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.

From the Handbook: Molitor tactically, Part II

Part II of these managerial posts compared Paul Molitor to his predecessor. What about compared to the rest of the league?

Molitor was neither first nor last (with one exception) in any of the categories tracked by Baseball Info Systems. He wasn't often in the precise middle either.

He used 75 pinch hitters, for example; this is near the bottom of the American League in rankings, but almost twice as many as Kansas City's Ned Yost deployed. He allowed a starter to throw more than 110 pitches seven times; only Buck Showalter of Baltimore had fewer, but only three AL skippers topped 20. He used 124 different lineups; the league average was 128. (Yost used just 83, a remarkable figure for the 162-game season.)

I wrote the other day in some detail about Molitor's use of relievers on consecutive days; while he did that far more often than his predecessor, his 123 RCD was fourth in the AL and therefore not out of of step from his colleages. (The leader was Mike Scoscia of the Angels with 145; he had six relief pitchers he used on consecutive days at least 15 times each.)

Molitor's platoon advantage stat -- 59 percent -- was below average, but not close to the bottom. That was Brad Ausmus of Detroit at .47 percent; the Tigers had a very right-handed lineup. Five American League managers had lower platoon advantages than Molitor. Still, considering how often Molitor had at least two switch-hitters in his lineup, 59 percent is lower than I expected to see.

The one category in which Molitor was the trailer: he had the fewest "slow hooks" in the American League, with 27. My sense of the slow hook stat is that managers who rack those up have at least one starter they trust more than their bullpen who is nevertheless having a difficult year. Robin Ventura of the White Sox had the most slow hooks (66) in the AL; he had Jeff Samardzija. Ausmus was second (59); he had Justin Verlander pitching to a 6.62 ERA into July. Molitor trusted his bullpen more than those managers did and didn't insist on getting more innings out of, say, Phil Hughes.

From the Handbook: Molitor tactically, Part I

2015 was something of a novelty for Twins fans: They got to see a new manager after 13 seasons of Ron Gardenhire calling the shots. And before Gardy, there was 14-plus seasons of Tom Kelly.

What, specifically, did Paul Molitor do differently in terms of moves than Gardenhire?

Here's a sizable difference: Consecutive days of use by relief pitchers. Gardenhire at one point (2007-2010) averaged more than 100 RCD a year. But his final four seasons, he was down to 82, 82, 78 and 82. Molitor shot that up to 123 last year, roughly a 50 percent increase, and notably more than Gardenhire's high of 115.

Five pitchers had at least 13 consecutive days usage for the Twins last year; Blaine Boyer led with 20.Two others had nine. Only three Twins relievers had 13 RCD in 2014, none with more than 17.

I think this is worth bookmarking. Ryan Pressly had nine RCD in his 27 appearances for Molitor, then he got hurt. Boyer spent time on the disabled list. Aaron Thompson had 13 RCD, lost effectiveness and was sent down, never to return. Pitchers get hurt, and some of these guys were and are marginal major leaguers anyway, so I'm reluctant to declare a bright line of causality. but this is worth monitoring. Molitor was aggressive about using relievers on consecutive days. It's possible that is counterproductive.

To cherry-pick some other possibly interesting data points: Gardenhire used an average of 125 lineups a year, with a high of 135 in 2005 and low of 97 in 2006. Molitor's 124 is right around Gardenhire's average.

Gardenhire's teams averaged 135 steal attempts and 51 sac bunt attempts; Molitor in 2015, 108 and 44. (Gardenhire's two lowest bunting years were his final two seasons). Molitor also stole less often in 2015 than Gardy did in 2014 and bunted more frequently. 

Gardenhire's hitters over his career had the platoon advantage 62 percent of the time. Molitor's hitters this year, 59 percent of the time. I believed, and declared often, that Molitor was more attuned to the platoon advantage than Gardenhire was, but this suggests otherwise. (I suspect the difference is that Gardenhire had a number of left-handed hitting regulars over the years that he simply refused to platoon despite the numbers, such as Jacque Jones and Jason Kubel; they faced more righties than lefties simply because there are more righties than lefties. Molitor's regulars tended to be right handed.)

