Measuring the Influence Of the Wild Card Manager

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The margin for error in the wild card races in both leagues is narrowing to nonexistent, which puts every player and every play under the microscope. But perhaps more than anyone else, it’s the managers who will be in the spotlight. The AL wild card race is down to a death match between the Chicago White Sox and the Minnesota Twins, while the NL’s wild card still has eight teams within five games of one another. Like the players they rely upon, every manager does some things well and some things that end up hurting the team.

Evaluating manager performance isn’t easy. One method is to take a look at how many runs a team has scored or allowed, and to compare that to how many runs you would have expected the team to have scored or allowed by taking into account their opponents and how many hits, extra-base hits, walks, and so on they had on both sides of the ledger. If you make that adjustment, you can calculate what a team’s won-loss record should have been and get a sense if the team’s over- or underachieving. The method has its limits — it’s hard to separate out how much those results are a product of managerial acumen, and how much was a matter of, as Casey Stengel once put it, “I couldn’t have done it without the players.”

However, it’s notable that Ozzie Guillen’s White Sox outperformed expectations last year, and Chicago is four games better than you’d project them to be this year. Ron Gardenhire is highly-regarded inside the game, and there isn’t anything about this year that would speak against that with the Twins 2.8 games better than expected. The Reds played much better with Jerry Narron running the team in 2005, so the suggestion that he’s helping them exceed the value of their stats now doesn’t seem extraordinary.

Where things get a little more difficult is when we try to separate actions from results. It seems a little strange to suggest, as the data does, that the Giants’ Felipe Alou, the Marlins’ Joe Girardi, the Phillies’ Charlie Manuel, or the Astros’ Phil Garner are bad managers — all are fairly well-regarded by people on the inside, and for good reason.

If we want to get more concrete, we can look at specific areas where a manager makes an impact: How often he takes a risk by calling for an intentional walk, how much he employs the running game as a part of his team’s offense, and whether he creates roles in which players might succeed, or creating situational relief roles in the bullpen.

From an analysis perspective, Bochy does a lot of things that a stathead would consider smart plays: He oversees an efficient running game, and he doesn’t waste outs by having his position players bunt.What he does do a lot more than his peers, however, is have his starting pitchers issue intentional walks. Although Bochy and the Phillies’ Charlie Manuel have called for roughly the same number of free passes, they call for them in very different situations and with different pitchers: Bochy has had his ace, Jake Peavy, walk 10 hitters intentionally, almost as many as Manuel has ordered for all of his starting pitchers combined.

In contrast, Manuel starts managing his pitcher’s matchups once he’s into the pen, which is particularly understandable when you’ve got a collection of relievers as dependent on situational usage patterns to succeed as the Phillies. Manuel’s doing what a manager should do with players who have limits: He doesn’t let Aaron Fultz lose the game facing a hitter he probably shouldn’t.

Guillen does much the same with the White Sox — leaving his starting pitchers alone but getting involved when it comes to his pen. He is the only manager who has asked his closer to issue an intentional walk seven times, but Guillen doesn’t seem to have emasculated Bobby Jenks, or made him any less effective, by doing so.

To paint it broadly, what the numbers suggest is that Girardi has his team run more than the others, but that costs him more outs than it does for Narron or Bochy. By contrast, Alou doesn’t run much, but with the oldest lineup in baseball, that shouldn’t surprise anybody.

For an American League manager, Guillen bunts a lot, while Bochy and Manuel are both notably unwilling to ask a non-pitcher to lay one down, especially considering that they’re in the National League. The Twins’ Gardenhire is one of the managers least likely to call for a free pass from his pitchers, and considering the added pressure an extra baserunner can put on a defense, that’s sensible.

Beyond the bean-counting of stats, it’s important to remember that managers are leaders, and sometimes, leaders shoot themselves in the foot. Nobody wants to be the next Bill Terry, the Giants manager who famously asked if the Dodgers were still in the league, only to see those same sadsacks play spoiler to New York down the stretch in 1934, and thereby propelling the Cardinals to the NL pennant. The always-garrulous Guillen might be the manager most likely to fall into this trap, since he’s always ready with a few quips about who’s good, who’s bad, and who’s a punk in his frequently-shared opinion.

Similarly, nobody wants to be the next Gene Mauch, Leo Durocher, or Don Zimmer, the infamous architects of some of history’s greatest stretchdrive collapses — the ’64 Phillies, the ’69 Cubs, and the ’78 Red Sox, respectively. All three managed to fritter away their team’s leads, although in slightly different ways: Mauch overmanaged his rotation in the season’s last week, using his best starting pitchers on short rest, only to have the gamble blow up in his face. In contrast, Durocher and Zimmer passively played their regular lineup into the ground, wearing out their starting players while their reserves watched from the bench.

A good manager keeps his regulars at their best throughout the season by not overworking them. Garner deserves good marks for being a manager ready to put his bench to work — the flexibility he has with multi-position players like Chris Burke or even a reserve like Eric Bruntlett helps keep the team from running out of in-game options.

Similarly, Girardi gets good marks for how well he’s managed his young regulars, but it’s helped that he’s also found ways to use solid veteran reserves like Wes Helms or Alfredo Amezaga. If there’s a manager in danger of overusing his regulars, it might be Manuel — the Phillies bench is suspect, even more so now that Shane Victorino is in the everyday lineup after losing center fielder Aaron Rowand for the remainder of the season to a broken ankle.

Ms. Kahrl is a writer for Baseball Prospectus. For more state-of-the-art analysis, visit baseballprospectus.com.


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