"Replacement Level" Managers

This is an old post that I never published. It's not good, as it just presents something of a freak show stat, but I was mildly interested by it when I re-read it so maybe someone out there will be as well. All of the facts/figures are through 2009 and I did not update them at all. I did not one factual error which is also not corrected - Billy Southworth was inducted into the HOF in 2008.

I put quotes around "replacement level" in the title because this article is not really about establishing a replacement level for managers in the same sense as the phrase would imply when discussing players. It is rather about establishing a baseline for crude comparisons of managerial records, in the same vein as WAR--but without any claim that the baseline represents the point at which talent is freely available.

After all, it's folly to hold up a manger's W-L record as the sole evidence of his quality as a manager. Even the most ardent believers in the importance of managers to a team's record cannot possibly believe that they can separate the manager's contribution from all of the other noise that goes into a team's record.

If you want a crude method to compare managerial W-L records, there are few options that come to mind. Conventional approaches would include just looking at total wins, winning percentage, and games over .500, just as one might do with pitcher W-L records.

Of course, my own initial thought as a sabermetrician is to turn to a baseline that values longevity to some extent. If a manager is allowed to direct 3,942 major league games, yet has a sub-.500 record, it would be silly to assign him a negative number and move on (Gene Mauch). Managers are obviously employable even with losing records, and there are many factors well outside the manager's control that contribute to a team's record.

So my natural inclination is to look at a manager's wins above replacement, which inevitably leads to a decision about how to define managerial replacement level. There are a lot of ways to estimate replacement level for players, but one of the simplest is to look at the aggregate performance of players given very little playing time. The analogous solution would be to look at managerial records for those managers that were replacements, managing less than a full season of games.

When using this approach for players, one must be careful to consider the selective sampling issues involved--players that fail in an initial trial are less likely to receive future playing time, even though it is possible that their true talent is greater (the opposite is also true to some extent). The same is also likely true to some extent for managers--managers whose teams do not perform well in an initial interim role are not as likely to be retained. However, since my application here is just establishing a rough baseline to use for ultimately unimportant comparisons of managerial records, I am simply going to proceed as if these concerns are irrelevant.

The goal is not to devise a rating system for managers; it is to find a crude baseline to use for comparing un-contextualized managerial records. The freak show nature of the exercise is evident, and hopefully will serve to excuse my playing fast and loose with proper research procedure.

What I did was look at career records for all managers with less than 154 games managed (Although I then removed managers who served full season stints in seasons with less than 154 games from the list as well, as well as Cubs managers from the early 60s who were part of the College of Coaches experiment and Stanley Robison and Ted Turner, who owned their teams and weren't real managers.) from 1901-2009. This is my group of "replacement-level" managers. There are 109 such managers, serving in a total of 135 different team-seasons. Their career totals of games managed range from one (ten managers, with either Rudy York or Eddie Yost as the biggest name) to 149 (Tom Runnells with the 1991-92 Expos).

Overall, they managed 5530 games (an average of 41 games each), going 2322-3208 for a .420 W%. So that will be my baseline for managerial records--.420.

By using .420 as a baseline, I don't mean to imply that it is a replacement-level in the traditional sense. It is quite possible that interim managers generally don't keep their jobs if they don't manage at least a .420 W%, but I don't mean to imply that replacement managers are ".420 managers".

If one was to attempt to measure a manager's replacement level in terms of actual effect on a team attributable to the skipper, my intuition is that it would be close to .500. There are simply too many possible candidates for managerial positions for me to think otherwise. Regardless, though, this "study" in no way indicates that the managers lowered .500 teams to .420.

The teams had a total aggregate record (with both the replacement and non-replacement managers) of 9334-11752, a .443 W%. This comparison does not take into account that the games managed by replacements ranged from one to over 140.

A crude way to compare team performance with and without the replacement level manager is to weight each team-season by the minimum of games managed by the replacement and other games. Using this approach, the weighted average of (W% with replacement manager - W% otherwise) is -.019.

Another crude approach is to weight by the harmonic mean of games managed by the replacement and others, rather than the minimum of the two. The weighted average difference is -.025 when using the harmonic mean. Those results should not be used to draw any conclusions, but without any regression or significance testing they imply that a replacement-level manager might lower a .500 team to .480 or .475, a difference in the range of four games a year. I am not claiming that is true, for the selective sampling reasons discussed previously among a myriad of other reasons.

With that out of the way, I will present some data on managerial records above .420 for managers, 1901-2009. I'll call this Austin Rating in honor of Jimmy Austin, who is the only man to serve three such stints as manager (all with the Browns) without reaching 154 career games. Austin's player-manager career started with St. Louis in 1913, replacing George Stovall temporarily (2-6) before Branch Rickey took over permanently. He also did a stint in 1918 (7-9) in relief of Fielder Jones before Jimmy Burke stepped in. His final and longest experience at the helm was in 1923, when he was 22-29 replacing Lee Fohl. His career 31-44 mark (.413) is a little below the .420 baseline, so his own Austin Rating is -.5.

Here are the top 25 career managers (again, through 2009):



There are sixteen Hall of Fame managers from this period; fourteen are in the top 25 for Austin Rating, with Whitey Herzog (270, 28th) and Wilbert Robinson (224, 34th) just missing the top 25. This is not offered as an indication that Austin Rating tracks HOF managerial choices or that it correctly identifies good managers, as any reasonable system based on career wins and losses would likely produce similar results for Hall of Fame skippers.

