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Primate Studies — Where BTF's Members Investigate the Grand Old Game Sunday, October 06, 2002Baseball Primer’s 2002 Managers of the YearOur picks. I love the idea of evaluating managers, because it has no rules, no guidelines. The manager receives credit (or blame) for what is really the management team (GM, scouts, etc?). It’s hard to decide what to the manager is responsible for, but I think we can safely give the manager credit for two main categories:
With that in mind, lets try to evaluate the candidates in both leagues (for the sake of simplicity, a candidate is anyone who received a vote in the primer voting).
LONG TERM MANAGINGWhich manager most outperformed expectations? Who’s masterful roster usage kept added the more wins than the experts thought possible? Let?s try to establish expectations by looking at pre-season predictions. I used an the predictions of the average Primate and Diamond Mind?s, averaged them, and compared them to actual performance. In the NL:
Frank Robinson did the best; however, he did have a bit of help with the surprise help of Bartolo Colon and a few weeks of Cliff Floyd. Generally all the (Non-boone/bochy) candidates led their teams to surprising performances, with Jim Tracy leading the way. A lot his success has to do with amazing pitching performances from Eric Gagne and Odalis Perez. In the AL:
Hands down, Mike Scioscia?s Angels were the surprise of the year, with a lot of success due to an excellent bullpen. Much credit should go to Gardenhire and Howe for keeping those teams afloat for another year when most counted them out due to small market constraints. Tosca presents an interesting challenge; he got Toronto back to the level that most people saw them at, after a disastrous first half by Buck Martinez. Look for Toronto to really consolidate the Ricciardi plan under Tosca next year. SHORT TERM MANAGINGIt?s easy to look back and see if a team lived up to expectations; it?s a lot harder to infer how successful a manager is game-by-game by looking at season totals. Earlier this year, Bill James presented an intriguing argument for the potential evaluation of managers based on their performance in 1-run games. He suggests a formula for predicting a team?s record in 1-run games. We can evaluate the success of a manager?s one run strategy by seeing how much he beat his expected performance by. The value of this formula is debatable, but seeing as how it?s the best evidence we?ve got, let?s take a look: In the NL:
In the AL:
COMBINING THE LONG AND SHORT OF ITChoosing the manager of the year is a far more subjective process than any of the player awards. In trying to make it objective, I will combine apples and oranges. Let?s see which manager added the most wins to his team: In the NL:
In the AL:
By combining a measure for successful seasonal managing, and a metric for successful in-game decision making the managers of the year should be: Jim Tracy and Mike Scioscia? Do I think that Scioscia and Tracy singlehandedly added 20 wins to their teams? No, of course not. Barry Bonds couldn’t even do that. However, I’m surprised how well the results agreee with the subjective observations (which I think is the probably the best way to evaluate manager of the year). SO HOW DID WE ACTUALLY VOTE?NL Managers:
AL Managers:
(Voting done in a 5-3-1 scoring format) And in a fluke, “objective” and subjective judgment agree!
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