It Must Be Gardy

I don’t care about the Manager of the Year award. If fired Royals manager Trey Hillman won it this year it would be fine with me. In fact, I’ll start the campaign now: Hillman for 2010 American League Manager of the Year!

But seriously, folks… if Ron Gardenhire wins Manager of the Year, I’m fine with it. If he doesn’t, that’s fine with me, too. I don’t care. If he does win, I know that it will drive many saber-oriented Twins fans crazy, as I’ve read many of their criticisms of his decisions. You can find enough of those around if you look around the ‘net. I’m not here to say that Gardenhire is a bad manager. I don’t really know.

That last sentence is key to my post, as a couple of my favorite saber-friendly writers seem to think that a lack of knowledge about whether “Gardy” helps the Twins win or not redounds in his favor. Joe Posnanski writes:

I think Ron Gardenhire is the best manager in baseball. I think that not based on what we see but what we can’t see.

Commenting on Posnanski, Rob Neyer blogs:

Managers make moves that don’t make sense, based on the numbers we’re looking at … but we often don’t have all the numbers…. If we did have absolute knowledge, Gardenhire might look better than we think.

Posnanski’s appeal to our lack of knowledge either way is more obvious, but it is also present in Neyer’s strange thought about the “absolute knowledge” we don’t have — we “don’t know everything” going on with the Twins, so Gardenhire must be making more of a difference than other managers. I’m not going to criticize Gardenhire, but rather to point out the obvious problem with this claim.

To be fair, Neyer does make some other points (although doing so cuts against his “we don’t know” claim). He notes that the Twins have historically had a low payroll (although he also notes they don’t this year [thanks to the taxpayers’ largesse towards the impoverished Twins owners], which sort of makes the point irrelevant when considering 2010), but what does that have to do with Gardenhire? It was their front office that signed Jim Thome and Orlando Hudson and traded for J.J. Hardy. When the A’s were winning despite a low payroll in the first half of the decade, did everyone credit Art Howe? Yeah, I think they did — wasn’t that what Moneyball was all about, how Billy Beane was a mere figurehead and Howe was the real mastermind behind Oakland’s success?

Some will say that Gardenhire should get credit for the Twins’ winning despite injuries to Joe Nathan and Justin Morneau. The Twins were heavily favored to go to the playoffs long before the season started, and when Nathan went down I (incoherently) predicted that certain writers would use it as an excuse to give Gardenhire credit even though the best closers don’t matter all that much. Over the last three seasons, Nathan has averaged about 2 WAR. This season Jon Rauch has been worth 1 WAR. Obviously, a brutual loss. As for Morneau, he’s actually been worth 5.3 WAR this season — a career best. The “R” (“replacement”) in WAR accounts for the playing time element. Maybe Gardenhire saw this coming, and came up with the great idea of asking Morneau to hit for a Bondsian .446 wOBA in the short time he did have. “Strawberry, hit a home run!” “Okay, Skip.” “Ha-ha! I told him to do that!”

Going through these arguments (and there are others) distracts from my main point regarding the Poz/Neyer quotes, however. In both of them, it is asserted that we can’t say that Gardenhire isn’t a key to the Twins because we don’t know/don’t have all the information. Taken on its own, it is a fallacious argument from ignorance. “I’m asserting something without argument, and it’s your job to disprove it.” I’m not even claiming that they necessarily need numbers to back it up (it would be nice, of course). The problem is that just asserting that “we don’t know why the Twins are having success, so it must be due to Gardenhire” isn’t a valid argument. What would Neyer and Posnanski say to someone who claimed that the reason the Yankees are winning this season despite Derek Jeter’s season is because of Jeter’s “intangible” leadership? Hey, Jeter’s around, the Yankees are winning, there must be some connnection, right? We don’t know, but it would be “prudent” to be open to the possibility, right? How is that any more baseless than asserting that Gardenhire must be doing something we can’t see in the numbers or in his tactics? Maybe there are other managers around baseball who have helped their teams even more than Gardenhire has; how should we select which manager has done the best at things we don’t know about?

Maybe Gardenhire is making a difference. Maybe he isn’t. But the proper inference from “we don’t know” isn’t “he probably is,” but rather “we don’t know.”





Matt Klaassen reads and writes obituaries in the Greater Toronto Area. If you can't get enough of him, follow him on Twitter.