Going down the list, the non-Hall of Famers are either active or recently retired (Cox, LaRussa, Torre, Piniella) or in the Hall of Fame as a player (Clarke) until you get to Billy Southworth (Clark Griffith is also in the Hall, with a noteworthy career in the areas of playing, managing, and ownership). Southworth does not have wins in bulk (which seem to be the true indicator of HOF selection), but his .597 W% results in a very strong Austin Rating.

Here are the bottom ten managers:



Most of these guys served in the early part of the twentieth century, when competitive balance was less pronounced and multiple franchises had long walks in the wilderness. Protho brings up the rear for managing three teams in Phillies dreadful pre-War stretch (1939-41). The only manager on the list that commanded over half of his games post-1950 was Roy Hartsfield, original skipper of the expansion Blue Jays. Extending the list down to 13th would include Alan Trammell, while Manny Acta ranks 18th lowest, but including 2010 would give him a slight bump as the Indians scraped over the .420 mark.

Finally, here is the leader in Austin Rating for each current team in their current city (except Washington which doesn't have much of a history; record with that franchise only):

The Laziest Post I Could Possibly Write

There isn’t any baseball topic that is more of a cop-out, more of an admission that the author is flat out of ideas, then penning an article about one’s opinions on the Designated Hitter rule. I’ve managed to write roughly three posts a month for eight years without going there, so you’ll have to excuse me this one time.

Allow me to put my bias on the table upfront: I support the DH rule. I don’t think it is a perfect rule, but I think that baseball is a better game when the rules recognize that the defensive primacy of the pitcher has resulted in a systematic offensive deficiency. I do not demand that the DH rule be expanded to the National League, but I would certainly not oppose it and would strongly oppose any effort to eliminate the DH from the American League.

I’m not arrogant or naïve enough to believe that I have unearthed some new angle on this topic that you haven’t read before. The DH debate is relatively common, usually picking up extra momentum during interleague play and the World Series, and a large proportion of baseball fans have a strong opinion about it one way or the other. It now has entered the zeitgeist thanks to perpetual interleague play and the notion that universal adoption of the DH is inevitable.

There are two common pitfalls of those discussions that I think are unfortunate, and I’d like to address them before I make my points on the DH rule itself. This post doesn’t have any natural flow, so I’ve gone ahead and used topic headings:

Two Silly Arguments

The first is that participants in a DH debate sometimes accusingly point out that DH proponents tend to be fans of AL teams (or, from the other side, that proponents of pitchers batting tend to be fans of NL teams). It is undoubtedly true that this is the case…but so what? Whenever subjective preferences are on the table for human beings, there’s a good chance that one’s formative experiences or familiar experience will be reflected. To the extent that something is a matter of subjective preference without the insertion of any logical process, does where the preference arises from really matter? And if facts and logic are introduced into a discussion, does the background of the person presenting them matter? Facts are either true or not, and logic is either sound or faulty.

The second is the use of the "real baseball" card...namely, that baseball is somehow not baseball if pitchers are not allowed to bat. I’m not sure there’s a pro-DH counterpart to this argument; there certainly are specious arguments made in favor of the DH, but DH supporters generally don’t try to say that it’s not really baseball if pitchers bat. Arguments of this type are a convenient way to avoid making any sort of logical defense of one’s position.

One of the worst arguments put forth by DH supporters is that "Everyone uses the DH except the National League and the Central League". It’s true, more or less, but it’s still an appeal to the majority. The fact that the DH is widely adopted is evidence that many decision makers felt that it was a good idea, but that doesn’t necessarily make it so. This argument is the pro-DH answer to the "tradition" argument of the anti-DH diehards.

The Historical Trend of Pitcher Hitting

Of course, I’m not above snark and derision myself, and while I’ll try to avoid that for the rest of the post, I can’t pass this one up. You will occasionally see the claim that the DH rule exacerbated the decline of pitcher’s offensive production, and that pitchers did not or were not on a path to become the offensive zeroes they are in modern MLB until the DH rule was implemented. To this I say: nonsense. There are only two things constant throughout the history of major league baseball: the National League tries to position itself as morally superior to its rivals, and pitchers hit worse with each subsequent generation.

By 1972, pitcher hitting (in terms of RC/G relative to the league average, which I call ARG but his conceptually similar to OPS+ or wRC+) had already declined to levels near where it is today; for 1963-1972, the yearly averages were 10, 8, 7, 13, 7, 4, 11, 13, 14, 12. This was a continuation of a trend--pitcher ARG had never dipped below 20 prior to 1952, below 30 prior to 1934, below 40 prior to 1903--with each generation, a new low was being reached, and the race to the bottom was accelerating. (See this post for a more detailed look at positional offense in the twentieth century).

Pitcher ARG has declined further on average since the DH was introduced, but none of the observed figures would look particularly out of place in the 1963-72 figures. I suppose one must acknowledge that it is possible that the post-DH decline is understated due to the possibility that good hitting pitchers are more valuable to NL teams and thus get a greater share of pitcher plate appearances, but any such effect would have to be quite small unless the other forces at work were reversed or strongly diminished.

Radical Change to the Rulebook

A more popular argument against the DH is that it represents a fundamental change to the rules of baseball, a radical and unnecessary departure from the game as it was played for a century. (This is the refined, non-inflammatory version of the “real baseball” argument). Sometimes special attention is given to the first rule in the book, 1.01, which starts "Baseball is a game between two teams of nine players each". Since the DH is a tenth player, this rule is violated, and it is the first rule and thus the DH is completely antithetical to baseball itself.

