Why Do We Vote for Manager of the Year So Early?
The results are in. Terry Francona is your American League Manager of the Year. Congratulations to him! He’s probably an excellent manager. I actually had a vote for the AL version of the award, and, well, I probably screwed it up. One part of the screw up was on me, and I’ll eat my crow. But here’s my excuse: I didn’t have the most important part of the year at my disposal when I made my vote.
I voted for John Farrell, Buck Showalter, and Terry Francona in that order. I think all three are excellent managers, and so I relied on the numbers I produced to try and help me make the decision.
That vote was based on their rankings in the statistics that hoped to judge how well a manager used his best relievers, introduced flexibility into his bullpen plan, optimized his lineup to feature his best hitters, and avoided bunting with non-pitchers. By placing best or second best in everything but lineup optimization, Farrell jumped to the top.
If Francona had ended up second instead of third, I might have given the Indians manager some credit for overcoming more adversity, but instead Showalter came in second. His team outproduced expectations, and did so on sub-$100m payroll.
At the time, I felt that Showalter did a good job of using his relievers well. He had faith in Mychal Givens and Brad Brach, at least, and he didn’t screw up his lineups, and his players love battling for him. Additionally, the Indians and Red Sox were both supposed to be good going into the season — they were projected to top their respective divisions.
What other non-statistical peripherals should I have considered at the time? I could have moved Francona and Showalter around, but I didn’t think I had a compelling reason. And Farrel was still first.
I did have a reason to move Francona, though, and I even referenced it in the piece, so obviously some of the blame is on me. “The Indians have been better at moving the pieces around once they got the right pieces,” I wrote, and even Francona would admit that he couldn’t do what he did with Andrew Miller until he had Andrew Miller, and even that extreme usage we saw in the playoffs was more possible in the playoffs.
As much as I wanted to give Francona credit for his usage of Miller, I felt that I was doing so based on a month-plus of sample. I hadn’t seen Francona’s masterful work in the postseason, or Showalter’s refusal to use Zach Britton in a winner-take-all game (which he admits to regretting), and so I would have just been giving Francona an award for not making Miller the closer when he already had Cody Allen in place.
And so we turn to a possible flaw in the process. We’re asked to turn in our vote on the manager of the year before a single post-season game is played, and that cuts us off from perhaps the most important sample we could have.
The postseason is different from the regular season, but it also is different in a way that allows the manager to really shine. When everyone is watching every play, and there is no tomorrow, we see how flexible and fast-moving the managers can be. That’s when Francona showed he would use only his best relievers in the biggest moments, trust role players like Coco Crisp, Brandon Guyer, and Lonnie Chisenhall to do their best in key moments, and ride Corey Kluber as much as he could.
In any case, it’s more information, and it looks like important information in the case of the manager. And yet there’s that time frame: “Voters submit their ballots before the start of the postseason.”
When it comes to the player awards, it makes a lot of sense to limit it to the postseason. It would be unfair to limit the best pitcher and best hitter awards to only the players that make the postseason, and extending the deadline on the vote would probably lead to those sorts of outcomes. More than it already does.
Does that same argument hold for managers? Not quite. We almost always give the best manager award to teams going to the postseason — only six times out of 68 have we given it to a manager outside the top two spots. In today’s baseball, with more postseason berths, you might say that only Joe Girardi, who won with a fourth-place Marlins team that had a losing record, would have lost out if we moved the manager vote until after the postseason.
The award is going to managers that will make the postseason anyway, and the postseason provides us voters with more information before making our choice. Seems like a no-brainer when set against the convenience of having all the votes due on one day.
With a phone full of pictures of pitchers' fingers, strange beers, and his two toddler sons, Eno Sarris can be found at the ballpark or a brewery most days. Read him here, writing about the A's or Giants at The Athletic, or about beer at October. Follow him on Twitter @enosarris if you can handle the sandwiches and inanity.
Farrell’s baffling decision to use Stephen Wright as a pinch runner and the season ending shoulder injury he suffered performing that role surely outweighs any positive contributions Farrell may have added with tactical decisions/lineup optimization etc. etc.
Managers have fairly often resorted to using pitchers as pinch-runners. How often have they gotten injured doing so? I would say it’s extremely rare (I can’t think of another example off the top of my head). If Wright didn’t get hurt, and the last guy off the bench wins the game later on, then Farrell would be applauded for using his bench wisely. So is using a starting pitcher to pinch-run completely off=limits now? Even if the odds are 0.1% that he could get hurt and miss significant time?
