TDL’s Sports, Wrestling, & Otherwise

One of the contentions of the stat-crowd is that the manager of a baseball team has a negligible effect on the outcome of a game. Their contention is that the manager in baseball has the smallest in-game effect of any major sport. I found myself disagreeing but, ironically, due to the lack of statistical analysis on exactly WHAT a manager can do to a game there’s really no way to prove it either way. To make up for it, I decided to read some books about managers or by managers. I started with Three Nights In August back in September. A good read. Three Nights was written by an independent observer of Tony La Russa. I wanted to go a step further and read a book actually by a manager, which led me to Kevin Kennedy (with Bill Gutman)’s Twice Around The Bases: The Thinking Fan’s Look Inside Baseball.

Oops.

This book was about 260-pages. Reading past page 50 was a chore… reading past page 200 was impossible. I tapped out at about page 190. One thing to remember: jocks are writers and probably shouldn’t pretend otherwise. It was an awkward read and read like Kennedy drank about ten fingers of Maker’s Mark and muttered stories to Gutman who then tried his best to put them into some readable format. Actually… that’s probably close to exactly how the book was written.

The book is split into two halves. The first half is Kennedy relaying his experiences in the game from minor league coach in the Dodgers’ system all the way through his final gig with Boston. He goes back into his early days managing winter ball in the Caribbean. If there was a whole book written by a good author about managing in the winter leagues, it would probably be an interesting book. Kennedy talks about the differences in the game between here and there… specifically mentioning armed guards on the dugouts and the control bookies have over the game there. He mentions a near-riot that broke out because a pitcher was pulled at 14 strikeouts when the pitcher’s over/under on the day was 15. He specifically mentions a game where the power was mysteriously cut to the stadium as soon as the game was official. There was a lot of money on the game and it was in the bookie’s favor when the lights mysteriously went out. There was no power to the stadium and the back-up generators were never brought online.

He then gets into his first big league job in Montreal and his eventual managerial jobs with the Rangers and Red Sox. He gets into the politics of manager jobs. He also takes the standard digs at how awful the Red Sox were run in the 90s (outlined in much more detail in Now I Can Die In Peace). Dan Duquette played politics with the GM of the Rangers during the strike season to get Kennedy. Kennedy proceeded to manage the team to a division win. Duquette then proceeded to blow the team up and make a ton of moves without consulting his manager. The team sucked the following year. Duquette fired him. He describes the politics and the “good ol’ boy” network that led to both jobs and, if anything, it helps to outline why baseball is so agonizingly slow to grow from within. Old baseball men teach young baseball men all of their prejudices and wrong-headed information. Young baseball men become old baseball men. The cycle repeats.

The second half of the book is the useless and unreadable part. He has four chapters divided in to the best position players, best pitchers, best hitters, best all-around players, and best games he’s ever seen. There’s an awful lot of talk about “confidence” and “swagger” and an awful lot of “I’ve never seen this guy play, so I can’t add him to this list.” I think the most ridiculous instance of this was Ty Cobb. I never saw Ty Cobb play either… but if you want to present an argument to tell me a guy who had over 4,000 career hits, a lifetime line of .366/.433/.512, and a lifetime BB/K ratio of like 3:1 — I’d be interested to hear how much wrong you could fit into one sentence.

Now, for the kinda/sorta good stuff. Kennedy is a big proponent of a running game — something that the statistically inclined will tell you is over-rated. Kennedy makes the point, and it’s probably a good one, that statistics won’t show you if a pitcher makes a bad pitch because he rushes the ball to the plate to prevent a steal. A statistic doesn’t necessarily show you Armando Benitez’s game-losing balk last season because Jose Reyes made a head-fake toward stealing home. The stats won’t show if the shortstop is moving to cover second and leaves a hole for a base hit or a hit that splits first and second because the first baseman is holding a runner. The only raw numbers you really get from a running game, stolen bases vs. caught stealing, doesn’t really tell the whole story of being “aggressive on the base paths.” Could there be something to that? Maybe. Kennedy took over the Rangers in 1993. In 1992, the team was 74-88 with 81 stolen bases, 44 caught stealings (64% success rate), a team line of .250/.318/.393, and 682 runs scored in 162 games. Kennedy took over basically the same team and went 86-76 with 113 stolen bases, 67 caught stealings (63%, indicates much more movement along the bases at about the same success rate), a team line of .267/.326/.431 , and 835 runs scored in 162 games. Could the extra hits have come from pitchers rushing their throws or guys being out of position? Yeah. Could the 150 extra runs be from moving more guys into scoring position? Yeah. Is it definitely those thing? No idea. It’s almost impossible to make a similar comparison during his stint on the Red Sox because he took them over between 1994 and 1995. Baseball was in a bit of a mess at that point and the seasons were shortened.

One of the reasons that people tend to call moving on the base paths “running yourselves out of an inning” is because it’s usually practiced by bat-shiat crazy managers. Ozzie Guillen of the White Sox would be a prime example. Kennedy makes the argument that with proper studying of pitcher’s tendency, what they throw on each count, how long it takes them to get to the ball to the plate, a level-headed manager can control a smart running game that disrupts the defense and creates chaos in the infield. The problem is: instead of backing this stuff up with statistics and a coherent argument, he just presents it as “this is the way it is and here are three anecdotal stories about the time my gut was right.” That’s great and all, but the reason no one ever tries to prove a running game helps on offense is because the people who defend running games defend it with nothing but gut instincts and anecdotal evidence.

Kennedy also outlines a few ways in which managers help their teams win game. Stealing signs, positioning the defense, and studying player tendencies so his team doesn’t have to are a few examples he gives. If a batter tends to hit a certain pitcher into shallow left, a good manager should know that and position his defense accordingly. It should be on the manager to know these things, not individual players. A statistic doesn’t show that a good manager has his left fielder playing shallow instead of deep in that situation leading to an out that may not have happened if his player was positioned incorrectly. I agree with that examples. One can’t necessarily expect players to follow these things. A manager has play statistician and psychologist over the course of a season. A good manager can do both. Kennedy also gives us a decent look at various types of signs… even telling us different ways that guys communicate on the field. For instance, a second baseman leaning on his left foot instead of a right foot can be a sign of who’s moving to cover second.

All told, the book was a rambling mess. The first half is, at least, an interesting rambling mess.