It’s piling on to spend any time arguing against an argument that most people will immediately recognize as specious, but indulge me:

1. The baseball rulebook is not the Constitution. If you somehow demonstrate that the DH violates rule 1.01, then rule 1.01 can be revised just as easily as the DH can be added.

2. Read literally, nine players doesn’t leave room for substitutes of any kind. OK, you say, what it’s trying to impart is that there are nine players in the lineup for any one team at any time. If that can be read into the rule, then why can’t you just read it as nine players in any particular half-inning? After all, the DH does nothing to change the fact that there are nine players in the field and nine players in the batting order; it simply allows two players to alternate between an offensive and defensive role while sharing one lineup spot. The rules prevent these two players from ever being active simultaneously (viewed from a half-inning perspective).

Getting back to the more general issue of the DH being a radical rule change, I’m not going to try to argue that it’s more or less of a change to the rulebook than other changes that have occurred over the years. I am going to argue, however, that there have been many other changes to the game that have done much more to alter the way baseball is played than has the DH rule. Certainly the dawn of the “live ball era” changed the game much more than the DH, despite not being directly traceable to any rule change. (There are rule changes that certainly contributed, like banning the spitball and requiring clean balls in play, but there is also the composition of the ball and the approach of batters, both things that are not decreed by a line in the rulebook but can change the way the game is played).

The offensive outage of the 1960s that served as the catalyst for the DH rule is another example, and one which it could be argued was more of a direct result of a rule change (the expansion of the strike zone). Many would argue that changing the definition of the strike zone is not as radical of a change as introducing the DH, because it was simply a tweak to a pre-existing element of the game. My contention is that the amount of actual change to the game caused by a rule change is not necessarily proportional to the perceived radicalness of said change. The ultimate example of this is the way that the usage of pitchers as pitchers (not as hitters as in the case of the DH) has constantly changed throughout the game’s history.

Tradition

I’m not opposed to tradition. If something has been done a certain way for a long time, and the end result has been favorable, I have no problem accepting tradition as a point in its favor. But it’s just that--a point, not a game, set, or match. Tradition is also a very dangerous argument to make at this stage in the game if you hate the DH, since nearly forty years of the DH is in the American League has to make the tradition argument close to ripe for those who’d like to keep it around.

I have more to say on tradition, but it ties into the ultimate reason why I support the DH, so I’ll hold off for a second.

Strategy

Proponents of the DH like to claim that it introduces more strategy to the game; opponents sometimes argue the opposite, often citing Bill James’ article in the Historical Baseball Abstract that pointed out the higher standard deviation of sacrifice attempts in the American League. I’m not eager to take a position on which side (or either) is right. I’d grant that it’s probably true that the pitcher being forced to hit introduces more choices for a manager; but some of those choices have obvious answers. If you like strategy, is it more important to have many points at which a choice must be made, or more variation in the choices that are actually made (assuming for the moment that the DH actually does that)?

However, the debate about strategy takes for granted more fundamental questions: what is the optimal amount of strategy in a baseball game, and what exactly constitutes strategy? One could posit that there are three basic types of strategy, which I’ll label by the people responsible for making the choices.

1) Player-level strategy: Decisions about how to pitch to a batter, whether to dive for a ball or not...all of the choices that a player must make while taking the game state into condition

2) Manager-level strategy: Pinch-hit, pinch-run, change pitchers, bunt...the level of strategy that is most relevant to this discussion

3) GM-level strategy: How to evaluate players, which free agents to target, draft strategy...

I suppose Bill James would want us to consider a fourth level, Commissioner-level, which would be relevant to a discussion of the DH, but I’ll ignore that because it’s not particularly relevant to the game on the field.

Sabermetricians have spent most of their time, historically, on GM-level strategy, with Manager-level strategy second. Investigations into player-level strategy have increased in recent years, particularly with the flowering of Pitchf/x data, but still lags behind the other two.

The digression was probably unnecessary, except to set up my opinion--GM strategy fascinates me, player strategy is beyond me, and managerial strategy is interesting but there can be too much of it. Giving the manager more strategic options only interests me if those options allow baseball players to demonstrate their excellence.

Even then, it can be too much. While managers sometimes go overboard in their attempt to utilize their relievers in an attempt to gain the platoon advantage, in theory it’s a good idea. That doesn’t mean it makes for compelling baseball as a spectator. At least in that case, players are being used in a manner that most efficiently converts their ability to value, and the players are better than their peers at the task they’ve been assigned. While the former might be true when strategic choices are made with respect to pitcher hitting, the latter is not. Pitchers are not world-class hitters, and even the lowliest defensive specialist position player would be a standout hitter for a pitcher.

From where I sit, even if I accept that forcing pitchers to hit adds manager-level strategy, I don’t see that as a good thing. I’d rather see players asked to do things they excel at than watch a manager try to make the best out of a player who has no real talent at the task he is forced to engage in.

Conclusion

I don’t begrudge those baseball fans who think that pitchers hitting should be a part of the game at its highest level. While I would prefer not to ever have to watch a pitcher hit, I’m fine with the status quo.

