Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 758: Welcome Back, Baker

Episode Date: November 3, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about Jeurys Familia’s blown saves in the World Series, then talk about Bud Black, Dusty Baker, and the state of managing.

I can remember the little things that always made you smile They made you happy Now you think you're wiser because you're older Good morning and welcome to episode 758 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives brought to you by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller, along with Ben Lindberg of ESPN. Hi, Ben. Hello. How are you? Peter Gallagher on Good Wife is the best thing in my life.

Oh, wait, wait, I don't know! I'm an episode behind. Oh, well, he wasn't in the last episode, which is an even sadder thing. You literally respond to, I haven't seen the last last episode with a fact about the episode. That's the most insignificant fact. It's probably insignificant, but you don't know what I'll find significant. And there's always ways that people give away more than they think they're giving away. I mean, it seems like you're safe.

I forgot Peter Gallagher was on The Good Wife until you mentioned it. He's been on one episode of The Good Wife, so not a big deal. Anyway, it's an unusual situation that I'm a week behind, but I am. All right. Any other Good Wife talk? Not Good Wife, but I meant to mention yesterday that I wonder whether future generations will look back at box scores from this World Series and think that juris familia was

a huge choker i don't know whether they will or whether it's the blown saves yeah because he blew three saves in one series and if you actually dig into it he blew saves in that he played for the mets who daniel murphy also played for and was bad at defense for. And that was really his only sin. But if you just look at blown saves, he blew a bunch of them. I mean, he did give up a home run to Alex Gordon. Yes, he did. To tie a game.

Yes. Which is a pretty big, I mean, I think that he, you're right, Familia pitched generally very well. And like even the after, I hope I'm not confusing games here, but even after Murphy's error, the next ground ball was essentially a weak ground ball that was in the hole, and it's not like Murphy was going to get it or got a glove on it or anything. But I think on that play, I would just sort of guess that 20-ish players make that play. I think if the previous error hadn't been made, he might have been positioned differently so that he would have made the play.

And I mean, it certainly wasn't hit hard. In that rally, there was one ball hit at all well. The Sal Perez single to right field was the only ball hit at all well against Familia. And then in game five, I'm trying to remember, but basically he sawed off a batter to get sort of a weak ground ball to third and then was dominant after that. So how did the runner get to third ground ball to first

right that sounds right yeah ground ball to first uh whole day by mistakis um anyway yeah so and that said change the order and let's say that he's got the two blown saves uh that we just talked about the defense aided defense and luck aided blown saves that we just talked about the defense aided defense and luck aided blown saves that we just talked about that will gladly give him no blame whatsoever for but nonetheless they're on his on his resume um and he's also i mean at this point well okay so he's got those two and then now let's move game one to game five and say that game one was game five and game five was game one. The Alex Gordon home run then becomes an all time memorable home run, right? It's not quite Lidge and Pujols or Carter and Williams, but it's not that far in terms of World Series memorability

and championship leverage and stunningness and all that. So guys have been tarnished for the postseason closer choker reputation for one swing plenty of times. I think Familia's one big swing is kind of buried in game one, and also it wasn't a walk-off, so that kind of helps. But if that were the last game, I could see it. Yeah, I could see it sticking to him. I'm glad it won't.

He's really good. He's fun to watch. Yeah, no, he's very good. So he was maybe better than three blown saves suggest, but not blameless. Yeah, he was clearly better than three blown saves suggest. That's a record, I assume. I don't know. I wonder what the record for blown saves in an entire postseason is,

to be honest. I wonder what the record for blown saves in an entire postseason is, to be honest. Didn't Rivera blow three saves in the 2004 ALCS? So maybe it's three. Postseason. I'm play indexing, Ben. Okay. So we're doing pitching game finder for postseason only,

players with most matching games in a season, and the stat I'm... And the decision is blown save. So here we go. You ready? I'm ready. Are you ready? Yes. All right.