He was NOT forced to use Wright. It was the 6th inning and he opted for Wright with his bench still full (sure maybe someone was not available/had a night off but there’s no mention in any of the post-mortems out there).
Even worse: he pinch ran for Ortiz who was already on 2nd. Lose your best hitter with that spot coming up again? Check. Tiny fractional gain of probability to score one run (down one on the road)….double check.
The difference between “Postseason” and “Offseason” is how much spending the owner okayed, and how the upper management spent it. I can’t get behind judging Francona into November, while almost everyone else stops being judged in September. Voting based on Postseason results feels like fan voting for the Hank Aaron award. Same nominees every year, currently the most popular will win, deservedly so or not.
Managers already get an award for being the best manager in the playoffs, it’s playing in the World Series.
IMO assuming the MOY award deserves to go to a playoff team is really missing the point of the award. The award should go to the manager that gets the most return from the least amount of talent. It should go to managers like Girardi 2006 more often. How much do you really have to ‘manage’ with a team full of all-stars? Did Torre really only deserve 2 awards then for leading the league in wins for how many years? There is not a lot of consistency to what the writers do with MLB awards at all.
Giving the NL award to Dave Roberts this year is INSANE. He had a $300million payroll, what part of that is impressive? I would have given it to Baker and Showalter this season for finishing 10+ games ahead of projections.
And Roberts essentially had 270 Million of that on the DL for a significant part of the season. He essentially had to play with two completely different teams over the course of the season, literally more than roster’s worth of changes. At that point, money goes out the window.
At this point, money is a moot point and argument. The Yankees and Tigers had top 5 payrolls but weren’t expected to be very competitive ball clubs. There isn’t a direct Dollars to Talent conversion. It’s a really lazy argument.
“There isn’t a direct Dollars to Talent conversion.”
You must be on the wrong website.
$300million buys more than just starters, it buys backups and roster depth as well. It’s simply not as impressive to keep that afloat as a team operating with 1/3 the payroll.
There isn’t a perfect solution, but it has never seemed completely satisfactory to exclude the most important part of the season from consideration toward the annual awards, even more so when an award is explicitly called “of the year”.
This year, at least, I think the two managers who distinguished themselves in the playoffs won the award anyway.
I think it’s perfectly reasonable to exclude the post-season, especially for MOY, for two reasons, one being obvious (apparently not):
1) Everyone should be equally eligible and should have around the same number of games and time period to prove their worth. That most MOY are of playoff teams is probably a flaw that we don’t want to exacerbate.
2) Post-season managing will stick in people’s minds because of recency bias and because more voters watch it. A manager who is perceived as managing well in the post-season will often get the award when he doesn’t deserve it and a manager who makes a large blunder (like Showalter) or manages poorly in the post-season likely won’t, even if he deserves it (because he managed brilliantly all season long, including the post). Maddon would be a good example of the latter if in fact he deserved the award.
Now, repeat after me: “Bunting is not bad, bunting is not bad, bunting is not bad. Game theory, game theory, game theory….”
It’s a little tough to figure out how you’d weigh post-season performance versus regular season performance if you could consider both. I suspect most people who post here and take an analytical approach to this sort of thing would find it unfair to, e.g., deny Kershaw an otherwise-deserved Cy Young based on a lackluster post-season performance, or to have denied Barry Bonds the ’92 MVP because he didn’t hit very well in that year’s NLCS. Even though those players’ subpar post-season performances may very well have cost their teams a World Series appearance it still seems more “fair” to judge the full season.
But would managers be judged (or deserve to be judged) by the same standard? Based on Sarris’ analysis here I suspect the answer is “no.” E.g.:
I’d be curious to know how this additional information would be evaluated when determining a vote for Manager of the Year. Take Showalter. If an MVP or Cy Young candidate had one terrible post-season game I doubt that would totally hose his awards chances. But I do suspect that a manager who made the decision Showalter did in the Wild Card game would be badly harmed in the voting. I think bad performances by good players in key games are seen as statistical anomalies (unless it becomes a multi-post-season pattern), whereas bad decisions by good managers in key games are seen as revealing some underlying managerial or character flaw. That happened with Maddon–some folks went beyond just saying his bullpen decisions in Games Six and Seven were bad, and figured that they were so bad that Maddon had to be “panicking” or buckling under pressure. That increased willingness to assume that managers “choke” in the playoffs (Maddon) or that they reveal their “true” quality based on how they handle individual playoff decisions (Showalter) makes evaluating managers based on post-season performance fairly different from how it works for players. Maybe that’s justified, but it does complicate the idea that including post-season performance when evaluating managers is a straightforward case of just getting more information to work with.
Nobody wants to read entire essays in a comment section.