I believe that the DH rule is a correction to a fundamental flaw in the initial design of baseball (to the extent that baseball was "designed"). Initially, the pitcher was a facilitator of action, more like a beer-league softball pitcher than a Greg Maddux. Of course, this lasted for about five seconds--competitiveness ensured that the rules constraining the pitcher would be constantly assaulted until the latter part of the nineteenth century when the rulemakers finally raised the white flag.

I contend that the balance between offense and defense that supporters of pitcher hitting sometimes cite has never existed in baseball and was never possible in a game in which one player’s defensive responsibility so dwarfs that of his teammates. A shortstop certainly has more defensive responsibility than a first baseman, but the difference is not so great as to make the shortstop’s offense a trivial matter when evaluating him as a player. The difference is not even so great as to ensure that when selected in practice, individual shortstops always hit worse than individual first baseman.

With respect to the pitcher, though, the value placed on hitting has been in decline from the beginning of professional baseball. Beyond the importance of selecting pitchers who can retire opposing batters, the relatively unabated trend of pitcher workloads declining with time has reduced the number of plate appearances an individual pitcher gets. At first pitchers were everyday players, more or less, and then there were two-man rotations and three-man rotations, and then the pitchers stopped completing all of their games, and there were four-man rotations...well, you know the story.

Natural selection (I’m sure my use of this term leaves a lot to be desired if you happen to be an evolutionary biologist) dictates that when one trait is so important, it will dominate, and pitching dominates in the selection of pitchers. It dominates to an extent that makes the fact that pitchers are lousy hitters a fait accompli, and it means that the notion of balance between offense and defense for a pitcher is folly.

The DH is admittedly an inelegant solution to this problem. It creates another position for which there is no offense/defense balance (although I don’t hold the ideal of offense/defense balance in particularly high regard). It is a solution that would have been unlikely to have been adopted in the early days of baseball had what I call the fundamental flaw been recognized as such.

I could have included this in the "Silly Arguments" section, but thematically it fit better here--DH opponents sometimes use a slippery slope argument that the DH is a harbinger of two-platoon baseball. Even by the standards of slippery slope arguments, this one strikes me as awfully specious. The DH has been in existence for forty years; there have been no serious proposals to expand the DH beyond the pitcher. There are no other positions that exhibit an inexorable historical trend of declining production with each generation. Given the nature of the game, it is difficult to imagine that such a situation could ever occur. No defensive position is even comparable to the pitcher in terms of its influence on run prevention.

I am all for continuing discussion about ways to tweak the DH; I’ve floated at least one of my own before. One option that is a non-starter as far as I’m concerned, though, is the notion of an eight-man lineup. While proponents like that it would remove the one-platoon DHs, it would fundamentally change the balance between offensive and defensive value for players of every position. It would instantly increase the incentive to carry defensive liabilities and make offensive production a more important factor in selecting players.

The eight-man lineup would cause far more fundamental change to the game than the DH has. Instead of having one offensive position (DH) and one defensive position (pitcher) in which there is no tradeoff between offense and defense, it would tip the scales at the other eight positions more towards offense. Traditionalists would be aghast at the impact of all the extra plate appearances on the record book; that consequence wouldn’t bother me, but perhaps we could shift to eight innings to balance things back out.

That last line is not meant as a joke. In the early 1880s, Henry Chadwick was convinced that baseball would soon be adopting a tenth fielder--a second shortstop of sorts, who’d play on the right side of the diamond and a tenth inning to go along with it.

That never happened, of course, but it’s worth remembering that a number of things that we take for granted in baseball were once anathema to whatever version of "purists" were around at the time they were introduced. The defensive dominance of the pitcher, which was decried well into the 1880s by some people who were upset that fielding just wasn’t as valued as it once was, is one example. What was radical a generation ago is accepted now is tradition a generation from now. Feel free to argue against the DH, but you’ll have to do better than the tradition or real baseball cards, because they could have been played against you in the past, and will be in the future.

Cleveland Manager Rant

I have considered myself a baseball fan first and a fan of any particular team for over a decade. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment at which this happened, but it’s been a while. I never regret this; college sports offer me plenty of opportunity for simple good v. evil, one team only fanaticism. I consider professional baseball too entertaining of a sport, one too amenable to rational analysis, to tie up much of my interest in a partisan stupor.

Still, I am a fan of the Indians, and I assume I will be until they move to Albuquerque in 2037. And so on Thursday evening, as I learned about Manny Acta’s firing, I vented a little bit on Twitter. The last time I had such a visceral reaction to a piece of Indians news, it was upon learning about the Ubaldo Jimenez trade.

The problem with being a fan first is that it makes one prone to that sort of off-the-cuff emotional reaction, whereas I’d much prefer to think for a while and then react. This is the more refined (albeit still tinted by the irrationality of fandom, poorly written and disjointed) version of that initial screed.

I always liked Manny Acta as the Indians manager. I supported his hiring, and I generally thought that he did a good job as manager from what I could tell. Of course, some of the most important duties of the manager are the things that, as an outsider, I cannot quantify and really can’t even get a good feel for--how he relates to players, how well he works with the front office and how he interacts with them on roster decisions, and the like. It’s certainly possible that Manny Acta is bad at these aspects of the job.

