The demise of the Nats, or why managers matter

The assertion has persisted for generations: Managers don't greatly matter.

The Washington Nationals right now are an intriguing case study for that assertion.

The Nats have had a chronic revolving door for the dugout boss, apparently at the instigation of ownership, which has been willing to spend heavily on playing talent but not on managers. They have had newbie managers (including the current occupant of the job, Davey Martinez) and really old managers (including his immediate predecessor, Dusty Baker), but their one common denominator has been a lack of bargaining power.

Matt Williams was their manager in 2014-15, his first and probably only stint as a major league manager. He won the divisional title in 2014, finished second in '15, and the defining moment of his tenure came when Jonathan Papelbon tried to choke Bryce Harper in the dugout and Williams had no clue about it.

Out went Williams, in ccame Baker. The change wasn't as smooth as that; there was a tentative agreement with Bud Black that fell apart because Black had higher salary expecations than the Nats were willing to pay. Baker had been out of the game for three years and was willing to take the job at a bargain price.

Baker now has 22 seasons on his managerial resume with a record well above .500 but only one pennant and no World Series titles. His in-game moves are often puzzling and his grasp of the metrics popular with today's front offices is not publicly apparent, but he has no peer at the delicate task of handling superstar egos. The Papelbon-Harper incident suggested that was a skill the new manager needed in Washington, and whether by intent or fortuity, the Nats got that skill.

The Nats won a pair of division titles under Baker but didn't win a postseason series.  Mike Rizzo, who heads the Nats' baseball operations, wanted to extend Baker after last season; ownership said no.

Martinez, long an understudy to Joe Maddon in Tampa Bay and Chicago and almost as long a prominent candidate for managerial jobs, got the Nats post. There was every reason to expect him to be a good selection. But it has not gone well.

The Nationals have, still, as much talent as any team. Harper, Max Scherzer, Anthony Rendon, Stephen Strasburg, Ryan Zimmerman, Daniel Murphy, Trea Turner, Gio Gonzalez ... Juan Soto, age 19, started the season in A ball and now has 14 homers in the majors.

And they're running third in their division, barely above .500, and looking worse than that.

What went wrong for the Nats this year? I suspect this is a case where "clubhouse chemistry" became a real thing.

Just before the trading deadline, Jeff Passan of Yahoo tackled that question, and in the process of describing the Nats quoted an unnamed veteran as calling the clubhouse "dysfunctional." It was almost a throwaway line in the piece, but it got Rizzo's attention.

Rizzo decided -- apparently incorrectly -- that the unnamed player was former Twins reliever Brandon Kintzler and promptly traded him away. A couple days after the deadline, another leading bullpen arm, Shawn Kelley, threw his glove on the ground after giving up a homer; Rizzo designated Kelley for assignment.

With Kintzler and Kelley subtracted, and with Shawn Doolittle and Ryan Madson hurting, the bullpen has become a mess. And Kintzler and Kelley were subtracted in an attempt by the front office to support a beleaguered manager.

One of the voices on MLB Radio, talking about the "dysfunctional clubhouse" description, saying that he'd been in the Nats clubhouse and had never seen a major league clubhouse so devoid of interaction. Whether it's "dysfunctional" or not, he said, it was unique.

And I suspect Harper is at the center of it. Consider this: He is the star on a team of stars, a former MVP, a Sports Illustrated cover boy at 16 -- and yet you pick the stat, somebody in that clubhouse has had a higher number.

Homers? Harper hit 42 his MVP season. Matt Reynolds hit 44 one year in Arizona.

Batting average? Harper's high is .330. Murphy hit .347 the next year.

RBIs? Harper's never had 100 ribbies. Murphy, Zimmerman and Rendon have all topped the century mark.

But it's Harper at the top of the food chain, Harper whose future is the source of constant comment and speculation. You can't watch a game on TV without seeing Harper in an ad. Think that can cause some grumbling?

Baker is, if nothing else, experienced at handling superstar egos -- and the interaction of the other egos.

Baker had Barry Bonds and Jeff Kent in San Francisco, a pair of MVPs who apparently detested each other, They won.

Baker had Sammy Sosa in Chicago. They won, although that situation got away from Baker.

In Cincinnati, Brandon Phillips, while not on the level of Bonds, Sosa or Kent, was one of the Reds' better players and a high-maintenance guy. Baker kept him focused and on track, something other skippers struggled to accomplish,

And with the Nats, there was scarcely a kerfuffle with Baker around. Before and after, drama aplenty.

Yeah, the Nats miss Johnnie B. Baker. Not for pitching changes and when to hit-and-run, but for all the other stuff that comes with a major league season.