The record is... Rivera only blew two saves in that series, by the way, but he did blow a save earlier in that postseason. Three in the postseason. So Mitch Williams blew four in 1993, which is particularly impressive for it being pre wild card yeah uh dan quizzenberry blew three in 1980 and raleigh eastwick blew three in 1975 but those are in a way slightly less interesting because those guys were probably coming in like

just i'll check but like i bet raleigh Eastwick, fictional character, in a book written about baseball by Matt Christopher, I bet he was coming in in the sixth inning. Yeah, so Quisenberry came in in the sixth, the seventh, and the seventh. These were supposed to be three- and four-inning saves. It's much easier to blow a four-inning save when you come in up by one in the sixth. Raleigh Eastwick, fictional character from a baseball book written by matt christopher was ah he was the ninth the ninth and the eighth so yeah fictional raleigh eastwick sucked okay that series sucked really bad in that series all right so he unless

it's conceivable he came in with like the bases loaded and like i i don't know i don't know anything about raleigh eastwick besides his fictionality it's conceivable he came in with the bases loaded. I don't know. I don't know anything about Raleigh Eastwick besides his fictionality. It's conceivable that he... Well, no, there were no Loogies. Let's find out about Raleigh Eastwick for a second. Let's give him a call. Right-handed pitcher. It'd be easy to find his. It's a lot easier than some of the names we've looked up.

Let's go ahead and say Raleigh Eastwick. Yeah, okay. So, Familia tied for second in blown saves in a postseason. Yeah. And he did it all in one series. And some would say the most important of those postseason series. Yes. Some would argue.

Mm-hmm. Raleigh Eastwick was a rookie, by the way, when he did this. And they, wow, he was a rookie. 1975, big red machine, blew three saves. I don't know if they were all in the World Series or not, but he blew three saves. I think they were. Yeah, because he didn't give up a run in the LCS. So he only gave up two runs in that entire postseason in seven games,

and yet three blown saves, and we're talking about what a choker he must have been uh so he he wasn't that's why they called him tough luck raleigh yeah raleigh's folly is that what you would have gone with for your headline yeah probably anyway he was their closer next the next year though and was very good as their closer the next year in his second year in the majors so they were at least smart enough not to hold it against him. All right. I'm happy to hear that. And then he was really bad in the postseason that year, and then he didn't get to close anymore.

Ever again, actually. True Raleigh Eastwick story. All right. So I figure we'll talk about Dusty Baker. Okay. The Nationals a couple of days ago seemed like they were all ready to hire Bud Black to be their manager. Bud Black, the recently fired manager of the San Diego Padres, they offered him a contract that he found insulting. Negotiations didn't progress, and so they went to apparently their second choice dusty baker

and dusty baker is managing again bud black now appears to be one of the favorites for the dodgers managerial gig um and but dusty baker dusty baker is back in baseball and i will say that i didn't expect dusty baker to be back in baseball? No, neither did I. So let's first talk about Dusty Baker being back in baseball. What if you were, I don't know, trying to write Dusty Baker's bio as a manager, what would you highlight at this point? I mean, not what he's accomplished, but like, what is he as a manager? There's a caricature of him that's pretty badly outdated, but do you have any kind of lingering feelings about how Dusty Baker manages? Well, he seems like he's closer to the old school side of the spectrum,

at least in his last job with the Reds. You know, he would hit Zach Cozart second, and he would try to talk Joey Votto out of walking, and he would say things like, on base percentage is good, but RBIs are better, which maybe is just a bad way to say that runs are good. I mean, runs are good. RBIs are better because they mean that you scored a run, and that's good. But if he meant as a way to judge players, then that's not such a great statement. So he would say things like that,

and obviously you alluded to his reputation as a pitcher killer, and that is overblown at this point, or at least it seems to be based on his last few years in Cincinnati. But he doesn't strike you as a great tactician. He just seems like more of a personality manager, which is, I guess, the opposite of what the Nationals just had. Yeah, he has definitely always had the reputation of being a players manager from his first year on.

