UTK Special 11/7/23

A Lot of New Managers

Stephen Vogt.

Carlos Mendoza.

Craig Counsell.

Bob Melvin.

Four teams got new managers in the last week, leaving three - Padres, Astros, and now the Brewers - with openings.

All of them got nice deals, with Counsell breaking the bank with a little billionaire dick-measuring between Steve Cohen and Tom Ricketts. David Ross never saw it coming, and he’s got more friends in the game than Ricketts.

We’ll see thousands of words written on this over the next couple days, and years as two new managers, and two surprising shifts happened. The results are unclear, unknown, and perhaps even unknowable. And that’s the thing that I kept coming back to. We have no idea how these million dollar moves will affect teams, positively or negatively. I don’t know it, you don’t know it, and as far as I know, no one in baseball does either.

At the end of The Science of Baseball, I riffed off Keith Woolner’s Hilbert Questions and the very first one was this: “How do we assess the value (or reduced value) of a manager on a game?” The book’s not so old that someone has figured it out in the interim and speaking to several team officials today, this isn’t something they have and are holding it inside the walls.

As one said, “if a manager does have value, we’re not even close to isolating it. Bill James did something on wins plus/minus expectations, but that’s usually because something changed. A player had a career year, someone went on a run, someone made a trade. I don’t know of anything that correlates back to the manager exclusively and I don’t have an idea what even would.”

So very smart people don’t know how to value it, and the Cubs decided to hand over nearly double the highest rate for a manager. This is nothing against Counsell; I think he’s great. But in the next five years, who wins more - Counsell, or Carlos Mendoza, who probably didn’t get the same money and is so clearly the second choice in New York as to be almost embarrassing. Mendoza’s a very qualified candidate, but he’s not Counsell, or even Carlos Beltran, which I think Mets fans would have taken better today after the announcement. If we swapped them on some other multiverse MLB, would the wins be significantly different?

Which leads me back to this - general managers and owners value managers. Players rave about their favorite managers and crush the ones they don’t like. It’s not hard to get quotes, even on the record, about this topic. But the ones that hire those managers can’t go off anything but soft skills, feel, and maybe record, whether that’s in Milwaukee or Charleston, South Carolina. There’s not an area where a team is more willing to spend a couple million dollars without even a good sense about whether it will help them win.

In fact, Counsell’s record deal puts the value of the manager, at least at the top end of the market, close to the accepted value of a win. It might be coincidence that these values align, largely because we don’t know what the value of a manager, any manager, is. This could be a vast underpay or the baseball equivalent of burning money.

We’re long past the days of managers working their way up, step by step as players did. When Ryne Sandberg did that a few years back, he didn’t last long as a manager when he made it and he hasn’t looked back. Today, players quickly step from the field to the manager’s slot, as David Ross did and now Stephen Vogt has. The job isn’t about experience, but about results, but again, there’s not too much to base this off of unless you’re hiring Dusty Baker. Even Bruce Bochy, a couple years out of the game, was a gamble.

The question becomes what is the right thing to do when you’re not sure something matters. The unknown, the chaotic, is an opportunity. If you have better information, you can make better decisions, but we know that’s not the case. Instead, with less information, the right thing to do would be to de-value it. Paying above market rates for an unknown is a terrible idea, perhaps the maximum inefficiency.

The better concept would be to diversify, which is what the Texas Rangers have done. They broke the game down differently, asking coaches to take charge of a particular area and focusing on the things they did best and that could be measured. A hitting coach helps players hit and yes, I know that’s not always measured by batting average or exit velocity, but we certainly know more and measure more accurately than with a manager. Offense. Defense. Diversified view points with multiple hitting and pitching coaches.

Of course, it’s Bochy who gets the big bucks, and will be the one that ends up in Cooperstown. We like figureheads in America, focusing on Presidents instead of bureaucrats, CEOs instead of workers, Head Coaches over coordinators. This should be no surprise in the attention economy and for once, baseball is falling into line with that. Whether it’s smart or not fits with America too, so more power to Craig Counsell for re-setting the market regardless.

One last thing: the Brewers, now looking for a manager, are reportedly looking at the usual suspects. As much as I like the concept of Troy Snitker managing against his father, something that would have to be a first, the name that stands out is Rickie Weeks. Weeks, like Counsell, has been in the front office. It’s a different front office, granted, but the pattern is there. Recent player, very well known and liked in the organization, shifting to the manager’s seat without other coaching experience. My guess is that’s the direction they’ll end up in, just from things I’ve heard in the past from people in and around the Brewers.

Of course, if they asked me, I’d suggest David Ross. Tell me that guy wouldn’t want to beat the Cubs and Counsell!