However, I reject the notion pushed by a contingent of Cleveland fans that Acta is a poor tactical manager from a sabermetric tactic. Again, this is an area that’s next to impossible to quantify--it's easy to pick some key categories on which managers have influence (like intentional walks, sacrifice hits, stolen base attempts, pitching changes, lineup construction) and mentally assign the manager a score based on rudimentary criteria (“intentional walks = bad”, “games led off by sub-.330 OBA hitters = bad”, etc.), but it’s difficult to develop a comprehensive evaluation even on these limited criteria. This is all complicated by the fact that some of our sabermetric tools have a margin of error comparable to the theoretical payoffs of alternative strategies, and that the manager always is working with more information than we have regarding the factors that could cause players’ abilities to deviate from our estimate of their true talent.

However, based on my general notion of baseball strategy and ability to process my observations, I have no overarching issues with the tactics employed by Manny Acta. Quite the opposite, in fact--I had less moments of confusion when watching Acta manage than I did with Mike Hargrove, Charlie Manuel, or Eric Wedge. Acta spoke intelligently about strategy in his media appearances and stayed true to his word as much as can be reasonably hoped for from a manager.

Of course, any manager is going to make isolated decisions that are puzzling. If cherry-picking just a few of these instances is enough to call for the skipper’s head, then I can guarantee you that it won’t take much more than a week into his replacement’s regime for a similar emotion to emerge. If you have to point to one specific choice in reliever usage, or one marginal young player that didn’t play enough for your taste, then I humbly suggest you don’t have much of a case. No, it doesn’t make sense to me either that Acta chose to use Vinny Rottino as a leadoff hitter (in one game!), but how many managers would have used Shin-Soo Choo as their leadoff hitters in over half of the team’s games? I’d suggest the latter is a much bigger deviation from the normal practice of managers, and one more amenable to sabermetric orthodoxy than the other is a departure.

In any event, Acta is gone now, making the more important question for Indians fans the matter of what this tells us about the people who run the organization. I don’t think it’s pretty. First, a quote from owner Larry Dolan:

“I fully support Chris' decision to make this change and am confident that he will lead a tireless search to find the right individual to lead the club to our ultimate goal of winning the World Series.”

Of course, this is typical owner-speak and reading into it is pointless. Still, the quote strongly implies that Dolan believes the single individual most responsible for winning the World Series is the manager. If the Indians could just find the right manager, they’d be fine.

Team president (and former GM, for the majority of Dolan’s ownership) Mark Shapiro tweeted:

“One of only levers u can pull w potential for broader change is the manager. Not easy but decision should indicate our desire to improve”

Left unsaid is what those levers are. And those levels have never been pulled. Since Dolan bought the team, the Indians have hired and fired three full-time managers: Charlie Manuel, Eric Wedge, and Manny Acta. They have fired zero general managers: Shapiro was promoted to president and his lieutenant Chris Antonetti took over after the 2010 season.

Manuel’s firing was a little different than those of Wedge and Acta--it came mid-season in the Indians first transition year between perennial contender and rebuilding. Manuel was not seen as a fit for the new paradigm, and so his attempt to force the issue by requesting an extension led to his dismissal.

Shapiro displayed a tremendous amount of loyalty to Wedge. It would have been easy to fire him after the failed attempt at contention in 2006, or the letdown on 2008 on the heels of 2007’s near pennant. But Shapiro stood by Wedge until after 2009, when a team that fancied itself a contender crashed and burned to 65-97.

The Indians’ fundamental problems, however, remain the same in 2012 when Acta was canned as they were in 2009 when Wedge was canned. The Indians possess a number of solid hitters at tough positions (Carlos Santana at catcher, Jason Kipnis at second, Asdrubal Cabrera at short), but gaping holes at the easiest positions (only Shin-Soo Choo was a good producer in the corners, and Travis Hafner’s perennial injuries have also held back the DHs). This is not a temporary problem--the Indians’ farm system has not produced a major league caliber 1B/LF since--Luke Scott? Sean Casey?

The Indians of 2009 and 2012 were also both woefully short on starting pitching. In 2009, the team had just traded CC Sabathia and Cliff Lee, so it was somewhat understandable. In 2012, though, those departures could not be blamed. The Indians ventured into 2012 with a rotation consisting of one pitcher who’d both pitched well and had good peripherals in the prior season (Justin Masterson). They had an enigmatic pitcher acquired at the cost of the organization’s top two pitching prospects (Ubaldo Jimenez); a veteran coming off a lousy season in the NL (Derek Lowe); a finesse righty who was below average in 2011 despite a league-leading 1.1 W/9 (Josh Tomlin); and a sinkerballer with an unremarkable minor league track record (Jeanmar Gomez).

The 2011 Indians started the season 30-15, which was a lot of fun at the time, even for those of us who suspected it was but a mirage. But those 45 games have ultimately proved to be a disaster for the franchise. They transformed what was supposed to be a rebuilding season into an increasingly desperate attempt to cling to the lead in the AL Central. They goaded the front office into trading its two best pitching prospects for Ubaldo Jimenez. And even after the team stumbled to 80-82, those 45 games influenced the team’s expectations heading into 2012: they were contenders.

Regardless of intention, the Indians were either unwilling or unable to acquire additional talent to fill out the roster, and insisted that there was sufficient talent to contend, leaving Acta as the fall guy if the purported contender failed to contend.

The Shapiro regime has controlled the Indians for eleven seasons, and in that time they have managed to make the playoffs just once while playing in one of MLB’s weaker divisions. Assuming that they should have a 20% chance of winning and seasons are independent, there’s a 26% chance that could happen by chance, so it’s not inherently damning.

