March 28, 2008
Ranking the Managers
The Wall Street Journal ranks Ron Gardenhire as the best manager in baseball. The study ranks Scioscia, Francona and Torre 14th, 16th and 17th respectively. Subjectively, I would not rank those three that low, and I'm not sure how many people would. It would be neat if someone took these 20 managers and asked people to rank them 1-20 to see how they did. My guess is that this study missed something about why these managers have been so successful over the last decade.
Posted by David Pinto at
01:50 PM
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Management
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I would guess that the WSJ factors in payroll, so managers whose teams spend a lot of money get downgraded. Gardenhire would certainly come out ahead in such a ranking.
It's not unlike the voting for Coach or Manager of the Year in pro sports: the leader of the "surprise" team usually wins. The leader of an established contender has almost no chance of winning the award.
Isn't the first criterion the problem? Most sabermaticians (excuse me, baseball researchers) consider a win/loss record in close games - which generally varies a lot year to year - to be a matter of luck not strategy.
The reason why those guys won so many games? $$$
The third category the WSJ used, whether the manager got more out of his players than other managers, is a tough one. The idea of seeing how a guy's stats went up or down from one manager to the next (even including some adjustments and variables such as age) is very difficult to quantify. It's interesting though that the highest rated managers tended to be from smaller market teams, i.e. seemingly doing more with less.
I tend to wholesale avoid WSJ articles that address sports as their writers don't know the topics from a hole in the wall.
No offense David, but I would probably do the same if I saw something related to the likelihood of recession on your page (unless it was how various teams fared historically).
John Gibbons is one of the *best* managers? Ok, anyone who thinks team management is fighting his players can't rank too highly.
I think we'd all have been better taking Ben's advice on the subject.
In keeping with what Ben posted, why is anyone taking anything series about sports from the Wall Street Journal? They have enough problems trying to predict what the next hot stock is going to be. This is way out of their area of expertise.
I would guess Torre ranks so high in close games based on the methodology used (games tied after the 6th) because he's always had great offenses and Mariano Rivera. Francona seems low because of various free agent busts (Renteria, Lugo) dragging down that dubious player performance metric. And yes, I live in the north east.