from his first year on um and i um i i remember um chris jaffe in his book evaluating baseball's managers which i think we've alluded to before this specific thing i'm about to say but um one of the interesting things he wrote about was that dusty baker appeared to be getting worse with age this book came out about i don't know seven years ago ago, six years ago. And Dusty Baker appeared to be getting worse with age at the time as far as whether his players were outperforming expectations, whether he was getting as much contribution from his veterans, and so on. And Chris wrote then about how it's perfectly reasonable to assume that a player's manager would have a kind of a steep decline phase in his career as he becomes less and less attuned to the players and to the generation

of players. And when Dusty Baker took over in 1993 in San Francisco and first got that reputation as a player's manager, he was a couple years from retirement only. He was 44 years old, which would have made him a plausible player to have in the clubhouse just as far as his generation and his age. And so it kind of made sense that he would be able to relate to players back then. And as he got older and they all stayed the same, it became sort of less and less plausible that he would be able to relate to them individually. And I think that it's somewhat significant not just from an age perspective. I think that is really significant from an age perspective. I think that is really significant from an age perspective. I think that generations of men in particular have always had very fraught relationships to each

other. There's a sort of a story that is told repeatedly throughout history of old men hating young men and perhaps the reverse as well. And so there's that. That's always going to be there. But also I think you could make the case that baseball players, because baseball changed, because the economy of baseball changed, because the media around baseball changed, because all these sort of aspects that make baseball players different than normal lives changed,

that make baseball players different than normal lives changed. It's arguable that even if Dusty Baker had stayed 44 for the entire time, that his playing experience and his playing career might have been less and less instructive as to the perspectives of his own players. I don't know that there... It's just a hypothesis. I'm just saying it's plausible that there is nothing in Dusty

Baker's playing career that prepares him to address something like Bryce Harper. Right. And sometimes it just seems like guys lose a clubhouse or they don't connect with a clubhouse the same way. And maybe it's not even related to age. Maybe it is, but maybe it's just a different group of guys, or maybe they just get settled in the job and don't have the same energy that they devoted to it when they first started. I don't know what the explanation is with him, but by the time that the Reds let him go, he suddenly had the opposite reputation, or at least when they justified letting him go, suddenly had the opposite reputation, or at least when they justified letting him go, Walt Jockety said, if you were around, you kind of saw that it didn't look like players were responding. We felt a new direction, a new voice might be necessary. And they also mentioned that

he had had a stroke and that they thought they were concerned about his health and that it would be best he stepped down. So it definitely sounded like old manager in multiple ways. The image I have of Dusty Baker with the Reds more than almost anything else is him sitting behind his desk looking, I don't know what he looked, but when, have I even seen this? Is there a video of this? I might have actually completely invented this vision in my head, this sight in my head. But was he even there? Are you talking about the Brandon Phillips?

I am, yeah. I think there was video of that. there was video of that i think the time when brandon phillips yes salted c trent rosecrans yes and and dusty baker did nothing to intervene or discipline him at all and i think he did smile while that was happening and i'm maybe that is a player's manager thing to do maybe that's what a player manager player's manager would do in that situation. But it, you know, I mean, maybe just because we are in clubhouses and write about baseball. And so we identified with the guy who was the victim of that encounter. It seemed like a sort of cowardly response. Yeah, I, I don't know exactly what the lesson that I mean to take out of that,

that that is, I bring that up, because that's kind of the vision I have of Dusty Baker more than anything else. And it's a manager who, I don't know, I don't think that this is necessarily the moment where he should be judged as a manager or anything like that. And I don't know that he did anything wrong and I don't know anything about it. I just have this vision of him that is not that compelling like he's just a guy who's sitting there trying not to be noticed almost like he's trying not to be there and there's not there doesn't strike me as being there didn't really strike me as being anything there uh anything like there wasn't a real players manager aspect there there wasn't really a an authority aspect there there wasn't a real players manager aspect there. There wasn't really an authority aspect there. There wasn't really anything there.

