybe it's more difficult to manage the players than it used to be. But the fact that the front office is carrying such a heavy load or is capable of that, at least with in-game tactics, maybe a guy doesn't need to have decades of experience coaching or managing. He can just come in and if he's receptive to what a front office says and the research that it's done, and maybe he'd be even more receptive in that he hasn't had a previous job and he doesn't have any ingrained ways of managing, that maybe you don't really need that seasoning because you

you come in and and whatever questions you you have can be just answered in that arena that makes some sense though on the other hand i'm always thinking to myself we're just talking about three managers like ventura math in the air matini and office are the guys with very little experience then again you could have there's have some experience and still be willing to... There's Redmond. There's Walt Weiss. Well, true. I'm sorry, I forgot.

There's other guys. There's still a minority. Then again, to flip against my own point, you get guys like Joe Maddox, plenty of experience, who are known for liking getting more information, like having it presented to them. So obviously there are guys like that.

We got a question a few days ago that normally we would answer in our listener email show, but we have you here. Brian asked whether we thought we would ever see a return of the player manager. Do you think that that will ever happen again? I know that it's been occasionally mentioned. Brian mentioned that it's been suggested with like Paul Molitor, Barry Larkin, Paul Conurco, but we haven't seen it since, I guess, Pete Rose, 1986.

Is it gone for good? Yeah, I wouldn't exactly say never say never, but if it would be, it would be a total fluke. Even if you look at Pete Rose, the only other player managers having Pete Rose are guys that are so much at the end of the career, they never actually play when they manage. I mean, like it says, Joe Torre was a player manager. He had one play the career, and then he became manager. He's still a player manager. You know, there's a couple other guys like that, the 60s and the 50s.

You've got to go back before Pete Rose. The last guy to actually play every day with managing would be like Lou Goudreau and Mel Ott back in the 40s. So he clearly had, aside from the occasional one or two game player manager like Phil Cavaret or whatever, you've got to go back about 60 years. We've got Pete Rosen, about 60 years. You can always get something happening. You can always get one guy like that.

But it just seems to me that the trend is away from player managers. It's actually been the trend since like 1920. The only shift backwards was in the Great Depression. People would do it for financial reasons to lower their payroll and not have a separate title for a manager altogether. It just seems like we've mentioned it already. The trend is upward with ages. It's now mid-50s

for a typical manager age. Giambi famously was in consideration for a managerial job and then played this year. And I talked to some of his teammates for an unrelated thing. And one thing that sort of kept coming up is how valuable he is to the manager as basically being like a proxy manager in the clubhouse who lets the manager stay out of the clubhouse a lot of the time. He can do a lot of the things that you might think a manager does. But, you know, a manager in a lot of ways wants to make his presence significant.

So he doesn't want to have to be coming in there every day. He wants it to be, you know, notable when he gets in there. So you have a guy like Gianni who fills some of the same roles, but without actually being the manager himself, which made sense and sort of put it in a different perspective for me and it is hard to imagine like what the advantage is of a player manager i mean the only reason it would be an advantage is if you have a player on your team already who you think would be better than any other manager that you could possibly get otherwise like it just it feels like a difficulty of of you

know time management it would be nothing but tension it just feels like a difficulty of time management. It would be nothing but tension. It just feels like it would be weird. I'd love to see it, but I can't imagine the advantage of it. You make a really good point there. The question is, do I want to hire a player manager? The best guy I could possibly hire for the job happens to be one of the 25 guys on the roster at a particular moment. And most of them are too young or not experienced. Maybe 5 or 10 guys could be potentially viable managers under any circumstance.

And what are the odds that one of those guys is the best guy you could find out there altogether? Odds are it's going to be someone else. You know, there's just a logistical factor. There's not many guys on the roster in the first place, even fewer that can even be a manager under any circumstances. So, yeah, that's another way of thinking about it. So in your article, you called this the end of an era. So, yeah, that's another way team, with a bunch of teams. And then you sort of speculate at the end that maybe we won't see this sort of manager anymore. If managers are getting hired at an older age, then it's not possible for them to have

such long careers. Do you think that that's the case, that managers will either be, I don't know, that they'll be replaced more quickly or that they just won't be hired early enough to have the kind of legacy or the kind of track record that some of the guys who have just left the game developed over time? Well, I may have misstated my point, that's how it came out. The main thing I was looking at, mostly just looking at the guys recently hired. Like the five guys hired this offseason plus Sandberg hired midway through the season. Look at those two guys. It's really hard to say that, hard to imagine any of those guys are going to last long enough

