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February 10, 2004
Catchers as Managers
Glenn Berggoetz and Jeff McBride have done some research on managers and found what is to me a suprising result. They've asked me to publish this on my website. Here's the article.
Given this data, my question is, why did catchers become so popular to hire as managers? Was there a great early manager who was a catcher? Do catcher just talk a good game? My other question is, how much does Connie Mack, as a managerial outlier, effect this research? Mack is credited with managing 53 seasons. His record in that time is 3776-4025, a .484 winning percentage. So he's going to drag down catchers by giving them a boost in longevity while taking down their winning percentage. From looking at the charts presented, I don't think it makes a big difference. Connie, of course, couldn't be fired because he owned the team. I would be interested to see what the first chart looks like with Mack taken out. Comments
I would think that straight wins and losses are not the best way to judge managers. I'd suggest using the methodology that Bill James introduced in his manager book. I believe his approach basically judges a manager by the extent he can maintain a strong winning percentage, against the natural tide of "regression to the mean." By this approach, Joe McCarthy was the greatest manager of all time, though I think Bobby Cox may be giving him a run for the title. Posted by: studes at February 10, 2004 02:51 PMComparing actual wins/losses vs. expected wins/losses is probably also more useful than just looking at winning percentages, also. For a recent example, how much is Alan Trammell to blame for the 2003 Tigers? Not much, in my opinion. I think this excercise would probably be more useful (and a lot harder to gather the data for) if we expanded the sample size to include minor league managers - or, at least, AAA. What about the negro leagues? I'm all for questioning the conventional wisdom with statistical analysis. But I want to make sure we've got the right data set to do so; in this case, I'm not convinced we do. Posted by: John Y. at February 10, 2004 03:21 PMI wonder also if the common conception that catchers make good managers isn't the cause of the performance noted in the study. That is, when an owner doesn't have an obvious good choice as to who to hire, he uses the fact that one candidate is a catcher as a tie-breaker. Thus more marginal oe inexperienced candidates who are catcahers are hired. Posted by: Cap at February 10, 2004 04:11 PMI'm no statistician, but wouldn't you expect that the larger the group the more average it would be? I mean, doesn't the fact that so many more catchers have managed than any other position mean that a lot more bad managers would be hired among the catcher pool than among, say, the left fielder pool? I understand that we're looking at percentages, and the comparisons are valid, but I think that if you stopped hiring catchers to manage and hired left fielders in their place, the left fielders' collective winning percentage would drop. I'd be interested to see how the average catcher/manager compares to the average manager. Posted by: rauscher at February 10, 2004 04:19 PM51%-49% is the difference between the "best" and the "worst"? Looks like all that time and energy proved that you win about 50% of the time. The rest appears to be nothing more than margin of error. Posted by: Al at February 10, 2004 06:14 PMThere is also a case to be made that the data used is very biased. That is to say that if the front office feels that catchers make the best managers, they will be more likely to hire a catcher as a manager in hopes that they will help their team. A team that needs more help is more likely to be a worse team. So, it is possible that the front office who has a bad team will hire a catcher to manage in hopes that they will enliven and drive thier team toward greatness. Additionally, it seems that it is more difficult for other position players to be hired as managers. These other potential managers may well have to bust their balls and be BETTER managers than their catching peers, simply because they have a different reputation. Posted by: dillple at February 10, 2004 09:21 PMI think the bigger question is how much difference does a manager make. I haven't read Bill James work on manager evaluation but how many wins is a good manager really worth. Maybe I'm negative and can only see how a bad manager can really wreck his team (i.e. overuse pitchers, steal too much, etc.). As for this thread, has anyone considered the evolution of the manager, i.e. is there any difference in the quality of the team that a manager takes over? It seems that if a manager took over a good team at the start of his tenure and did well, he'd be labeled a good manager and would be able to ride out a few .400 seasons before people showed him the door. Posted by: Ken at February 11, 2004 09:01 AMAs for your questions, I can only surmise that I have always taken issue with this theory. As I was hoping that catchers merely weren't in the When it comes to Connie Mack, his winning Other than Mack, about the only other old-time highly successful former catcher who became a manager was Pat Moran. Moran led the Phillies to the pennant in 1915, and managed the Reds to the 1919 World Series title. He is the only catcher from baseball's early days to place in the top 50 in career winning percentage for managers. As far as winningest managers, Mack is the only When it comes to winning percentage, only one I think Al's comment says it all. We're talking about a 2 point swing. Not to mention the fact the the players on a team have a lot more to do with it's WP than the manager does. Posted by: steve at February 13, 2004 05:32 PM
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