When I tweeted something to that effect (minus the binomial probability), I got a reply that simply said “Process != Results”. I was unfamiliar with the tweeter, so I’m not sure if it was serious or facetious. I’m inclined to think it’s the latter, as it sounds very much like the kind of sentiment that is often offered by what could be called the Cameron school of sabermetrics.

There is of course a great deal of truth in the statement; a process can be valid and yet produce poor results through decisions made on the basis of incomplete information, unforeseen events, chance, and other factors. But that doesn’t mean that actual results can be ignored, particularly as the sample becomes larger.

Of course, it’s easier to rationalize poor results when the process is in line with one’s ideological leanings (this is true for me as well, of course). It wasn’t long ago that Chris Antonetti was the darling of the organizational rankings crowd.
Some people believe that they possess enough insight about front offices to make ordinal rankings of their quality. I am not one of them--all I can do is lay out the facts as I see them:

* The Indians can generally be classified in the upper tier of publically open to sabermetrics organizations, which is certainly a plus from where I sit

* Shapiro’s Indians have drafted poorly. The most recent Indians first rounder to establish a solid major league career is Jeremy Guthrie (2002). The most recent to have one with the Indians is CC Sabathia (1998). The jury is still out on several recent picks, although if Alex White or Drew Pomeranz is productive, it will be with another organization.

* The Indians have done a great job of trading for players either in the minors or very early in their major league careers. Cliff Lee, Grady Sizemore, Asdrubal Cabrera, Travis Hafner, Carlos Santana, Shin-Soo Choo, Michael Brantley, Chris Perez, Coco Crisp, and Justin Masterson are examples. But it’s much harder to find contributors drafted or signed by the Indians--Jhonny Peralta, Fausto Carmona, Jason Kipnis, Rafael Betancourt, Rafael Perez, Vinny Pestano? (Neither of these lists is comprehensive by any means, but I think thye are representative of the whole).

I don’t think that questioning the efficacy of the current organization at developing talent based on an eleven year fallow is excessively “results-oriented”.

With respect to the next managerial hire, I tend to think it won’t matter much. The organization will not win until it can develop more players, regardless of who is managing them. I’m hoping that Terry Francona’s interest is real and not simply a courtesy to Shapiro, but I doubt that is the case. While I don’t think Francona would be a silver bullet, his tenure in Boston doesn’t raise any obvious red flags. But Francona figures to be the default #1 candidate for any openings, and it’s difficult for me to believe that he would choose Cleveland over other options.

Sandy Alomar appears to have the inside track otherwise, and there’s very little evidence as to what type of manager he would be. There is plenty of evidence that Indians fans will welcome him as 90s nostalgia grows more powerful, and while that may be a plus from a PR perspective, it can be obnoxious for someone who was never a particular fan of Alomar the player. And heaven forbid the fans start talking about Omar Vizquel.

Disjointed Ramblings on the Indians' Managerial Vacancy

NOTE: I wrote this on Thursday and didn't expect the Indians to hire Acta over the weekend.

While the Indians have been searching for their next manager, it has been amusing to observe the reaction of non-analytical fans on message boards and talk radio. There are a large number of people who are furious at the prospect of Manny Acta becoming manager.

Let me digress for a moment by saying that I hope he gets the job. From everything I've read and heard from him, his outlook on the game is one that I can relate to. He says the right things about being open to analytics and his managing seems to reflect that. His bullpen usage seems to this distant observer to fall into the over-managing category, but I have to question how much of that was conviction and how much of that was trying to squeeze every possible advantage out of a bunch of lemons. In any event, I'm thoroughly unconcerned about his win-loss record in Washington, a franchise that was a basket case before he got there and maybe now with a new GM can finally right itself. (Acta bonus fact: He's the David Aardsma or Hank Aaron of big league managers--first all-time alphabetically.)

I say all of that, but if you asked me whether it was more likely, should Acta become Tribe skipper, that he would be considered a success or a failure when his tenure was over, I wouldn't hesitate: failure. It's a cliché, but it's a cliché with a lot of truth: managers are hired to be fired. Most of them get three or four years to turn around a team that was usually already in some sort of distress (or else they wouldn't have been in the market for a new manager at all) and fail to do so, often through no fault of their own.

I don't want to make it sound as if I think managers are unimportant--I certainly think they are less important than a lot of non-analytical observers believe they are, but I also am much more concerned about the identity of the GM and whether anyone can hit, pitch, and field. I do believe, however, that most of what really separates managers from one another are factors that we as outsiders cannot judge with any sort of accuracy--discipline, motivation, the makeup of their coaching staff, how well they interface with the GM, and the like. Those things may not turn the Royals into World Series contenders, but I believe they matter more than the usually small tactical differences between managers (there are exceptions of course, many of whom do not need to be named).

The amusing part is the ways that fans attempt to evaluate managers. The following is an incomplete listing of some of the criteria I see fans using:

1. Tactics: Of course, this is where your baseball worldview really comes into play. One man's genius is another man's moron on the tactical scale. While sabermetrics certainly has some insight to offer on this front, it's not as if you can just plug some variables into a formula and get a strategic rating.

2. Past success: Fans like it better when the prospective manager has won something. However...

3. Freshness: Other fans don't want a "retread" manager. Of course, there is no definition of what constitutes a retread versus a Proven Veteran (TM) manager. Bobby Valentine managed parts of fifteen seasons, compiling a .510 W%, two playoff appearances, and a pennant. Does that make him a proven winner, a proven mediocrity, a winner, a loser, or something else? Does his tenure in Japan count for anything?