It was just like, oh, Dusty Baker's still in the game kind of a feeling. And so, I don't know. That's a very weird moment to base somebody's managerial ability on. And I'm not trying to suggest that I do. It's just what kind of comes to my mind whenever I think about Dusty Baker these days. I think that he generally is a, I do think he's an underrated baseball mind. Managers who are players managers, I think, tend to, they tend to not get enough credit for their baseball acumen. There's a feeling that, oh, well, you can only be one. You're one or the other. You're a players manager,

or you're a disciplinarian, or you're a tactician. But in fact, they all pretty much know a lot about baseball. And I don't know that there's a huge correlation between what type of personality you are in the clubhouse and whether you're good at baseball. Dusty Baker, as RJ Anderson has written, did a very good job of getting a lot out of his bench, especially later. And that's an important skill for a manager in the kind of era of versatility that we're in right now. So that's good. And, you know, never seemed to have a particularly obvious style of managing that made him outside of the mainstream of managing.

So I think that's all good or fine. It's all irrelevant, I guess. It's all, or fine. It's all irrelevant, I guess. It's all like normal stuff. And he'll never shake the reputation as a guy who destroys pitchers that he got from Kerry Wood and Mark Pryor. But as RJ also showed in his last few years, at least in Cincinnati, his number of starts over a certain pitch count were not way out of line with the league,

and his average pitch count was not way out of line with the league. So he was basically a normal manager in that respect. Yeah, I think that he has that reputation largely because he happened to have Kerry Wood and Mark Pryor, two guys who were both much, there was much more attention on them. Like he essentially got two extremely talented young pitchers in an era where I think almost everybody would have ruined those guys because that, you know, that was how you used pitchers for the most part at the time. He might've been a little bit less cautious than the median,

but I doubt it. And if, if he doesn't get those two pitchers, we probably don't really notice him. And we're probably ranting about, I don't know, whoever would have had him, Lupinella or Jim Riggleman or Eric Wedge or whatever random manager happened to get two young pitchers ready to break. So Adam Kilgore wrote about this hiring and the non-hiring of Bud Black in the Washington Post, and he made it sound like the learners, the owners of the Nationals, sort of against Mike Rizzo's wishes, are just going very cheap with managers, that they have a history of doing this, and that with the previous managers, they had some grounds for doing that.

Like Matt Williams was a friend of theirs and had never been a manager before, and so maybe you get him at a discount. And then there were interim managers and guys who hadn't managed for a decade, like Davy Johnson, so you could see why maybe you would go kind of cheap with them. But if what Kilgore Reports here or the report that he Cites is accurate About what they offered but

Black it's sort of a Shockingly low number Like a single year for 1.6 Million when The Marlins are giving Don Mattingly Four years now that's probably not the best example Because the Marlins will just fire Don Mattingly after a year anyway. But at least they give him the money.

So everyone gets three years at least, it seems, when you start. That's just kind of the going rate. Maybe because you want the manager to have some authority in the clubhouse. And if he's a lame duck when he starts, then he doesn't have much of it. So I guess the learners don't believe that managers make much of a difference. It seems like I guess that's their philosophy on managers, that they think they're interchangeable and not worth paying for because they do pay for players. They have a fairly high payroll. So it's not that they won't spend on anything.

It's that they won't spend on this. Yeah, they, I don't know if the Jim Riggleman example tells us a lot about the learners, but it seems kind of like it does. Remember, Jim Riggleman four years ago, quitting in the middle of a season, in the middle of a, you know, season for a team that was kind of doing well and on the cusp of the middle of a you know season for a team that was kind of doing well and on the cusp of getting somewhere and kind of shockingly so it was that was like a big shocking moment where the manager just was like well i quit and not for any particular reason that could be discerned except that the nationals weren't giving him the uh kind of extra year of contract that, as I recall, the extra year of contract that managers all get. I mean, there's kind of a, it seems like there's kind of a rule that you get an extra year in your contract that the club will just eat if you suck. Like,