Molitor put runners in motion 132 times, the closest of any manager to the AL average of 136. Gardenhire averaged 128 (but in his first two years, just 44 and 37; in 2012 he was up to 207). 

Gardy getting shut out

Andy Green, most recently third base coach for the
Arizona Diamondbacks, will manage the San Diego Padres.

For a good while on Wednesday, Internet reports -- or perhaps I should say Internet rumors, considering how it all ended -- had Ron Gardenhire getting the San Diego Padres managerial job. Late in the night, it was suddenly Rick Sofield's job. And on Thursday afternoon, the Padres held an actual press conference with their actual hire: Andy Green.

Other than the obvious lines on his resume -- he's 38, hit exactly .200 in 265 major league plate appearances over four seasons, all  with Arizona, bounced around the minors as a player, managed four seasons in the minors for the Diamondbacks before getting back to the majors as a coach -- I don't know anything about Green, so I'll pass on saying good hire or bad hire. San Diego's been a oddy comfy job for managers -- Bruce Bochy lasted there forever. and Bud Black held the job for more than eight years without much success -- but the new front office might be swinging the pendulum the other way. We'll see.

No, the thing of interest here for me is Gardenhire. I wrote in the Monday print column that I thought the former Twins skipper a better fit for the Washington job than the Padres position, but apparently the Nats are going with Black, who checks the "major league experience" block as well as Gardenhire does and is at least reputed to be more in tune with the analytical approach to the game than Gardy is. The Black hire isn't official yet, and the Dodgers and Marlins haven't made their announcements yet either, but right now it appears Gardenhire won't have a helm going into spring training.

What we aren't seeing in this year's wave of hires is a strong bias for skippers who never managed on any level. Green has. Black has. Don Mattingly, who is said to be taking the Miami job, has. To be sure, Scott Servais in Seattle is a novice, so that trend hasn't died out completely, but it's not as pronounced as in the past few offseasons.

Still, front offices aren't backing off their insistence that the dugout bosses use the new analytic information they are being supplied with. I suspect that, fairly or not, that's an issue for Gardenhire as he tries to land a new position.

New horizons in managerial inexperience

Dan Jennings was the manager Monday night in the first
professional game he was ever in uniform for.

The Miami Marlins fired former Twin Mike Redmond as manager Sunday. On Monday they announced that general manager Dan Jennings would take the job.

Jennings has a good reputation around baseball -- as a front office executive and scout. He never played pro ball, never managed in the minors, never donned a uniform for any purpose until now.

Teams are increasingly hiring skippers without managerial experience (including Paul Molitor with the Twins), but this is a step further. There have been general managers who moved into the dugout, but they had managerial experience at some level of pro ball and/or played in the majors.

That this hire has met with near-universal scorn is hardly surprising, For one thing, Marlins owner Jeff Loria lacks the benefit of any doubt. Loria is reminiscent of Milo Bloom's description of Senator Bedfellow in the old Bloom County comic strip: "Leaving a trail of slime where ever he goes ..."

The protestations from Loria's lackeys not withstanding, the assumption is that Jennings was chosen because he's already on the payroll. Loria's now paying both Ozzie Guillen (for this season) and Redmond (through 2017) not to manage; Loria now essentially gets to avoid paying a third to actually show up.

I said near-universal scorn, This piece from MLB TV's Brian Kenny is the rare exception.

The key, of course, is what the players think. Jennings may be a good judge of talent; he may be adept at handling a spreadsheet; but he probably hasn't put the thought into the nuances of game strategy that an experienced manager has. I have no doubt that Buck Showalter or Ron Gardenhire could lay quite a filibuster on you about the best counts to put the runner in motion. Jennings has experienced hands around him to advise him (some of whom would have been well-received by the voices attacking the Jennings hire), but now the tactical moves are ultimately his call, and if the players doubt his acumen, he'll have problems regardless of what he does.

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.

Identifying managerial trends

John Farrell of the Red Sox is a rare pitcher-turned-manager.

Out with the old, in with a new generation of managers.

2010: Bobby Cox (29 years, two franchises, 2,504 wins, one World Series title, five pennants, 15 division titles); Lou Piniella (23 years, five franchises, 1,835 wins, one World Series title,  one pennant, six division titles); and Joe Torre (29 years managing five franchises, 2,326 wins, four World Series titles, six pennants, 12 division titles) retire.

