If I was hiring a Major League manager, it wouldn’t be Jerry Manuel.
This is pretty old news already, but it’s been on my mind with more recycled managers getting second chances. Here’s what Manuel said after having his interim tag removed:
“You get so many statistical people together, they put so many stats on paper, and they say, well, if you do this and you score this many runs, you do that many times, you’ll be in the playoffs,” he said.
“That’s not really how it works, and that’s what we have to get away from. And that’s going to have to be a different mind-set of the team in going forward. We must win and we must know how to win rather than win because we have statistical people. We have to win because we have baseball players that know and can understand the game.”
“You don’t see a lot of guys that have statistical numbers play well in these championship series,” Manuel said. “What you see is usually the little second baseman or somebody like that carries off the MVP trophy that nobody expected him to do. That’s because he’s comfortable in playing that form of baseball, so therefore when the stage comes, it’s not a struggle for him.”
FJM already tore him up for all this (”First of all: what are ’statistical numbers’? How do they differ from ‘numbers,’ ’statistics,’ or ‘numerical statistics’? Are there ’statistical letters’?”), so no need to go down that road. And really, no need to get angry or high-horse about it at all. The Mets made a business decision, and they can run their business however they’d like.
But I’m still not sure what teams are looking for when they hire field managers. The Rays, for one example, are a very smart team. I wasn’t impressed by their manager in the postseason, and I wasn’t alone.
So what makes a good field manager? Probably the same things that make a good manager in any other business. Leadership, smarts, decision making, etc. And for all I know, Jerry Manuel could be the greatest leader of our generation. But if any manager, in baseball or otherwise, based his or her decisions purely on intuition and not on data, he or she probably wouldn’t last very long in the job.
Peter Ueberroth once told the owners, “If there’s a half-million dollar decision in your other businesses, you’ll go to the purchasing agent and make him justify it. In baseball, you’ll make a five-million-dollar player decision and you’ll say, ‘That’s not me. That’s my general manager.’”
Most owners realize this now, and hire CEOs and general managers accordingly. Why that hasn’t trickled down to the field manager level yet is very hard to say.
Feedback? Write a comment, or e-mail the author at shawn(AT)squawkingbaseball.com
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