Photo Credit: Keith Allison (Flickr CC)
Fall of 2017 will be remembered for a variety of things, including a great World Series. One of 2017’s lasting legacies, however, might be a sea change in the way we evaluate Major League Baseball managers.
When the 2017 regular season ended three teams that did not qualify for the postseason announced they would not be retaining their managers: The Phillies, Mets and Tigers. Of the 20 teams that did not advance to the playoffs, 85% opted to keep their skipper in place.
Since then, three teams that reached the playoffs (the Yankees, Red Sox and Nationals) have also announced that their managers would not return for 2018. Those three teams averaged 93.7 wins this season, and two of them advanced at least once in the playoffs. Of the ten teams that reached the postseason in 2017, just 70% retained their managers.
From the birth of baseball statistics, quantifying the impact of a manager has been an ongoing challenge. For most of baseball history win-loss record has been seen as a proxy for that information: Good teams must, it seems, be led by good managers and bad teams by managers who fail to get the most from their rosters. If nothing else, this fall has given us a pretty clear indication that several successful MLB franchises do not feel that way.
The Nationals’ decision not to bring back Dusty Baker for 2017 is perhaps the most egregious example. Baker has managed 20 full MLB seasons (plus two strike-shortened campaigns in 1994 and 1995) and won 90 or more games in ten of them. He has a career .532 winning percentage in 3500 MLB games and a .593 mark in two seasons with Washington. Even while announcing they would not be keeping him around, the Nationals referred to Baker as a likely Hall of Fame manager.
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Joe Girardi, hired in 2007, was the third-longest tenured manager in baseball (trailing only Mike Scioscia of the Angels and Bruce Bochy of the Nationals) when the Yankees announced they would not offer him a new contract this week despite the fact that his team had just come within a game of the World Series. Obviously expectations are high in New York but Girardi had never had a losing season in his ten years in the Bronx, won a World Series in 2009 and made six playoff appearances in what was largely considered a “down stretch” for his franchise.
John Farrell was the least experienced of the three postseason managers let go but his list of credentials is also extensive: He won a World Series with Boston in 2013 and just finished leading them to their first back-to-back division titles in the divisional era. Counting his time in Toronto, his teams had a .517 winning percentage in seven seasons in the perennially tough American League East.
These three leaders, despite their track records of recent and long-term success, were all let go in a span of two weeks this fall. At the same time, 17 managers who fell short of the postseason in 2017 and averaged under 76 wins this season as a group are all coming back for another campaign. At the very least, this could be seen as a clear indication that winning is not the only tool being used to evaluate MLB managers.
It’s likely that managers have always received too much of the credit or blame for the result of MLB seasons. It’s feasible, if not likely, that teams succeed from time to time in spite of managers that fail to provide optimal leadership. It’s perhaps even more likely that many teams with substandard talent cannot be suddenly turned into a winner by excellent management. If nothing else, this fall’s unusual sequence of managerial vacancies would suggest that MLB front offices are acknowledging this possibility.