4. Media image

These criteria often result in a bewildering mix of contradictory preferences. With the Phillies winning another pennant, there are now Tribe fans bemoaning that Charlie Manuel was once our manager. But how many of these folks were upset that he was fired? How many of them believed that he was a country bumpkin? How many of them really, honestly believe that he would have led the Indians to victory with the same players Eric Wedge was given, or that Wedge would have flopped with Chase Utley and Jimmy Rollins on his team?

My opinion of Charlie Manuel today is the same as it was the day he was fired by Cleveland: Nice guy. Presumably knows a lot about hitting. Makes a lot of inexplicable decisions while managing.

Since I think it's a pretty decent bet that Eric Wedge will be a manager again, I can't wait to see what will happen if he ever leads a team to a pennant. Near the end of his tenure, it was hard to find many Indian fans who had anything positive at all to say about the man (other than perhaps that he had class). I've written some tepid pro-Wedge stuff over the past year and only because no one reads this blog was I able to avoid being labeled as an apologist. Should he win, he will join Manuel as a tool with which to attack the organization--rather than as the cautionary tale about judging a manager on his record in one stop.

Anyway, to sum up my position:

1. Managers matter, but not as much as the average fan thinks they do.
2. Much of what distinguishes managers from one another is almost unknowable to outsiders.
3. I prefer a manager who is open to analysis and/or independently came to a similar view of baseball as the one I possess.
4. It's silly to think that because a manager didn't win during one job, he'll never win in another.
5. It's more likely than Manny Acta will be unceremoniously fired than that he will lead the Indians to a World Series. That doesn't mean he's a bad hire--I'd say that about anyone stepping into this position.

To really beat the dead horse that is the fourth point, try a thought experiment. Right down the names of 5-10 current managers that you think you'd like to have managing your team. It's a pretty decent bet that a lot of your picks have been fired at some point.

Suppose you'd chosen the eight managers who managed in the postseason this year:

Ron Gardenhire, MIN--first managerial position
Joe Girardi, NYA--fired by Florida, although not really for on-field performance
Mike Scioscia, LAA--first managerial position
Terry Francona, BOS--fired by PHI (285-363, .440)
Tony LaRussa, STL--fired by CHA (522-510, .506)
Joe Torre, LA--fired by ATL, NYN, STL (894-1003, .471), not extended by NYA
Charlie Manuel, PHI--fired/not extended by CLE (220-190, .537)
Jim Tracy, COL--fired by LA and PIT (562-572, .496)

Mid-Season Managerial Changes, 1982-2008

Disclaimer: This is not so much a study as it is a collection of data. There is no claim that the data is statistically significant; although I will use it in the course of discussion, I am not making any formal claims. You will also note that I have included a number of graphs; they don't do much for me (I'd rather just have the data table), but some readers may find them helpful in this case. With any of the images, you can click on them to enlarge as they may be tough to read otherwise.

I started with 1982 because it seemed like a good cutoff point--I didn't want to go too far back, and strike years cause a bit of a problem. I'm certainly not claiming that there is any fundamental difference with regard to managerial dismissals between, say, 1978 and 1982.

I counted all permanent managerial changes that occurred during the season with four exceptions, identified by either the Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball or my memory as not baseball related. The three exceptions are:

1. Dick Howser, KC 1986--medical issue
2. Pete Rose, CIN 1989--banned from baseball
3. Tommy Lasorda, LA 1996--medical issue
4. Larry Dierker, HOU 1999--medical issue

Only the first change is counted for any team-season. If there is an initial interim replacement, and later a permanent replacement, I have lumped them together as most of the interim stints are just a couple of games. I have tried to use the word "change" primarily, but sometimes I have lapsed into "fired", even though some certainly were resignations (and unless my memory from two years ago has been completely fried, Mike Hargrove's departure from Seattle really was a resignation). I'm not using "fired" as a technical term, here, okay?

I have a link to the spreadsheet I used at the end of the post, if you are interested. I am going to do this in a Q-and-A format:

At what point in the season did managerial changes occur?

The earliest (in terms of games) changes came after six games: Cal Ripken (BAL, 1988) and Phil Garner (DET, 2002). Each team started 0-6.

The latest change came after 160 games, when Larry Bowa (PHI, 2004) was let go and Gary Varsho managed the final two games.

The average change came after 80 games, which seems logical. The median was 75.5 games. No team made a change at the exact halfway point of 81 games; in 1990 both Jack McKeon (SD) and Whitey Herzog (STL) were replaced after 80 games, while Bob Boone lasted 82 games for KC in 1997 and Jerry Narron the same for Cincinnati a decade later.

Here is a table showing the number of games elapsed when a change was made. "0" means that the change occurred after 1-9 games; "10" after 10-19; and so on:


And a graph of the same:


The pattern seems to be a lull after the All-Star break; if you make it to the halfway point, are relatively safe for a month, month and a half. Then things pick up again towards the tail end of the season.

Which franchises made the most changes?

