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who do they know is out there, is going to say 'yes' and will bring at least some of the attributes desired?
it's the second question i am interested in knowing the answer(s). because if i am a guy that gets called i am going to ponder a lot about going to that nuthouse.
(I'm assuming that the Sox failed to re-stock baseball ops post Theo, but could it be instead that the Sox downsized baseball ops earlier? I know they let a lot of their consultants go in 2009 or so, after the crash.)
buck rodgers was not a smart aleck know it all like bobby but he did say what was on his mind and he was not delicate in his assessments. thomas was too slow for centerfield, caldwell was fat and the other three were trending in that direction.
the brewers found a stopgap who let the guys play and it worked for a season and a half before it all went to pot and the team got old overnight though who knows how much of that was guys not taking care of themselves.
just a cautionary tale
The difference is that Brewers had a guy that they thought were good at managing, Red Sox has one who writes in Scott Podsednik in the third spot by mistake.
Obviously I'm delighted to think that Valentine is headed out the door but I'm not sure what I think of Cherington. I feel that he deserves some time to find his way but at the same time I have been underwhelmed by his performance so far.
EDIT: Sorry, Beyeler was "Best Manager Prospect" in the Eastern League a couple of years ago.
The other comments don't reflect well on him but this is the right answer. There is nothing wrong with bunting for a hit in a 5-0 game in the fifth (!) inning when a pitcher has a no-hitter going. 8th or 9th inning, we can discuss it (though I tend to think if you want to pitch a no-hitter, then don't give up any hits -- hitters should do what they want to get on base). But fifth inning? Give me a break.
(Of course, the last two offseasons don't give me a ton of optimism about this front office making the right moves to replace the players and replace the manager, but I think it's better to try to replace them than to hope the problems of 2011-2012 just resolve themselves.)
The story about Pedroia tweeting a picture of Valentine napping in the clubhouse several hours before game time, I think, should be understood in this context.
It's a bit irrelevant now but I think "the problems of 2011" have pretty clearly been either overstated or misidentified. The Sox won 90 games and basically fell apart because they spent six weeks asking their 8th, 9th and 10th starters trying to win games. I will forever believe that the 2012 team would have contended with some subtle adjustments. Instead they made what I think was a catastrophic and long-term change to management that is going to linger for many years to come.
More relevantly, the Sox need to clean up this self-made mess. Valentine and the entire coaching staff need to go. I know Magadan seems to be getting some good press but I see a club that has had a massive decline in walks and seriously question what approach he is taking. They also desperately need a superstar to put in the middle of all this. The pitching staff, as bad as it has been, I think is actually pretty close to being championship caliber. I'm confident that Lester/Buchholz can be a 1-2 of a contender and Doubront is a perfectly reasonable 4/5 type. The Sox need some stability in the middle of it all (Edwin Jackson?) and then some depth (likely to be some combo of Lackey, Morales).
That's later when they sign Swisher, Hunter or Pena.
i agree there are differences in the two situations.
while i do agree that bobby has his personality flaws i also believe he has the ability to be a good manager. i would be sitting down with bobby at the next homestand and ask him what his vision is for next season and how will he execute on that vision? i would then meet with him immediately at the end of the season and hear the answers. if i didn't like what i heard then i might consider a change. but i would not be deadset on making a change though i would have people doing the research to be ready if a change was needed.
You can have the best ideas in the world but if you're showing up late and/or not keeping up with some of the very basic information that's important to your job and/or not getting the best out of your employees, you're not going to keep your job.
i hear that and agree
No, the simple answer is the players are out there saying, \"#### this game, #### my life."
i think it's pretty well established that in this era managers who are emotionally distant and/or abrasive just don't work with today's players.
one could contend that doesn't work anywhere but you see those approaches work in operations and finance
Good managers can work anywhere as long they gain the respect of their staff. They don't have to kiss ass they have to push their unit in the correct direction. The staff will follow them once they see that the manager knows what they're doing and that they have success. They also have to have the backing of management. If they don't it turns into "Lord of the Flies."
