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.”

[Author’s added note, May 14, ~10:20 A.M. EST: You really should check out Posnanski’s post that really lays out Hillman’s clubhouse issues that I hinted at below. Do so if for no other reason that to find out that by the end of his first season, “the players were rather openly comparing Trey Hillman to Michael from “The Office.” Hmm… I wonder where they got that idea?]

The first manager of the 2010 season has been “let go”: Thursday afternoon, immediately after Zack Greinke’s first super-duper meaningful pitcher win of the season, the Kansas City Royals announced the firing of manager Trey Hillman. I’m not an “insider,” so I won’t get into analyzing the specific politics of the organization. That sort of stuff will hopefully come from the almost-always outstanding work of Joe Posnanski, Rany Jazayerli, Sam Mellinger, and others.

It is tempting to run through a sampling of Hillman’s “greatest hits.” (Who can forget Kyle Farnsworth pitching to Jim Thome on Opening Day 2009?) We’ll always remember Hillman’s response to the person who asked why left-handed reliever Ron Mahay wasn’t brought in to face Thome : “Mahay isn’t a lefty specialist.” Hillman handled the bullpen poorly, made bizarre playing time decisions, had an amazingly poor grasp of the platoon, and allegedly lost the clubhouse in his very first Spring Training with the club. I personally soured on Hillman fairly quickly. I didn’t appreciate the condescending tone Hillman tended to take when he felt cornered, and it was clear that part of the problem was his personality and attitude (he didn’t have time to “educate” us).

Nevertheless, even when someone has lost their job deservedly, it is difficult to take much joy in it. Hillman clearly loves the sport, and went to great lengths to be “in baseball” any way he could — working his way through the Yankees’ minor league system as as manager, leading the Nippon Ham Fighters to Pacific League championships in 2006 and 2007, and finally getting a shot at the American major leagues with the Royals in 2008. This is what happens to managers who preside over terrible teams. I would be shocked if Trey Hillman ever managed in the American major leagues again, and while that’s an accurate reflection of his abilities, it is sad to see that part of his dream end. Like just about every defeated political candidate I’ve ever heard, he never sounded better than during his ‘concession speech.’ All the best to Trey Hillman in his future endeavors. I’m just glad he got to stay long enough to see Jason Kendall’s emotional 250th hit-by-pitch.

The least surprising post-firing announcement is that Hillman’s replacement, at least on an interim basis, is former Brewers skipper Ned Yost. You aren’t going to believe this, but Yost was a coach for the Atlanta Braves at the same time Dayton Moore was working there. Some blame Yost for the Brewers’ pennant race problems during the last part of his Milwaukee tenure, but it is safe to say Yost probably won’t have to deal with that situation anytime soon with Kansas City. The truth is that it just doesn’t matter all that much, from a pure baseball perspective. You’ve read the sabermetric “managers don’t matter all that much” thing before: yes, managers often make bad strategic decisions, and sometimes they blow up in their faces, as in the Farnsworth/Thome example above. But over time… sometimes you pinch-run Tony Pena, Jr. for your designated hitter Billy Butler in a close game, Pena gets stranded, then, in extra innings, one of the worst hitters in the history of the major leagues, playing DH, gets the game-winning hit. Within a few games, random variation limits the amount of damage (or good) a manager can do. Yes, Hillman played Jose Guillen too much, but he’s not the person who gave an obviously declining outfielder in his early thirties a guaranteed $36 million dollar contract, either.

Back to the matter at hand. If you’re reading this, you probably know how this usually plays out. A new GM (Dayton Moore) comes in, quickly gets rid of the current manager (Cf. Buddy Bell) and brings in “his guy” (Trey Hillman). If after two or three seasons, if the team is still losing, the manager gets canned, and the GM’s leash gets shorter. Dayton Moore was quite emotional during Thursday’s presser, but it would be cynical to suggest that it was for any reason other than his personal relationship with Trey Hillman. Still, this is a clear sign (especially if one thinks the order to make a change came from ownership) that patience with the Royals’ lack of progress at the major league level is running thin. Pre-Moore acquisition Alex Gordon has been successfully neutered, but the most valuable on the team are still pre-Moore draftees Zack Greinke and Billy Butler. Hillman was Moore’s last line of defense. Some may say that Moore needs time to “see the end of what he started” in the minor leagues. Did anyone say that Allard Baird should be allowed to see what became of Greinke, Butler, and Gordon?

Trey Hillman (about whom Moore once said had a chance to be “one of the best baseball men of his generation”) needed to go, if for no other reason than showing that there is some level of “accountability” within the organization. The signals indicate that ownership isn’t going to wait around indefinitely on Dayton Moore, either. Again, we’ve seen this movie: new general manager comes in, honeymoon period (he isn’t the old guy!), seems to have a plan (I bet no one has ever thought of building a “farm system” before!), hires new manager (new ideas from Japan!), spends lots of money of free agents… then, when/if things go south, one of the last lines of defense is that the GM’s managerial hire gets fired. The typical next step isn’t to fire the new manager: after the first hire-and-fire, it’s usually the GM’s turn.

Now that is a process worth trusting.