2011: Tony LaRussa (33 years, three franchises, 2,728 wins, three World Series titles, six pennants, 12 division titles) retires.

2013: Dusty Baker (20 years, three franchises, 1,671 wins, one pennant, five division titles) and Davey Johnson (17 years, five franchises, 1,372 wins, one World Series title, one pennant, six division titles) are forced out; Jim Leyland (22 years, four franchises,  1,769 wins, one World Series title, three pennants, six division titles) retires.

Those seven men combined for 173 seasons; 14,205 regular-season victories; 12 World Series titles; 23 pennants; and 62 division titles.

The managerial field can't help but get younger with that bunch removed from the field.

The Cincinnati Reds are today to announce that they will promote pitching coach Bryan Price to the managerial job, succeeding Baker. Price, 51, not only hasn't managed in the majors before, he hasn't managed in the minors.

The rival managers in the NLCS this year, Don Mattingly
(left) of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Mike Matheny
of the St. Louis Cardinals, never managed in the
minors before landing their current jobs.

As I noted in the Monday print column, relatively few pitchers emerge as managers. John Farrell, who will lead the Boston Red Sox in the World Series beginning Wednesday, is one of two ex-pitchers currently managing (the other is Bud Black of the San Diego Padres). Price will make it three of the 30.

Price also figures to join the growing ranks of the truly inexperienced skippers. And there's one of them in the World Series also: Mike Matheny of the St. Louis Cardinals hadn't managed on any level before being picked to follow LaRussa in the St. Louis dugout.

Most, if not all, the managers who get big-league jobs without serving minor league apprenticeships have the benefit of long and distinguished playing careers. Price does not; he never pitched in the majors.

Managerial transition points

I mentioned earlier this month that I was nibbling my way through Chris Jaffe's book on managers. I've finished now, and if you're interested in the history of baseball, you will be interested in the book, although it's not a particularly easy read.

One point he made -- keeping in mind that it was published a bit less than a year ago -- concerns his notion that there have been three significant "waves" of managerial retirements, each of which coincided with significant changes in the job.

The first came in 1920, when Hughie Jennings, Clark Griffith and George Stallings left the job. The second was in 1950-51 (Connie Mack, Joe McCarthy, Billy Southworth and Frankie Frisch, among others). And the third was in 1976-77 (Walter Alston, Bill Rigney, Paul Richards, Danny Murtaugh and Red Schoendienst).

The first wave came with the banning of the spitball and the coming of the lively ball era. The second came with the societal shifts of the post-war era, including the breaking of the color bar, night ball and the rise of personal autonomy -- managers were less able to police the off -field activities of their players. The third came with the advent of free agency.

Jaffe, I think, somewhat overstates this contention. Mack's "retirement" wasn't because of the social shifts so much as because he was 87; elsewhere, Jaffe notes that he was merely a figurehead for the last 10 years of so of his career. Richards' 1976 stint as manager came 15 years after his previous dugout job. Schoendienst returned for two interim stints after 1976. Stallings didn't retire at all; he continued to manage in the minors.

Does Bobby Cox's
departure indicate a
change in the job of
managing?

But there remains truth to the thesis, which makes me wonder: Is there a similar shift under way now?

Lou Piniella, Bobby Cox and Joe Torre all left the profession in recent months. That's at least as significant a departure of managerial experience as any of Jaffe's identified waves.

I don't know right now what the big shift in the job would be if there is one. It's something I hope to keep in mind the next year or so, to see if there's something happening behind the scenes that changes the job.

More likely, we simply had a whole lot of really old managers decide at once that they could be happier without the headaches. (And we have more old guys -- Tony LaRussa, Dusty Baker, Jim Leyland -- still around.)

---
Poll results: We had 51 responses to last week's question, which Twins starter would you be willing to trade for Joba Chamberlain?

The plurality went for Nick Blackburn (19 votes, 37 percent). Fifteen (29 percent) said Kevin Slowey, 11 (21 percent) none of the abover, six (11 percent) picked Scott Baker and zero wanted Brian Duensing to go in such a trade.

New poll up.