This is correct. I'd be very concerned with a quick decision that ends up with a puppet in charge.
It was probably a last chance for Valentine. Nobody was offering him managing gigs (9 seasons since he managed the Mets), and he can always go back to broadcasting.
If he never thought he'd get another chance, this was a no lose situation. There was enough talent that they might have made the playoffs, and then he's a hero. If he's fired, he goes back to TV. No real loss.
Maybe he'd figured he already lost the team and could save the batteries on his filter. Maybe he'd been at ESPN too long.
Maybe he thought he could reach the team, and when it became obvious in ST/April that he couldn't, he just lost interest/energy.
I have no idea his thought process but it's as likely that he realized it was a lost cause early when management didn't give him the keys and the players hated him for not being Tito.
Eric Van posted something a while back on SOSH that was somewhere between insinuating and directly stating this. Apparently he was one of the many lowly paid consultants let go to save money, and he was making the case that it was penny-wise-pound-foolish thinking from ownership. It was actually a really interesting post - I wish I remember what the thread was titled, but will add that if I think of it.
I think that's fair, especially after what happened in the summer of 2010.
He interviewed for the Orioles managerial opening, but then withdrew from consideration so he could focus on the Marlins job.
Then the Marlins decided not to interview him at all, and the Orioles hired Showalter.
If Bobby V is back, I'm going to guess the fan base really, truly checks out and apathy runs at an all-time high in 2013. I cannot imagine a set of circumstances where he comes back.
That said... it makes all the trading of the so-called "anti-Bobby V" players seem all the more curious. Don't get me wrong: even if Francona and Theo were still here, I would have advocated the Dodger trade in a heartbeat for what it got us down the road. The Youkilis trade still puzzles, especially because they got so little when a team like the Phillies might have given us a way, way better package to pick up a 3B with power they desperately needed (and by better I don't mean anything more than a flier in low-A, but still someone you can dream on more than the return they got from the White Sox).
I don't dislike Bobby V. I probably even advocated for his hiring at the time, as a "do the opposite of what you were doing" approach. But clearly it has not worked. My fear now is the team won't spend the $ to fire him and are instead trying to get him to resign in an attempt to get out from under the cost of the 2nd year of the contract.
"I think Valentine's responses were that of a man who knows he's gone at the end of the season and is just playing out the string."
I dealt with him personally but only occasionally more than a decade ago, so large grains of salt.
But yeah, that strikes me as typical of his demeanor. And he's offbeat enough that you can see why people would either like or dislike his "candor."
Werner didn't say the Red Sox are understaffed; he said the Red Sox want to "supplement" their current staff. He said the Sox want more "evaluators," which is a different need than what was provided by the guys like Eric Van who (apparently) were let go.
Regardless, the Sox' most glaring mistake last offseason appears to have been at manager, and guys like Van almost assuredly wouldn't have been consulted on that decision even if they had still been there.
Does Valentine in Boston remind you of Dressen in Milwaukee back in the early 60s at all? Some of the stuff I am seeing from BOS fans here tracks with stuff that I have read about Dressen.
http://espn.go.com/blog/boston/red-sox/post/_/id/22518/cherington-in-seattle-nothing-going-on
The Red Sox Season.
I can't wait till it is all over and he pisses off.
Anyway, hope you are all well.
i have been making the bobby/charlie comparison for a decade and a month ago in another thread talked about the youk trade relative to dressen pushing to trade bruton for bolling
so yes
the only brave who liked dressen was joe adcock who was also a bit of a jack8ss
However.
That being said, from the outside, he honestly looks like a convenient (VERY convenient) scapegoat. Between the injuries, the FO, and string of jackasses in the clubhouse, I can't quite imagine any other manager making much of a difference this year. It is good to get rid of him now, I agree; but in the alternate universe, in all alternate universes, the slaughtered lamb just has a different name.