they'll just fire you and pay you. But nobody works, hardly anybody works in the last year of their contract. There's always an extra year. Like if you sign for this year, you'll get 2016 plus 2017. And then by 2017, they'll add 2018 on. And so you always have this cushion of knowing, like, well, if I get fired, at least I'm going to get paid. And it gives the impression of commitment to you. And they wouldn't do that for Riggleman, as I recall, if I recall the details correctly. And it's very weird that they wouldn't do it for Bud Black because, yeah, Bud Black is not a guy who is like desperately trying to get any job in the industry. He's a very well-respected manager who just had an eight-year career with a team

and has other teams that are interested in him and that doesn't have to work for the worst contract in the sport. And it sort of feels like there's kind of one of, like you said, basically, there's one of two ways to look at this. One is, look, if you want this manager, at the rates that managers get paid, I mean, we're not talking about even seventh inning right-handed specialist pay. At the rate that managers get paid, you should essentially never ever have a contract dispute with your manager. Like, whatever they ask for, yeah, that's fair. They don't get paid enough to almost ever lose your guy if you actually really want that guy. The other way is to just, you know, you don't have a guy. Like Bud Black

probably is, well, maybe the philosophy is that Bud Black is not going to move the needle any more than 20 other available managers that you could have. That, yes, a manager makes a difference, but there's a lot of them. There's a lot of potential managers out there. And so there's no need to spend any more than you have to to get the guy that you want, because the guy that you want second is probably just about the same. So the generous way to receive this is that, yes, they believe the same. So it's the, the opt, uh, the, uh, the generous way to receive this

is that yes, they believe the second, uh, but, um, the less generous way is to think that they're just completely out of touch and nuts. Does it surprise you that at all that Bud Black is apparently so in demand that he was, well, that he was one team's first choice and that he might now be another team's first choice and a very smart and rich team's first choice. Is there anything about Bud Black that yells elite manager to you? I always found it somewhat amazing that he hung on in San Diego so long. That was a pretty unsuccessful run for the

for the team yeah and whether they could have done better or not who knows uh but uh like normally managers don't get to hang around that long right without winning anything yeah and that was his first job and it wasn't just that it was that he survived like three regime changes exactly owners like four owners maybe and and three gms or something it was crazy that never happens and so that to me says that he must be good at something maybe he's just good at talking to gms and owners but he must have been doing something to be respected, so respected in the organization that the new GM would feel like he couldn't bring in his new guy or didn't want to bring in his new guy. So I assume that's a positive reflection on what he did there. And I don't know, he shows up as one of the best managers in various statistical measures, which may or may not be the most important thing.

But when I did my recent look at bullpen management and tried to figure out who the best bullpen managers are, Bud Black was the best bullpen manager. And when Russell Carlton has done manager stuff on preventing fatigue down the stretch. He has found Bud Black to be the best manager. So there are at least some studies that back up that reputation. So not really surprised, no. Not really

surprised? I mean, the one that you give the example of Russell's piece, for instance, is a really interesting one and that's one of the the reasons that you could see a team today really wanting him if they buy that uh research in that concept but does it surprise i mean it doesn't surprise you that he hung on in san diego for nine years i mean they certainly definitely does that anyone could do that but the fact that

he did do that it makes me think that he should be in demand because he must have been doing something well. you and ultimately how they can you in some cases, the manner in which they do it might be the most significant data point about any manager, like more than manager wins, more than playoff success, more than what we perceive to be their tactics, more than how often you hear about drama in the clubhouse, more than manager of the year voting, which by the way I want to get into for a second but um more than any of those might just be like how how much your previous team was committed to you and whether i mean there is something about for instance dusty baker being fired after a world essentially being fired after a world series appearance in san Francisco. And then like that year, like that year he was gone.

