I've decided that it is now high time I broke my silence about the Royals' decision to call a halt to The Tony Muser Experience, which ruined a running feature of my web site. I promised myself that I would let the emotion of the moment pass before dropping my two cents into the public kitty. That time has now come.
Despite the forced retirement of my Muser Musings column, I was decidedly happy to see Muser go. I mean, it's not like anyone outside of the Royals' front office couldn't see that Tony had outstayed his welcome by about eighteen months. It was the obvious, though belated decision. Getting into the ridiculous fashion in which Allard Baird handled the actual firing is something I shall try to avoid, save for this sentence: I honestly can't remember the last time the Royals' handled a public relations situation properly.
With one Tony gone, the Royals of course felt that they needed to bring in another. Enter Tony Pena, a man with zero major league managing experience, about six weeks of major league coaching experience and a losing record as a minor league manager. But I hear he's a swell guy.
Seriously, was Pena the proper choice? That is, of course, the only question to be asking at this point, though for the life of me I can't see why. The answer should be obvious to anyone who studies the game and it should be painfully obvious to anyone actually employed in the front office of a major league baseball team.
That answer is no.
I don't doubt in the slightest that Pena will bring a certain level of dash to the club. By all accounts, he's a likeable, high-energy guy. He will work hard. He's probably kind to old people and animals. The bad news is that he has no business running a major league baseball team because, other than his personality, there is zero evidence that would lead Allard Baird to conclude that Tony Pena will actually win baseball games.
Let's attack this from the perspective of the Royals' General Manager. You have been asked to hire a new field manager, one who can develop talent and ultimately win games. Now, to me, it's painfully obvious that hiring a guy like Buck Showalter, who has a proven track record and wanted the job, would have made oodles more sense. After all, if one were tasked with hiring a major league manager to win baseball games, one would think that the first characteristic one would identify in a potential candidate would be prior success as a major league manager, wouldn't one? Why the Royals' one, Allard Baird, chose to ignore Showalter's nationally televised campaign for the job is beyond me, but, then again, I'm just a silly writer.
But let's assume, for example, that Baird was directed not to spend too much, forcing him to select someone with no previous major league experience. Okay, so if you were the GM, what would be the first thing you would examine? Personally, I'd take a close look at each candidate's minor league record. Clearly, that wasn't Baird's primary criterion, because Pena's record stunk. In three years managing one of the most wildly talented minor league teams ever, the Astros Triple A team in New Orleans, Pena posted a losing record. Yes, he won the Pacific Coast League title last year, but the dude's lineup and rotation were filled with players who are now regulars on the 'Stros. In 1999, Pena had Lance Berkman, Daryle Ward, Richard Hidalgo, Julio Lugo, Morgan Ensberg, Tim Redding, Wade Miller, and Roy Oswalt on his roster for all or part of the season and still managed the club to a 55-85 record. That's not good.
So, if prior record wasn't really weighted that heavily, what would be next in line? Divorcing myself from the personalities involved and looking at the problem objectively, the obvious question that pops out is this - What are the characteristics that are most likely to evolve into a good manager? Since almost all current managers are former major league players (Grady Little is the sole current exception) it would seem obvious to me that their playing careers should be examined. Are certain types of players of players more likely to become good managers?
Well, let's look at that. The top twenty managers of all time in terms of winning percentage are comprised of 15 former position players and 5 men who never played in the majors (including Walter Alston, whose single big league at bat really can't be called "experience"). Already it looks like we can eliminate former pitchers from our search, because none of them made the top-20. Now let's eliminate the five with no playing experience and concentrate on the ones who actually made it to the bigs. Of those fifteen, two-thirds played offensive positions (5 first basemen, 3 outfielders, 2 third basemen). The remaining five consisted of three catchers and 2 second basemen.
Now that's interesting, isn't it? Isn't it accepted baseball knowledge that former catchers make the best managers? You know, that whole "on-field general" thing about seeing the whole game and being involved in every pitch? Yet here we see that the less-valuable defensive positions seem to dominate. Perhaps that's something that needs to be examined, particularly in the high-offense time period baseball currently finds itself in.
Over the past twenty years, 101 of 112 playoff teams (including the 1994 teams that were in position to be in the playoff when the strike hit) finished in the top half of their league in runs per game. That's over 90%, and the figure has been even higher since the live-ball days returned in 1994. Since then, 59 of 64 playoff teams have been in the top half in run scoring - over 92%. That's right, under current conditions, your team has less than an 8% chance of making the playoffs in any given year if they finish in the lower half of their league in runs. Currently the Royals are 11th in a 14-team league, so it would seem logical that you would want to find a manager who is going to stress offense and show some ability to develop young hitters.
So what type of inexperienced manager is likely to develop into a manager of high-scoring teams? Logic would make us lean toward someone who was himself an accomplished big league hitter. Let's see if the data bears that out.
Going back to those top-winning managers of all time, the fifteen former players among them varied wildly in their offensive abilities. Hall of Famers like Cap Anson, Bill Terry and Frank Chance are on one end of the spectrum and poor hitters like Pat Moran, Charlie Comiskey and Al Lopez are at the other. The measurement I'm using to determine this is called OPS+. Briefly, it's a standardized measurement of a player's career OPS (On-Base Plus Slugging percentages) adjusted for the era in which he played and the ballparks he called home. These are all adjusted to a scale that has 100 as average. Anything higher than 100 means the player was an above average hitter, anything lower means he was below average. Pretty simple. Cap Anson's OPS+ was 141; Pat Moran's was 78. You get the picture. (Please check out Baseball-Reference.com for all the gory details. It's a great site.)