If Bobby V is back, I'm going to guess the fan base really, truly checks out and apathy runs at an all-time high in 2013.
This assumes losing. If Bobby V is back and they win, no one checks out. (I agree with your next sentence, not likely he's back.)
I would guess the name in quite a few of those alternate universes was "Francona".
I don't think anyone in Boston believes that if only the team had a different manager, they'd be headed to the playoffs. But he's done more than enough to get fired at this point. He is not a scapegoat.
The immaturity demonstrated by Valentine and all his coaches (not speaking to one another) is reason enough to ship all their asses out.
I hated the Valentine hire. I never thought he was as good as he thought he was, considered him a particularly bad fit for Boston and thought he was at an age when most manager start slipping anyway. But he did pay lip service to advanced metrics, so there's that.
I disagree with this. I think the fact that every single significant player on the team had a poor season is likely to be due to his management style. Whether it's childish whining by the players or Valentine and the Coaching staff's lack of communication and professionalism I'll leave to you but I think he is directly responsible for a lot of the failings.
The Red Sox mistakes have been huge, big-ticket decisions. These are not the kind of thing having 5 or 10 or 1000 bright young guys working for $30K is going to fix. If they were doing a shitty job late in the draft, or in evaluating minor leaguers, then, extra junior staff might help.
But the people involved in a Lackey or Crawford signing are the top 4 or 5 execs and the owners. The relevant stats and projections are freely available on the internet. The only "inside" info you could gather is medical evaluations, which is certainly an area the Sox need to improve. Junior baseball ops people just have no role.
Wow! Talk about letting highly paid professionals off the hook.
If you can't play b/c you don't like the manager, you don't belong in MLB.
If you plan a winless road trip, you can be only pleasantly surprised.
Do you believe managers play no role in how well the guys play under them (And Dag's research suggests otherwise). Persistent underperformance does not have to be an either/or thing. You can fault both management AND the players when everyone plays below capabilities.
That's easy to say but not so easy in practice. Obviously if they are just flat out tanking because they don't like Bobby, that's unacceptable and on the players. However, players need to be coached at every level, there is a reason someone like Dave Duncan can get great performances out of people that other coaches don't. There is a reason that Curtis Granderson seems to have responded to Kevin Long in a way he didn't to other coaches. Coaches DO make an impact.
Setting the tone and atmosphere for a clubhouse is important. Maybe Jon Lester would have spent more time looking at film and figured out why he was pitching like ass and maybe Dustin Pedroia or Adrian Gonzalez would have figured out what was up with his swing earlier in the season if they felt comfortable in the clubhouse. I'm not 100% certain of these things but when every single major contributor to this team falls off dramatically, I don't think it is unreasonable at all to look at what substantively changed (the manager) and suggest that there was a cause and effect.
The alternative is that a whole bunch of All Stars suddenly and randomly fell apart at the same time.
EDIT: What SoSH said more succinctly. Particularly the last sentence.
That's easy to say but not so easy in practice. Obviously if they are just flat out tanking because they don't like Bobby, that's unacceptable and on the players. However, players need to be coached at every level, there is a reason someone like Dave Duncan can get great performances out of people that other coaches don't. There is a reason that Curtis Granderson seems to have responded to Kevin Long in a way he didn't to other coaches. Coaches DO make an impact.
I believe they have some impact. There may be 1-3 guys they help, and 1-3 guys they hurt. Kevin Long didn't make ALL the Yankee hitters into MVP candidates.
But to say everyone underperformed b/c of Valentine is a huge leap. I think the "toxic clubhouse" is much more the players' fault than Valentine's.
Valentine surely deserves to be fired. But any lack of effort on the players' part should be 100% on them.
Daddy's mean so I'm going to strikeout.
The players are the #1 reason the team tanked. They were the #1 reason the team collapsed in 2011. Valentine sits at #3, at best, behind poor management decisions for this year's poor season.
Should he be fired... probably.