And then getting fired by the Reds. The Reds fired him, right? Yeah. Getting fired by the Reds after like a 89 or something win season. Those are both pretty, like I always found that to be the the most damning part of davy johnson's career davy johnson is like the the sort of stat head second favorite manager ever and yet it was always weird that teams would fire him like right after they won 94 games and and like he never had a losing season and never stuck anywhere for that long and uh bud black doing the opposite is is uh

seems like a pretty impressive thing and maybe a very telling thing yeah but man oh man like they didn't do anything under him like nine years nine years he basically had two years where they were any good at all one of them is when he inherited an 88 win team and they won 89 but didn't make the playoffs and then one was a year where they had this crazy out of nowhere blip good season and lost in the last weekend of the year uh and wasn't that a collapse year yeah 2010 yeah those teams didn't spend much so i guess no i pass on in that respect yeah i they didn't spend much, so I guess you've got to pass in that respect. Yeah, they didn't spend much. And I'm not saying that he could have done anything with them,

but it's really surprising to see a guy last that long. Yeah, they were up six in late August and ended up basically losing all of September and lost on the last weekend of the year. So I don't know. I mean, I guess we talk all the time about how results get overemphasized. And so it's pretty, you could applaud San Diego for not responding to results. And you can, like I said, you can really draw a lot of of good encouraging things from the fact that bud black was able to keep that job for so long despite the bad results it's

very surprising is all not bad surprising yeah and the other thing is that we think we really know dusty baker well because he has a long track record as a manager but you never totally know what a manager is going to be like with a new team. Because maybe it'll be an old dog picks up new tricks sort of situation like Clint Hurdle with the Pirates. Or, as we said, maybe he'll respond differently to a different group of players. And what the manager says is not necessarily what the manager does. I mean, when the Nationals hired matt williams

and that was a little different situation because he hadn't managed before so we didn't really have much to go on but he sounded like he was going to be a stat head manager he said things about how much he liked stats and how much preparation he put into these things and he hired a guy away from arizona To be a defensive coordinator For the Nationals so that they could do Lots of shifts but then they did fewer Shifts than anyone pretty much Over his two year tenure

With the team so you never Totally know what the manager's Going to be like in a new situation Until he starts The last thing is I want to talk About manager of the year voting for Dusty Baker because I once looked at Manager of the Year voting points

between him and Bruce Bochy. And Bochy, even when Chris Jaffe wrote his book, rated extremely high by Jaffe's measures. Like he was like the 30th best manager of all time, even though that was before he had won anything with the Gi so this was just his relatively eh padre's career and i think bruce bocce at that point had like a seventh place manager of the year finish and nothing else and baker essentially every time his team finishes over 500 it he gets a top three manager of the year finish like like that's all he has to do is just finish over 500 and he ends up in the top three in manager of

the year voting it was like he it was a sort of a uh like ryan howard mvp vote kind of a thing where like ryan howard as long as he as long as he played he played for a long time, he would finish high in MVP voting. So I wonder, I will be very interested to see whether that holds on because it's a different voting pool, and Dusty Baker, he doesn't have the same charisma. It'll be interesting to see how Dusty Baker in winter does. It'd be great. I actually would love it if he were extremely successful with the Nationals

and became kind of like a legendary old dude because I think Dusty Baker was really fun as a young dude. He was a great manager in his 40s. I think that's one of the reasons he got so much Manager of the Year support is that he was fun, he was charismatic, he was confident. You got the feeling that he loved everybody. There was a love there. He loved his players.

He loved it all. And you just really loved him back. Dusty Baker was a great, lovable manager. And if I could hire a manager from any time period, was a great level of manager and if i could hire a manager from any time period or an early mid-90s dusty baker might be like one of the 20 or 30 guys i would put on my list and not six or seven but then middle but then middle-aged dusty baker kind of went through a sort of a funk it seemed to me like it he wasn't it seemed like he now was kind of it wasn't it seemed like he now was kind of sort of uh teetering between disgusted and amused at everybody at the world at sabermetrics at young people at the questions that were asked about him

at the fact that he was getting fired from jobs even though he was winning the fact that the cubs in his view the front office tore down that team and didn't leave him with anything he could win with and i don't know there was this happens right like there's a middle age for every career where guys lose their fastball you know i'm thinking like you know dylan in the 80s or something you know like everyone in the 80s everyone that's true everyone in the 80s but like especially dill like dylan from like 75 to like 96 was just sort of the saddest thing and you could maybe say johnny cash for that that same rough era and then and then there's a thing that happens to to to you when you get old you know that like that old expression about buildings politicians and, and prostitutes. If they're – once they get old enough, they all become respectable.