to be Cox or LaRusso or even Bobby Valentine. I mean, there might be one or two, especially Brad Offense, because he's young enough, but a lot of these guys are already in their 50s. Sandberg's in his 50s. I think Richard Torreira's now in his early 50s. Boyd McClendon, the guy's experienced definitely in his 50s. And it's one of the things where it's going to be tricky, even, you know, they can have good careers,

solid careers, memorable careers, but they're not really going to be like, you know, it's unlikely that they will just kind of make the Hall of Fame sort of guys. They might be, you know, it's unlikely that it will just kind of make the Hall of Fame sort of guys. There might be you know, we're only looking at six managers. The majority of managers never get that status anyway. But I'm just thinking, you know, boy, it's interesting, you know,

even some of the younger hires these days, often you can hire some of the worst teams, either like Bull Quarter, Mike Redmond, or Rocky Starts, like, you know, Manny and Eric Wedger, both in their 30s when they wereman, or if you look up to Rocky Starr, it's like Manny Acta and Eric Wedger, both in their 30s when they were hired. So if you compare the generation earlier, LaRusso, Cox, and Torrey, all very young managers, all try to be among the most successful managers of the generation.

Now I'm wondering here, when I was looking at my regular account, I was thinking to myself, is this a changing of the guard? One generation goes away, a new one rises up. Well, I'm not saying we're not going to get a new one rising up. I'm not saying it's not going to happen. I'm just saying the guys that are currently there may not be the next generation. You'd be kind of in a bit of a lull period. We're like, okay, one's gone away. We're still waiting for that next great crop to emerge. But you never can tell. Okay. My last question. We get this question a lot. We've talked about it on the podcast before. or a statistician or a person who does strategy and more of the football, basketball model for managing as opposed to the traditional baseball model of a former player?

You know, I always go back to Bill James. In his book on baseball managers all those years ago, he made one point. There's one absolute for a manager. He must have the respect of the players in the playoff. Everything else is negotiable. It doesn't matter about strategy, how he goes, his demeanor. He must have the respect of the players in the clubhouse. Everything else is negotiable. It doesn't matter about strategy, how he goes, his demeanor. He must have the respect of the players. And I do think a manager with some playing experience, it does

make it easier to get the respect of the players if he's had at least some experience, even in minors or majors or whatever else. I don't think it's impossible, but you need a much stronger force of personality to pull it off otherwise. In part for the reason that the players are used to what they expect more. To be the guy that sort of breaks through the glass ceiling

might be rather tricky. And, you know, really, there's enough guys out there that play baseball, whether it be the major leagues or minor leagues or whatever else. Enough guys out there to do that. You should be able to find some that are capable managers. Right. What is it about – how did it get this way, do you think? What is it about baseball that sort of makes it unique in that sense in that it's just the expectation, it's the way it's always been that a former player becomes a manager, whereas you don't see that in other sports. And there's no real respect issue or, you know, people who weren't players earn the players trust and and seem to

have no trouble with leadership in those sports well first one i think is i might be off about this i might be wrong about this i was only impressionally in the nfl a lot of guys were at least college football players we've had some experiences in playing just in the fact you could get a guy like earl weaver joe mccarthy they were were minor league players. But as to why it's this way in baseball, we'll just go back to the basics. When you go back to the 19th century, and your study mentioned about manager ages, they were almost all player managers back then.

Almost all of them. And over time, you just came to think of them as player managers before they became managers. And my hunch, you know, and you get more, say, professional minor league players become managers nowadays. And I guess that's analogous to playing college basketball or college football. So, you know, I haven't done any studies on NFL coaches or NBA coaches. My hunch is almost all the guys at least played in the college level.

Okay. Well, thank you for coming on and trying to shed some light on an area that we tend to be scared to talk about. Chris's book, again, is called Evaluating Baseball's Managers. You can get that anywhere you buy books. It looks like there are six left in stock currently at Amazon.com, so go buy them before other listeners do. at Amazon.com. So go buy them before other listeners do. And you can read his work at the Hardball Times. You can read his manager comments in the upcoming BP Annual. And you can follow him on Twitter at Jaffe Chris. So thank you, Chris.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. All right. We will be back tomorrow.