News broke late yesterday that Dale Sveum was offered the job managing the Chicago Cubs. Today that story was confirmed. In a sense that was a surprise since he seemed the least articulate candidate in the post-interview press conferences and was generally considered the favorite for the Boston job.
That followed news earlier in the day that Terry Francona would not manage this season, and so was not a candidate for the Cubs job. Not that he was ever a serious candidate except in the minds of imaginative sportswriters.
News also broke earlier in the day that Mike Maddux, thought by some to be the favorite after his standup routine in the interview postmortem, had disqualified himself for family reasons. Frankly, one
of the things that damped my enthusiasm for Maddux was all this soul-searching about leaving Texas and wanting to be near his family. It strikes me as showing a lack of commitment to the Cubs job. I mean, you are getting a three or four year deal. There are schools and houses in Chicago and its immediate surroundings. Good ones, too. So what's the problem? It is not like his kids are babies, either. His daughters are 21 and 19 respectively.
My personal choice was Sandy Alomar, Jr., who actually lives in Chicago and was also a former catcher, which is a big plus in my book for managerial candidates. I cannot see what all the fuss is about Sveum, though baseball guys seem to like him and I expect one must defer to the new management crowd on the assumption they are privy to more information than we are.
I think that one thing the pundits have ignored in all of this admittedly slow-breaking story is the role of the manager in the statistics-driven Moneyball style of team management. This model is very much geared to putting the front office in the driver's seat. The field manager is a secondary player. He is someone who takes the pieces delivered to him and molds them into a lineup. He provides game management. He does not have to do any of the thinking and analysis that goes with assembling the team. All he has to do is to buy into the schema.
The manager also has to be on the same page as the front office on what it takes to win baseball games. There are a lot of stats and a lot of theories and you can do a lot of analysis, but the real revolution toward the Bill James statistical approach consists in a few simple observations, which, by the way, I think are ultimately true and for which I have advocated in the pages of this blog.
First off, the idea is to score more runs and to prevent your opponent from scoring runs. You do this not necessarily by being more physically gifted than your opponent, though that certainly helps and physical skills are essential to performance. But the real point offensively is to avoid making outs. You diminish your chances of making outs by swinging more often than not at a pitch you can hit and by taking pitches you cannot hit. So the most significant statistic is OBP. Next is the number of pitches seen in an at-bat.
If you get on base, you obviously have avoided making an out and you have extended the inning, thus enhancing the chances of hitter following you extending the inning or getting a pitch to hit, and so on and so on.
It follows that the most important thing a pitcher can do is prevent your opponent from scoring runs, which starts with keeping him off base. Similarly, fielders who consistently are too slow to reach balls that ordinarily should be caught or who make mental errors like throwing to the wrong base, etc. diminish the odds of winning games.
Readers of this blog will realize that this approach to the game and the player decisions it implies pretty much describes the opposite of the team the Cubs have habitually assembled, especially in recent years. I can remember only one year when they played this way, 2008, and, of course, they scored more than 800 runs that season.
What Billy Beane did for this system was simply to make a virtue of necessity. He didn't have much money, but his insights into the game allowed him to find undervalued assets and so to keep his teams competitive even though they could not afford to sign or retain big name talent. Epstein in Boston and also here in Chicago will have the luxury of the analytical philosophy as well as a lot of money, so the Cubs move was a good one and he is likely to succeed over time.
Anyway, not to belabor the point, the job of putting together a team is the job of the front office. All the manager needs to do is to accept these principles and to manage accordingly. Also he has to make put together the lineup and make the game decisions that increase the odds of winning. In Oakland, Beane and LaRussa famously clashed about philosophy. LaRussa was an old-line guy with a record of success. Guys like that, and generally guys with a big following either among the fans or a great deal of prestige are generally the enemies of the front office and organization men who are recruited to implement management's policies.
The kind of structure Epstein and company are likely to bring to Chicago doesn't need a manager with personality and reputation. In fact, I rather think they correctly realize that not only don't they need one, they don't want one. These guys are the architects, the designers. The manager in this schema is more like the contractor or the foreman. His job is to read the blueprints and make sure nobody gets killed.
I'm not saying this is the best model. I'm only saying this is the model that fits the system and this is the model we are likely to get. Terry Francona was not a household word when they hired him in Boston. He had bounced around some marginal jobs after a four year stint managing the Phillies, which was undistinguished to say the least.
Somehow, maybe through his coaching stint with Oakland, he came to the attention of the Red Sox brass. This seems to be the common thread with the candidates Epstein and Hoyer chose to interview and from whom they selected Sveum. I think that is also one of the reasons Sandberg was not considered. He had no connection to the new regime, and he was a celebrity to boot. If you look around at the other teams employing these same principles, the same pattern emerges.
I still have my reservations, though. Take a look at the linked video and you will see what I mean. What on Earth is this guy talking about. And, gee whiz, I've bossed teams of workers in my time, and I've worked for strange bosses as well, but I never thought it was a plus from either side not to know what was going on in their heads.
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