And I would love Dusty Baker to emerge from this as a kind of a patriarch of the game, as a wise old man, as a person who can kind of have a different sort of laid-back love and joy in his life. And so I will be rooting hard for him just for that. Yeah, well, he's in the perfect situation to take advantage of a bounce back. I mean, it's the same thing we say about every hitting coach who's fired after a team that's supposed to be good at hitting is bad at hitting. He just has to be there, hitting is bad at hitting he just has to be there and the regression will come and he'll get credit for it i mean the same thing applies to dusty baker you can't really do a worse job than matt williams or at least that

than matt williams was perceived to have done and you can't really underachieve by much more than the nationals did under matt williams so if you can just get through this next season without the clubhouse completely falling apart, which is evidently what happened this season. And if the Nationals are a contender at all, then he will be celebrated. Probably he probably will get those manager of the year votes just for being there when that happens and not actively sabotaging it. Yeah, you're right. I would bet almost anything that he is a top three MVP, not MVP, M-O-Y vote getter next year. Yeah, it's very likely. Bummer.

I was hoping you'd say, no, Sam, you're an idiot. And I will bet you right now. No. Anyway. All right. So the last thing, just briefly, I wanted to bring this up last week and didn't get a chance to, but when Ken Rosenthal wrote a story about trends in managerial hiring, and I thought he made some good points and some points that I thought didn't quite land, but he said, you know, if you're a minority, a minor league manager, or a longtime major league coach, you probably can forget about managing. And if you're an analytics-minded Ivy League graduate,

you've got the inside track to becoming a GM. The latter still seems true. But since this article came out, there have been three managerial hirings. Since this article came out, there have been three managerial hirings, and they are Dusty Baker, minority and experienced manager, Don Mattingly, former manager, and Andy Green with the Padres, who is a minor league coach and major league – or minor league manager and major league coach. So those would seem to contradict the idea that you can only get hired if you're Scott Service and you're buddies with the GM. I think he did make good points about the fact that, you know, when you have a very non-minority front office, which is sort of a problem that baseball is trying to correct, kind of, I guess, then you will have the same problem probably in the dugout because, you know, GMs tend to hire someone they've known forever or something,

and that person is probably more likely to have the same demographic background as that person. But, you know, it seems like if you were gonna hire a manager right now and as rosenthal acknowledges like if you're jerry depoto and you've just been through the mike socia experience why would you want to do anything other than hiring a guy who is not an entrenched manager who doesn't already have this power accrued and who is not going to fight you and you know that because you've worked with him in the front office before i mean it seems like it would be hard not to make that choice and as rosenthal acknowledged there are other guys who don't really fit his thesis like jeff bannister and paul molliter and kevin cash and Hale. These are all coaches. And Pete McKinnon, the Phillies' new

manager, all fit this sort of old school mold or guys who paid their dues to get there. So I don't know that I buy that the manager who is just buddies with the GM is really a pervasive thing. We've talked about the trend toward former players who have not been managers and how that seems to have backfired in some cases or not had great results. So that seems like a real trend, but it seems like there is still a place in baseball for the experienced manager or the guy who paid his dues. And Dusty Baker is the ultimate experienced manager. He's 66 and he's managed for many years. So I don't know that I would hire someone with that background if I were a GM, but maybe if you go through the Matt Williams experience

and you see what can happen when you hire a guy who hasn't done it before, then you just want to go completely the opposite end of the spectrum, which is how managerial hirings and firings always seem to work. Yeah. Okay. So you can send us emails at podcast at baseball perspectives.com.

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