Notes, quotes and comment (manager edition)

The Washington Nationals announced Friday that Dusty Baker won't be back as manager next year.

That's a mistake on the Nats' part.

Baker may not be regarded as a tactical genius, but there are few better at handling a clubhouse of star egos. At 68, he probably isn't a good choice for a rebuilding team, but the Nats are in win-now mode. The Nats have a really good roster, and they have Bryce Harper for at least next year.

Baker fits there. I can't name anybody who fits better.

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The Tigers made Ron Gardenhire's hiring official Friday.

One thing I took from the stories of his press conference: He says he weighed 275 pounds at the end of his Twins tenure. He's down about 40 pounds from that, he says.

Let us hope he handles the stress of managing in a more healthy way this time around.

Gardy, Black and Baker

A few days ago, the Washington Nationals had settled on Bud Black as their manager. On Tuesday, they officially announced the hiring of Dusty Baker.

In between came an apparently contentious contract negotiation with Black, who found both the length of contract and salary too small. The Nats have gotten a reputation for low-balling managers, and that is apparently by design, Their initial offer to Black was a one-year contract; meanwhile, Don Mattingly got four years from the Miami Marlins, and the Fish have made a habit of paying people not to manage them.

The Black fiasco should be an embarrassment for the Nationals, but I suspect Baker's actually a better choice for Washington. For all his sabermetric and tactical shortcomings, Baker's well-established as a handler of egos, and that might be the biggest specific task for the manager of that squad.

And while he was justly criticized for his mishandling of a talented set of young pitchers during his tenure with the Cubs, Baker appears to have learned from that experience. He was the manager of the Cincinnati Reds when Johnny Cueto emerged as a star. In 2012 the Reds led the National League in run prevention; in 2013 they were fourth, this in an extreme hitter's park. in those two years, nine Reds made at least 30 starts. That's not a record that fits his reputation as a pitcher-killer, but that reputation ought to be outdated by now.

The Nationals had high expectations entered 2015, and failed to come close. There will be a good bit of roster churn there this winter, but they will still have Bryce Harper and Max Scherzer, and they will continue to have high expectations, perhaps higher than they ought to be.

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Meanwhile, in San Diego, the Padres have reportedly offered Ron Gardenhire the bench coach job. That provoked this tweet (from a reporter who confidently informed the world that Rick Sofield would be the Padres skipper less than 24 hours before Andy Green was hired):

The #Padres offered bench cch job to Ron Gardenhire, as @dennistlin reported. Better chance of Donald Trump becoming Hillary's running mate

— Scott Miller (@ScottMillerBbl) November 3, 2015

Assuming that Gardenhire doesn't need the job financially, I would think it's a question of: What's the best route for gaining the managerial job he really wants? My guess is that he (and his agent) will figure that he's better off remaining a free agent and waiting for somebody to get canned in midseason.

To be specific, there was a widespread expectation that Detroit would fire Brad Ausmus after their disappointing 2015, and that Gardenhire was his most likely successor. Ausmus has been retained for 2016, but the leash is probably short. There's a genuine logic to Gardenhire deciding to decline any coaching jobs to keep himself available for a managerial post.

We're losing some distinctive managers

Dusty Baker's teams averaged more than 100 sacrifice bunt
attempts in his 19 years as a manager.

The Monday print column — the last for 2013 — takes note of the novice managers being handed the reins of contending teams in Detroit, Washington and Cincinnati and offers the theory that this trend is rooted in the homogenizing of managerial strategy.

Everybody handles their pitching staffs the same way these days. Five-man rotations, adherence to pitch counts, a designated one-inning closer who seldom enters with men on base, specialist relievers ... that's not merely conventional wisdom, it is standard practice.

To do that, a manager needs an inflated pitching staff. In the 1970s and 1980s, teams seldom carried more than 10 pitchers on a 25-man roster. That started to change in the early 1990s, and today everybody has at least 12 pitchers.

The specialist relievers and the limited roster space for extra hitters have combined to essentially drive platoons out of the game.

The departures, at least for now, of grizzled veteran managers Dusty Baker, Davey Johnson and Jim Leyland takes out some of the more distinctive strategists. Baseball Info Systems has for several years published a "managerial record" in the annual Bill James Handbook, and Baker in particular shows up with a lot of boldfaced type, indicative of having led the league in a particular move.

Jim Leyland went longer with his starters than any
other current manager, a pattern that really started to
emerge in the past five years.