During the period in question, every major league franchise has made at least one mid-season change. I expected that the team with the most would be the Yankees, but I was wrong--they are in an eight-way tie for fourth with five changes. The Reds have changed managers seven times mid-stream since 1982 (eight if you count Rose's banishment):

1982: Russ Nixon replaced John McNamara
1984: Pete Rose replaced Vern Rapp
1993: Davey Johnson replaced Tony Perez
1997: Jack McKeon replaced Ray Knight
2003: Ray Knight and Dave Miley replaced Bob Boone
2005: Jerry Narron replaced Dave Miley
2007: Pete Mackanin replaced Jerry Narron

While there are five teams that made just one mid-season change, but three are fourth-wave expansion teams (and two of them have pulled the plug on their manager in 2009). The two longstanding franchises that made just one change are Pittsburgh (Pete Mackanin for Llloyd McClendon, 2005) and Los Angeles (N) (Glenn Hoffman for Bill Russell, 1998).


Has the frequency of mid-season firings changed over time?

Indeed it has, and the change to the division/playoff format of 1994 *appears* to be a reasonable explanation for the altered behavior. Here are the changes by year; N is the number of major league teams:


The maximum of 31% (8 of 26) was reached in both 1988 and 1991. The only seasons without any changes were 2000 and 2006. Here is the percentage in graph form:


I also figured a moving three-year average and produced a graph (the years on the x-axis are the first years of the three-year period):


1992-1994 saw a nosedive in the frequency of firings, one from which there has been a bit of a recovery, but never to a frequency any higher than the 1991-1993 period. 1994 certainly poses a problem due to the strike (and 1995 to a lesser extent with a 144 game schedule), but even if you ignore the three-year periods starting between 1992 and 1994 (i.e. those that include 1994), the rate of changes has dropped.

It certainly seems logical to me that the existence of four additional playoff spots led to a reduction in firings. More teams remain in the hunt despite slow starts, and a slow start is easier to overcome.

Summing it up, in the period 1982-1993, 19% of teams fired their manager mid-season. From 1996-2008, that rate has fallen to 10%. A difference of about 9% in a league of thirty teams is three (2.7) fewer changes per season.

Did teams improve their record after the change?

Yes, they did. The composite record prior to changes was 3562-4580 (.437); after changes it was 3881-4390 (.469). The total season record for the teams was 7443-8970 (.453).

76 of the 102 teams had a better record after the change than before (75%).

Of course you have to be very careful with this data. Cito Gaston was fired with a 72-85 record in 1997 and Mel Queen took over and went 4-1. Thus the 1997 Blue Jays count as a team that improved their record, but obviously one would not want to draw any conclusions from five games. Teams like that also can cause the aggregate records to be distorted.

Nonetheless, I am comfortable with the conclusion that teams generally had better records post-change. The improvement from aggregate wins and losses was .032. The average improvement (weighting all teams equally, even teams like the Gaston/Queen Jays) was .055. The median of the same was .045.

A better approach might be to take a weighted average, with the weight determined by the minimum of games before/after the change. Gaston managed 157 games and Queen managed 5, so the 1997 Jays will be weighted at 5. A team in which the change was made at the exact halfway point would get the maximum possible weight, 81.

Doing it this way, the average improvement is .046. Attempting something else in lieu of more advanced mathematical techniques, one could try weighting by the harmonic mean of games before and games after (2*before*after/(before + after), which you may recognize as Bill James' Power/Speed Number. It's also 2/(1/before + 1/after)). Done in this manner, the weighted average improvement is .049.

But don't teams that fire their managers generally feel as if they are underperforming? Could some (most? all?) of the difference in performance after the change be a result of regression to the mean?

Now that is a good question. And yes, I believe that is what is really going on here, although what follows in no way proves it.

What I would really like to do, if I had a lot more patience for this kind of thing than I actually possess and a better database, is this:

1) figure an expected record for each team in MLB during this period
2) for each team that made a managerial change, find a team (or teams) with similar records and expected records at the point at which the change is made
3) compare the performance of the teams that made a change with those that stayed the course

I *suspect* that if one did such a study, they would find that the performance of the two groups of teams was very similar, and that there was little proof that the managerial change was the impetus for improvement.

I do have a poor man's study here for you, though. In the Bill James Guide to Managers, James figured an expected record for each team based 50% on the previous year's record, 25% on .500, and 12.5% on each the second and third most-recent records. For example, the Angels played .438 ball in 1993, .409 in 1994, and .538 in 1995. So their expected record for 1996 was:

.5(.538) + .25(.500) + .125(.438 + .409) = .500

I figured expected records in this manner for each team that made a managerial change. Obviously, this is a crude approach and thus the study built on it is crude.

The teams that made managerial changes had a combined expected record of .492. Before the change they were had an aggregate W% of .437; after, .469; and for the season as a whole, .453. At the time of the change, 91 of the 102 teams had a lower than expected record (89%).

So one might well expect that many of these teams would improve on their own, whether a managerial change was made or not. It is of course impossible to say to what extent that is true . One must grant the possibility, however far-fetched it may be, that these managers were all an albatross around the neck of the club, dragging it down and preventing it from reaching its true potential. I don't buy it, certainly not in the majority of cases. Managers are relatively fungible, and so they are offered up as penance for a poor season, demonstrating to the fans or the players or the media that the brass is being proactive.

The teams went from playing at 89% of expectation before the change to 95% after. Even after the change, the teams did not play up to expectations, but the method of setting expectations is nowhere near accurate enough to get carried away with this tidbit. Ideally, the actual rosters would be used to set expectations, and you would account for injuries and the like.

Here is a spreadsheet listing all of the changes, along with the expected records.