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chiasmus
13 years ago

Posnanski’s original post was weakly argued, and Neyer’s argument seems largely off-point, but Gardy nonetheless presents an interesting problem that you’re not really dealing with. This comes up in Poz’s comments. The basic issue is that managing a baseball team has two major components:

1) On the field tactics and strategy

2) “Managing” in the human-relations, leader-of-men sense: keeping people happy, motivating them, maintaining harmony between teammates, creating a good work environment, etc.

As fans, we have lots of information about (1) but very little information about (2). So we’re bound to systematically overrate good game tacticians relative to good leaders. The case for Gardy is that, based on the limited circumstantial evidence available, he appears to be very good at (2), even if he’s not so great at (1).

The challenge for us as analysts is to figure out whether it’s possible to systematically measure both components of a manager’s role. Citing player WAR doesn’t get you anywhere since it would be partly a consequence of good managing in sense (2).

It may not be possible to quantify both sides of managing, but in that case we should really just give up and say “we don’t know” anything about managers *in general*, not just Gardy, since an understanding based only on game tactics will be so biased as to be useless.

mettle
13 years ago
Reply to  chiasmus

Regarding (2): Looking at players’ performance when they move from one team/manager to another or when a team changes managers would answer that question (if you can get a big enough sample size).

John
13 years ago
Reply to  mettle

Not just a big enough sample, but you would have to control for a number of other factors.

The Duder
13 years ago
Reply to  chiasmus

This is a very well thought out comment that I completely agree with. My guess is that (2) doesn’t have 10% of an affect on the game as (1), though.

Therefore we are correct to overrate the tacticians.

Huh?
13 years ago
Reply to  The Duder

The world sure wastes a lot of time and money on leadership training then, if it’s so worthless.

scottz
13 years ago
Reply to  chiasmus

The (1) and (2) of this comment I think are spot on, and one thing that I’ve tried to express over the years to my friends, but not nearly as succinctly as done here by chiasmus.

My follow-up to this thinking is that with a reasonable amount of talent, being good at (2) will help the talent over a long season, but being bad at (1) will weigh heavily in losing individual games. Thus, (2) can help get you to the playoffs, where a single error of (1) could cost you dearly in the playoffs.

I’d argue that Bobby Cox might qualify as a good (2), bad (1) as well.

CubsNine
13 years ago
Reply to  scottz

Yes, Bobby Cox is the classic example of this type of manager. Mediocre tactical manager, excellent clubhouse manager. Bill James once pointed out Cox was the only manager in history whose teams finished better than their consensus preseason projection 20 years in a row. (!!) And that was roughly 1980 to 2000 he was talking about, so it started well before the Braves’ dominant years began. Such managers are usually great for the regular season, not so great in the playoffs. But we all know there’s a ton of luck involved in playoff series anyway. Cox’s teams scored some huge playoff upsets, such as the 1991 NLCS over the Pirates and the 1995 World Series over the Indians. Of course his teams were playoff upset victims more often, going all the way back to Toronto blowing the 1985 ALCS to the Royals.

I always thought of Dusty Baker as this type of manager too. He got many years of impressive regular season results in San Francisco, and now he’s doing it in Cincinnati. But of course he’s famous for his tactical meltdowns in the playoffs in ’02 and ’03. After ’03 he never had a chance to do his good clubhouse managing in peace here in Chicago.

To use an NBA analogy, one might think of these managers as akin to Doug Collins with the Bulls: They can take a team to a certain level, but you need to bring in a sharp tactical manager to take the team to the next level.

Jack Str
13 years ago
Reply to  chiasmus

You’re leaving out at least 3), which is the role the manager has in deciding the rotation, and who plays the pen and in the field. I imagine Earl Weaver would have broken camp with a rather different rotation than the one the Mets went North with. I don’t mean to nitpick here, and you may have meant to include this kind of thing in 1), but this is such a huge part of managing–and a part I don’t imagine we’ll ever find a way of measuring–that I thought it was worth being explicit about.

It’s easy to imagine in the case of the 2010 Mets that the decision to include John Maine and Oliver Perez in the rotation–if indeed that was the manager’s decision–for the first 6 and 8 weeks of the season cost them several wins. I have to believe there are cases where a manager’s decisions concerning which players to go with have added or cost a club as much as a dozen wins–just don’t ask me to prove it.