Should they work harder at selecting the correct person - not a knee jerk hiring of Brad Mills - that too.
Apparently you know nothing about how stress works.
No one said that. But if everyone is underperforming, then it's just as much a leap to suggest that the manager (you know, the guy responsible for managing those underperformers) wasn't ineffective in his capacity.
Again, it's not either/or. But the only way Valentine doesn't absorb a significant role in the failures of the 2012 Red Sox is if you're one of those simpletons who think that managers have virtually no effect on a team's performance. And if that's the case, why would you even care whether Bobby V gets too much blame? He's irrelevant anyway.
Where does the stress come from? Does it come from expectations of the public? Does it come from the way the previous season ended? Does it come from inner expectations? Of course stress can also push people forward as well as back.
Do you have data which suggests the failure of the Red Sox is due to the stress applied by Valentine and his management style?
2011 - Great players play great
2011 winter - Manager change
2012 - Great players play far less than great
That's overly simplistic of course but I think dismissing it as a possibility without any cause is similarly simplistic.
I wrote my thesis on this sort of thing. It's not online, so I can't link it--but you can find tons of articles with a simple google search. Chronic stress causes decreased performance, higher susceptibility to injury, impaired judgment, and lower pain tolerance (among other things). I haven't yet found anything that relates directly to baseball--but do I need to? This is how the vast majority of people are affected. Maybe one could argue that the MLB environment exempts players from this sort of thing, but there's no evidence of that, either.
You'd need several studies done directly within MLB.
This also plays into my line about how "Ben inherited a mess" is just a bunch of felgercarb. Sure the team had holes, but what team doesn't. Now if a new GM came in 2013...THAT's a mess!
I'll show up in the clubhouse wearing a tux and tell people "I fix things".
I think Ben inherited a pretty nice situation. I think the "clubhouse mess" that existed last year was vastly overblown and will believe that until the day I die. He got a team that won 90 games last year and was expected to do the same in 2012. He got Valentine foisted upon him in about the worst possible manner, I think had the Sox handled his hiring better that would have helped this mess but there aren't a lot of teams that looked that much better on Halloween, 2011 than the Sox did.
It wasn't a perfect situation of course and some #### just happened (injuries both pre and in season most notably) but I think the Sox from the top down allowed the perception to move reality.
This would be stunning on at least a couple of levels.
I just did a simple google search, and the results aren't that impressive, at least in terms of scholarly articles. Nothing all that recent. I'm sure there's lots of other stuff that I could find with a more targeted and/or sophisticated search. And FWIW, the first article I clicked on looked at found no significant correlation between negative mood (the sort of stressor I'd expect to result from working for a putz) and performance. Also, they only saw correlations with performance for individual sports (tennis and gymnastics), not team (basketball). Of course, that was a study of female student-athletes, so maybe not all that relevant anyway.
I'm serious. I perform better at my job when there's just the right amount activity. Too little, and I'm dying...too much of course and I just start to shut down. all that standing around in baseball gives ample time to think "My life sucks."
Once the reserve clause was beaten and the free market took over, the players took on added responsibility, IMO. Since they're basically partners with ownership, they can't just quit on their partners when they don't like their immediate boss. If Player X says he has trouble focusing on his job because Bobby V is a bad boss, then then Player X has no balls. When he's at the plate, or on the mound, or wherever, he has to do the job he's paid to do. Otherwise, he isn't a pro.
2011 winter - Manager change
2012 - Great players play far less than great
That's overly simplistic of course but I think dismissing it as a possibility without any cause is similarly simplistic.
Except, you know, they stopped playing great with a month left in the 2011 season.
I didn't say it was a realistic outlook.
I think they miss Ortiz in the lineup a lot more that they care to admit.
But they didn't, at least not the hitters. Beckett was hurt and Lester was lousy but the majority of the key position players were quite good in September last year. It would be a mistake to focus on one month regardless of which way the results turned. The Sox won 90 games last year, brought back fundamentally the same team and are headed to 70 wins. Injuries played a part of course and the players are the ones performing (or not) but I think it is quite fair to acknowledge the one major change the club made on the field.