So I looked at these men and examined how their respective teams performed in terms of run scoring. What I found wasn't terribly surprising. The seven men whose teams ranked the best in runs scoring averaged an OPS+ of 118.43 in their playing days, while the seven men who fielded comparatively low-scoring team averaged an OPS+ of just 91.43. Now remember, all of these men were winning managers, so fielding a low-scoring team doesn't necessarily equate to losing ballgames, at least not over the entire history of the game. But it certainly does appear that managers who were good hitters tend to field teams that score more runs.
In today's environment, as already demonstrated, run scoring is vital to a team's playoff chances, so let's look at current managers and see if the trend holds. Thirty-four men have managed games in the major leagues this year. To make sure we are seeing true trends instead of anomalies, I decided to limit the study to just those men who have managed at 500 big league games and played at least on season's worth of games, 162 to be exact, as a player. That leaves us with a group of 16 current managers, and it quickly became obvious that our trend still holds true. The top eight managers in terms of fielding high-scoring teams averaged an OPS+ of 111.25 as players while the bottom eight averaged just 96.63.
It should be noted that hiring a manager who was formerly a good hitter does NOT ensure that he will field a high-scoring team - Frank Robinson and Hal McRae could both hit, but they are each in the bottom half of their managerial peer group. However, it also became obvious that hiring a manager who couldn't hit himself is almost a sure-fire recipe for fielding a low-scoring team. Only Bobby Cox among this group has managed to field teams that consistently rank in the top half of their leagues in runs per game, but that's not much of an exception to the rule since Cox's teams have been successful largely due to the greatest starting rotation of all time. Every other experienced big league manager who was a below average hitter - Tony Muser, Phil Garner, Jeff Torborg, Bob Boone, Bobby Valentine, and Bruce Bochy - has fielded teams that score below average. Of these, only Valentine and Bochy have achieved overall winning records or been to the World Series, and, in each case, they went to the World Series in a year that their teams bucked their usual trend and managed an above-average run scoring ranking.
It's crystal clear that the best chance for winning baseball games in the existing run-scoring environment is to hire a man who was a good hitter himself. Well, Tony Pena wasn't. His career OPS+ was 84. That's better than John Mizerock's awful 64 and Bucky Dent's 74, but it's still not good. There's absolutely nothing that would lead Allard Baird or anyone else to believe that a Pena-led baseball team will consistently score runs at a better-than-average rate. That, my friends, means the Royals aren't going to be breaking into the playoff picture unless they and Pena buck some enormous historical trends. I don't know about you, but I just don't see that happening.
So, who would have been a good candidate? Well, Showalter was the obvious choice, but we've already assumed that he was out of the picture for other reasons. Jamie Quirk (78) and Frank White (85) wouldn't have been sound choices, regardless of public sentiment. Among rookie managerial candidates, how about Willie Randolph? His career OPS+ was 104, which is not only above average but is outstanding for a 1980s middle infielder. He comes from a winning organization, was a winner as a player and, by all accounts, is a fine man. The same could be said for Chris Chambliss (109), who has been a winning manager at every level of the minor leagues and a successful coach and player for World Series winners at the big league level. And all Chambliss is doing is roving the Pirates minor league system as a hitting instructor, so it's not like Baird would have been denied permission to talk to him.
Look, hiring a manager isn't rocket science. You set up reasonable, logical criteria and you follow them to the right man. Something like:
1. A manager with a winning major league track record. Showalter, Cito Gaston, and Davey Johnson are in this group.
2. If that fails, find a guy with a successful pedigree, like a combination of being a successful coach in the bigs and manager in the minors, preferably with a history as a player with the type of skills that will translate into winning games in this era of run scoring. This is your Randolph/Chambliss group, maybe with a reach for someone like Alan Trammell.
Even if everyone in group one turned the Royals down or was priced too high, I guarantee that someone in group number two would have taken the job, even the lowly Royals job, if it meant getting big league experience as a manager. Anyone from either group would have been a safer, more reasonable selection than the one the Royals made.
Tony Pena meets none of these criteria, so why settle for someone like him? Because that's the way the Royals do business. Sometimes it seems that they're literally shooting in the dark and hoping to hit something. Come to think of it, that pretty much matches Tony Pena's hitting style too.
Ah, a match made in heaven.
» You can read more of Paul White's work at www.lostinleftfield.com.
Also by Paul White
» Kingery Correction
» Left Field Gold Gloves - National League
» Left Field Gold Gloves
» A Case for the Hall of Fame
» Good Manners and Poor Logic: Brock Was No Gwynn
» My 2002 Hall of Fame Ballot: The Also Rans
» My 2002 Hall of Fame Ballot: Two Right Fielders
» My 2002 Hall of Fame Ballot: Slot #5, Rich Gossage
» My 2002 Hall of Fame Ballot - The Starters I Left Behind
» My 2002 Hall of Fame Ballot: Slot #4, Jim Rice
» My 2002 Hall of Fame Ballot: Trammell & Smith
» My 2002 Hall of Fame Ballot: Slot #1, Gary Carter
» Happy Birthday Bob Elliott
» 3,000 Hits That Don't Belong in Cooperstown
» Frankie Frisch's Sad Legacy: The Cheapening of The Hall of Fame
» Babe's MVP Snubs
» The Schalk-Schang Redemption: Two Men Who Prove That The Hall of Fame Veterans Committee Was a Sham
» Being Tony Muser
» More submissions
Copyright © 2002 by Paul White. Posted May 17, 2002.
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