In 2013, for example, Baker's Reds attempted 110 sacrifice bunts. No other team reached 100. The average National League team (the NL does more bunting because its pitchers hit) had 80 sac attempts. Baker was 37.5 percent above that average. (Baker also led the NL in pitchouts, albeit by just one.)

Johnson and Leyland each led their league in what BIS calls "long outings by starting pitchers," defined at this point as starts exceeding 110 pitches. (When they started keeping track of this, the defining pitch count was higher, but there weren't enough starts of 120 pitches to make it meaningful.)

Leyland's Tigers had 50 such starts, Johnson's Nationals 27. (There were just 14 starts of 125 pitches or more in the majors this year; the Tigers had three of them, as did the Texas Rangers.)

My guess is that the new guys will be more conventional on bunting than Baker was, and likely to pull their starters earlier than Leyland and Johnson.

Notes, quotes and comment

Doug Bernier appeared in 33 games for
the Twins, with a slash line of
.226/.339/.283.

The Twins on Friday outrighted infielder Doug Bernier, who thus becomes a minor league free agent. This officially reduces the 40-man roster to 35, but the unofficial tally of 37 is more accurate, since it accounts for Wilkin Ramirez and Sam Deduno, who are on the 60-day disabled list.

This was certainly the most glorious season of Bernier's professional career: He got to spend almost three months in the major leagues after hitting .295 in a half-season as the primary shortstop for the Rochester Red Wings.

The Twins never really had a role for the 33-year-old — no matter how thin his bench, Ron Gardenhire always seems to have somebody who doesn't have much purpose sitting around — but I'll guarantee you, Bernier preferred that to playing every day in Triple A.

His removal from the 40-man roster was inevitable. It's possible that the Twins will seek to retain him as Triple A roster depth, but Danny Santana figures to be the primary shortstop in Rochester next season, and Eddie Rosario may be the primary second baseman if the Twins don't return him to the outfield or use him in a trade, and then there's James Beresford, who's considerably younger than Bernier, as a utility guy.

There may not be a place for Bernier in this organization. And at his age, it's not going to be easy to find a place to keep his dreams going.

Dusty Baker has managed the Giants, the Cubs and
the Reds into the playoffs over the years, but has
never managed a World Series winner.

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The Cincinnati Reds surprised a lot of observers Friday by dismissing Dusty Baker as their manager.

Baker's been around a long time — he is 16th on the all-time managerial wins list — and even at age 64 he doesn't appear inclined to go into retirement. He still wants to manage, and I suppose somebody will give him a job.

But he's not a manager I'd be particularly interested in having run my team. Even discounting his often-bizarre statements about the game (such as his complaint that hitters who draw walks merely clog up the basepaths), his tenures have been marked by a rather hands-off approach to player behavior, and inevitably there are incidents that appear to be the direct result of players knowing there will be no ramifications for immature behavior.

Cincinnati and Washington are two clearly win-ready teams with managerial openings. Those kinds of jobs aren't often available.

How a manager knows he's lost his team

Dusty Baker won a division title last year with Cincinnati, so he probably figures that telling horror stories of his tenure with the Cubs won't sound too much like sour grapes.

But there's certainly something nasty to this tale:

"At the very end, somebody took a dump right where I stood in the dugout every day,” Baker said Monday morning. “That was the low point. The grounds crew guy cleaned it up. He said, ‘Oh, I think it’s dog crap.’ I said, ‘No it ain’t. That’s human crap.'"

Baker claims not to know how the dumper was. I have my doubts about that; a manager, if only out of self-preservation, ought to know his team well enough to know who hates him that much. (If you want to try to figure it out, here's the roster of the 2006 Cubs.)

Dusty Baker can smile
now, but the end of his
tenure in Chicago was
distasteful.

But then, that always seemed to be the problem with the Cubs under Baker, and even under Lou Piniella. Baker in particular is a hands-off manager, content to let the veteran players run the clubhouse. It worked well in San Francisco; it worked last season in Cincinnati.

It didn't work in Chicago, where a clubhouse culture developed in which nobody took responsibility for anything. The only people who were held to account were TV broadcasters Steve Stone and Chip Carey, dislodged for the sins of (a) praising players on opposing teams and (b) noting the lack of accountability in the organization.

Baker deserves a lot of the blame for that; so does Jim Hendry, then and now the general manager, the man who hired (and fired) Baker and the man who chewed out Stone for saying on the radio that the Cubs "can't handle the truth." 

Baker probably figures the story says something about the players he had in Chicago, and it does. It also says something about the contempt the players had for their manager, and their certainty that no matter what they did, nobody would have the guts to do anything about it.