September, 2011;
Adrian Gonzalez - .318/.455/.523
Dustin Pedroia - .304/.336/.491
Jacoby Ellsbury - .358/.400/.667
Kevin Youkilis - .167/.302/.222 (10 games, injured)
David Ortiz - .287/.396/.372
Jon Lester - 1-3, 5.40
Josh Beckett - 1-2, 5.48 (4 starts, injured)
Clay Buchholz - Injured
If the offer is more, the players will come. For what it's worth David Ortiz, Cody Ross and Jacoby Ellsbury have stated recently that they are desirous of returning. Obviously a lot of that is posturing but I think it's worth noting.
But mostly i meant players like Hamilton and certainly Swisher.
You'd be surprised how few of them actually think like that, though. Other than the true stars, most MLB players spend their whole careers looking over their shoulders.
Playing professional baseball is very similar to high school: People tend to "enjoy" it much more in hindsight than they did at the time.
hoo boy, re Twitter:
Michael Silverman ?@MikeSilvermanBB
Bobby V issued sarcastic 'sorry' if anyone disappointed he kept job after bkfst w Henry. He does indeed remain #RedSox manager.
A point I would make about the "stress" issue is that playing baseball at the MLB level, is, obviously, a highly calibrated, specialized skill, and has of course rigorous performance metrics and the perks, the money, etc. come with enormous scrutiny. So, in that context, if the guy is a little off, a little distracted, it might be a big deal, in terms of his performance.
Or it might not, in that it is more or less impossible to separate among random variance, aging, physical injuries, etc. and psychological factors.
But at the same time, since it is so tough and the margins are so narrow, you do need a guy in the manager's office who creates an atmosphere conducive to success. There are different ways to do this, of course, but it is essential. I am reminded of the BP comment about Ron Washington in the 2012 book. They noted that Washington has, as was discussed here last fall, made some very odd tactical moves in big games, but they also talked about what a great job he has done with the various personalities in the Texas clubhouse and how much all the players seem to respect and like him. And obviously, even though they have come up short in the World Series, that team really plays for Washington, and they are doing it again in 2012.
Some of that is just Texas having a lot of good major league baseball players, but I think some of the credit also clearly needs to go to Ron Washington. So ISTM that while Boston's problems obviously have a lot of causes other than Bobby Valentine, Valentine has not really done the job in creating the atmosphere conducive to success (a very tough job in this case) and for that and other reasons, Boston needs to try someone else.
Moreover, look at the starting pitching. It's the only part of the team that's been fairly healthy, but it's also been terrible. Bard flamed out spectacularly. Josh Beckett was the definition of replacement level. Jon Lester still is. Clay Buchholz started off the season incredibly poorly in his return from a broken back. Doubront has been slightly better than you'd expect for a 5th starter. When you get less than 1 WAR from your opening day rotation, you're going to be a shitty team. That the Sox aren't even worse than they've been is a minor miracle, and it's pretty hard to blame that on the manager.
I expect Ortiz to be back. I'm not sure what AL team would want to hire him away at a price and location that would be preferable to Boston, and I'd be very surprised if the Sox want to part with their most popular, and longest tenured player in the aftermath of 13 months of drama and agita from the team.
Oh hells no.
The best players on last year's team -- Ellsbury, Pedroia and Gonzalez -- played well in September. Ortiz wasn't great, but did have a .396 OBP in September. Youkilis and Saltalamacchia fell apart last year. Salty has fallen apart this year, too - maybe as one of the largest men to catch in the bigs, and someone who doesn't seem like the type of guy to admit he needs a day off, they need to watch his workload. The collapse last year was mostly the starting pitchers, and also Youkilis and Saltalamacchia. It wasn't, for the most part, the top hitters on the team.
Adrian Gonzalez has hit .211/.268/.342 since being traded to the Dodgers.
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