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August 09, 2004
Tosca Tossed
Carlos Tosca was fired yesterday from his job as manager of the Toronto Blue Jays. Former Mets catcher John Gibbons will take over for the rest of the season. I liked the moves the Blue Jays made in the off-season. I thought they had improved the team. What the team couldn't afford, it appears, is to have its superstar, Carlos Delgado, fall to very mortal levels of production. I don't know how much the rib cage injury caused this performance; he's been hitting better in August. But if your plan for winning is to surround your superstar with a group of okay players, the superstar needs to produce. On top of that, the pitching has been just awful since the break. In 205 innings, the Blue Jays have struck out 133 while walking 84. They've also allowed 33 HR. All those stats are near the bottom of the AL. The question that must be asked on a Moneyball team is, how much of this is the manager's fault? Riccardi put this team together. Those of us who support this type of management would certainly be giving him credit if the Jays were succeeding. We need to assign Riccardi some blame for the failure as well. And what I want to know is why Moneyball GM's do such a poor job of hiring managers? When Ricciardi hired Tosca on June 3, 2002, he lauded his new skipper's abilities as a teacher, a reputation Tosca honed in a lengthy minor-league career in which he managed 1,759 games. Ricciardi said the entire coaching staff will be under evaluation for the rest of the year and did not rule out the possibility of hiring another "teacher." Why do they go for teachers like Tosca, or player's managers like Francona, or people with a presence like Art Howe? Why don't they go for someone like Earl Weaver or Whitey Herzog or Davey Johnson, who basically agree with their philosophy of running a baseball team without being obvious about it? Are these GMs afraid to share the limelight with a strong manager? In Foundation and Empire, Isaac Asimov posits that a weak empire cannot have both a strong emperor and a strong general. That sort of group dynamic seems to be going on with Moneyball managers. There must be a Casey Stengel out there. Beane and his ilk are very good at finding undervalued players. Maybe they should find an undervalued manager to go with them. Comments
1) if JP should get praise for success, then he should get criticism for failure. whatever stats he used to select pitchers didn't work. also, how much room did he give the manager to manage and the coaches to coach? did he dictate strategy for every situation and leave tosca a puppet whose job was just to keep the players "happy?" 2) as far as finding undervalued managers - doesn't it seem that WHAT the "moneyball" guys value in a manager doesn't seem to work? maybe they should re- assess their "stats" because they seem to overvalue "yes-men." 3) you can't have an organization run by two people who both say "one way - my way" so forget earl weaver. I think that billybeane and co don't really want someone who will MANAGE. and that is their "tragic flaw/ downfall" Posted by: lisa gray at August 9, 2004 07:23 PMIt always bothers me that the sabrametrics depends a lot on sample size, which goes well with the strategy of selecting the right players base on their performance over hundreds of games, but is less predictable for the tactical decisions that comes up during any particular game, especially in october. Like Beane said about the A's in playoffs, it's all luck when it's a short series. He'd probably have been out even if he slid. I think the manager's impact on a good team is overrated, and that this is a fundamental belief of the so-called "Moneyball teams." I think they figure it kind of doesn't matter who runs the team, so long as they're not running them into the ground (Larry Bowa). The A's have been in the playoffs the last few years with pretty uninspiring managers because he doesn't matter so long as he's not hurting his team. Posted by: Jason at August 10, 2004 10:13 AMAnyone knows as well as I do, the validity of "moneyball" will not be accepted by the average baseball fan until the A's or one of the mini-beanes win a WS title (even though, most winning teams are sabermetrically sound). Ok, I'm just fed up after seeing the John Donovan article on SI about money talks. superficial analysis of payroll does nothing to enlighten the true causes of success/failure of baseball teams. The question is whether it's possible to find a manager from the current generation that accepts the moneyball premises, yet brings his own experience and expertise to the daily running and in-game tactics of the team. Certainly in the long run, with the prevalence of MS excel and computers, the next generation of managers will accept the sabermetric analysis as an inherent part of baseball and not think a second more about it. Posted by: wilson at August 10, 2004 02:46 PMI hate to use a paradigm smasher of an example but look, Joe Torre isn't a brilliant tactician and he doesn't come across as a great teacher. I think torre stays out of the way of a bunch or really mature ballplayers and doesn't have to worry about developing players who are relatively inexperienced. i think the manager you select has to be chosen based on the players you have...the makeup of the team. Art Howe was successful in Oakland, measured by wins and losses. Is he a bad manager because they couldn't win in the postseason or did the A's just not get the breaks? re: Foundation and Empire Hari Seldon is right on!!!! Loved that book growing up. I accidentally sold my trilogy to the book dealer after college, but bought a hard cover edition with all three parts back a few years ago. With the advent of terrific CGI effects and new science fiction moviews and the SCI-FI channel, and the making of DUNE into a three part TV series and DVD/VHS movie, THE FOUNDATION TRILOGY by Asimov would be wonderful to make into a SCI-FI moview extravaganza. I have another great book, "Star Trek Speaks," where you can get quotations from the Star Trek Series (the original) on virtually any topic of life from various episodes of the show. It's kind of like Bartlett's quotations, except you get Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Engineering. --AJK P.S. The quote is pretty applicable to the GM situation!!! Posted by: Art Kyriazis at August 12, 2004 05:49 PM |
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