How do you know what people here do and don’t want to read? Did you take a survey?
This hardly qualifies. I usually skip long comments when there are overlong sentences and no paragraph breaks (because blocks of text are rough on the eyes) but if you’re coming here to read thoughtful analysis and a comment also contains thoughtful analysis, then it’s probably going to be read.
That being said, while I applaud your effort, it is easily (and it’s not even close) the most spurious “award” in baseball. We have no idea who the best and worst managers in baseball are and the general criteria used by the media (and fans) has virtually nothing to do with manager quality. No manager has the Cubs losing 100 games. No manager has the Phillies winning 100 games. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc.
I’d like to improve the bunt stat to somehow take into account the third baseman’s position but then I’m sorta out of ideas and that’s like four little stats to try and decide who is a good manager. Yeah. I couldn’t believe this was my first award to vote on.
Well, it sounds like you put a lot of thought into it, which is appreciated.
Eno, I appreciate the reply (most authors NEVER reply to my comments!).
Remember that game theory tells us that the third baseman should play in a position such that the win expectancy from bunting or non-bunting is exactly the same, and I think that’s pretty much true in 2016! Take a look at where third baseman play when they know that the batter is almost surely not bunting, but at least has the potential to. You’ll see that they are playing a little in because if they didn’t then it would be correct for the batter to bunt even if he is not normally a sac bunter. Also notice that other than with pitchers at the plate, third baseman don’t usually play ALL the way in for the same reason (because then it may become correct for the batter to swing away or try a “butcher boy”).
So you shouldn’t pay any attention at all to number of sac bunts. It doesn’t matter.
To the extent that the defense plays incorrectly, either too far in or back, it is not clear whether and when they do that and whether and when managers exploit them. It is also not clear when the defense is able to exploit managers who bunt too little or too much regardless of where the defense is playing. More reasons for the number of bunts not be reflective of manager acumen.
I suspect that managers who bunt a lot do so with little deference to where the defense is playing which allows the defense to exploit them and play further up than the “break even point” (the Nash equilibrium). But I also suspect that managers who bunt rarely are similarly able to be exploited by the defense by them playing further back than the BE point.
Next year I can give you lots of fairly simple ways to evaluate managers strategically. For example, sac bunting (by pitchers or position players) with runners on 1 and 3 and no safety squeeze. This is usually a bad play not matter what. Sac bunting with runners on 1 and 3 and 1 out with a pitcher up. Same thing. Bad play. Sac bunting with a runner on 2nd and 1 out (managers occasionally do this with pitcher at bat). Terrible play. Sac bunting with runner on 1 and 1 out with a decent pitcher at bat. Usually bad play no matter what. How often managers let non-ace pitchers see the order for the 3rd time in close games. How often they let pitchers bat (in NL parks of course) in high leverage situations in the middle innings. I have more. Let me know next year!
A manager does so much behind the scenes that it is impossible to tell how good a manager is based on nothing but on the field decisions. Does Joe Maddon’s relaxed and completely carefree environment actually help the team? Who really knows? What about the managers who are good about taking the blame off their players by deflecting it on themselves, thus alleviating just a tiny bit of pressure off them. What about their contributions to in season adjustments, such as noticing something wrong with someone’s swing and working with the rest of the coaching staff to fix it. There is endless different things that could be looked at in terms of what managers do that in game just doesn’t tell us.
Also, looking at all in game decisions only may fail to take things into account, something like your best reliever has already pitched 3 games in a row, and he just isn’t available unless of emergency. In this instance it will be a knock on the manager even if the previous 3 games absolutely needed that pitcher to pitch. Or noticing a fielding deficiency or bad alignment where bunting for a base hit in certain situations.
I think it’s important to exclude the postseason. It would be too difficult for voters not to vote for whoever wins, even though that’s a pretty poor indicator of who was the best manager (in the regular season too, but especially in the very brief postseason).
Even one of the 11 previous comments on this article explicitly states that the best manager wins in the postseason.
Roberts should have won no matter the outcome of the playoffs
they had an entire rotation on the dl for most the season
Farrell gets a lot of hate in Boston but I think that’s mostly scapegoating for a poor rotation and injury-depleted bullpen, which he can’t really be blamed for. At the same time, it’s hard to give him credit for bullpen usage when the whole ‘pen was bad and/or hurt for a good chunk of the year.
MOY is usually a “most over-performing team” or “Best story” award. How many MOYs have been fired after/during losing seasons the following year?
I get it, but I also think this turns it into a manager of the playoffs award.
It’s pretty simple really, they are regular season awards….ergo therefore…