Managerial musical chairs

This morning's USA Today had a story on the likelihood of a mass of managerial changes, which ties in to a recent post here about Scott Ullger and his ambitions.

Bobby Cox is retiring after
29 years as a major league
manager -- 25 with Atlanta,
four with Toronto.

Dave Nightengale's piece conveys the false impression that managers used to have greater job security than they do now. In reality, managers today who have any real success get far more rope than in the past. A big part of the coming upheaval comes from a group of 20-year managers who are leaving on their own behest --Joe Torre, Bobby Cox, Lou Piniella, maybe Tony LaRussa, possibly Dusty Baker.

Some other comments:

*Nightengale mentions Joe Girardi's contract status with the New York Yankees -- signed only through this season. I don't think he's going anywhere. George Steinbrenner is dead, and his infantile emotionalism was buried with him. The people running the Yankees now are not going to dump Girardi on a whim. And for his part, Girardi knows that, so long as the rest of MLB allows the Yankees to hold such a massive financial advantage over everybody else, whoever manages the Yankees has one foot in the Hall of Fame.

If Ozzie Guillen leaves the White Sox
for Florida, will bench coach Joey Cora
go with him, or get a managerial job
of his very own?

* According to Nightengale, Ozzie Guillen in recent weeks told people in the White Sox organization that he would resign after the the season, then changed his mind.

Nightengale, in an on-line only piece, predicts Guillen will decamp for the Florida Marlins job. I'm pretty sure that would be a mistake on both sides, and I think Ozzie is too smart for that (I won't say the same for Marlins owner Jeffery Loria, who is apparently set on getting Guillen).

And Nightengale figures Guillen's successor on the south side will be Tony LaRussa. Jerry Reinsdorf loves LaRussa, but I don't think a one-and-fly guy is a good idea.

---

Fascinating stuff in the Dodgers divorce trial: On Monday. Jamie McCourt (a lawyer herself) testified that she never read the postnuptual agreement in which the Dodgers franchise was declared to be husband Frank's sole property. Bad for her, right?

On Tuesday, the lawyer who drew up the agreement said he changed it AFTER it was signed, switching the Dodgers from community property to sole property. Incredible. Equally incredible: he told the court he saw no reason to tell Jamie McCourt of the change.

The words unethical and incompetent come to mind -- for Jamie McCourt, for Frank McCourt, for their lawyer ... for pretty much everybody involved in this unseemly mess.

The Dodger divorce is working for at least one guy: A law student at the University of Minnesota from L.A. who has chronicled the entire travesty on his blog.

Managerial shuffling

In the Monday print column, I took note of the extreme longevity of a number of current managers and suggested that well-run organizations are more loathe than ever to change managers for the sake of change.

Also on Monday, I heard Tim Kurkjian of ESPN say that by the start of next season, as many as 10 teams could have new managers.

These are not mutually exclusive thoughts. I specified "good organizations," which was meant to exclude the operations on the sub-.500 treadmill. And Kurkjian wasn't talking about firings exclusively, but also accounting for the pending retirement of Bobby Cox (photo above) in Atlanta and the speculation that Lou Piniella (Cubs) and Joe Torre (Dodgers) will walk away at the end of the season.

There is a certain self-destructive pattern to be seen in the fallen-and-can't-get-up operations:

• New general manager takes helm, brings in his own manager (and other front office and coaching personnel) within a year.
• Three years later, team continues to lose — no surprise, since even if the new organization is now drafting and developing players better than the previous regime, that's seldom going to be a quick fix.
• The GM, now under pressure for immediate results, fires his handpicked manager, brings in a new guy.
• A year or two later, the GM gets the ax, and his replacement tears up the organization and restarts the cycle.

Thus the Mets, for example. Omar Minaya hired Willie Randolph to manage, only to can him in a particularly messy way. The team continues to struggle, and Jerry Manuel, Randolph's successor, is almost certainly one of the managers on Kurkjian's at-risk list — and Minaya's grasp on his job is none too strong either.

The Twins, to the credit of the Pohlads (and particularly Carl) have avoided this treadmill. Even in the ugly days of the mid-to-late 90s, the organization remained stable, and when changes came, there weren't violent upheavals. Tom Kelly retired, and his third base coach was promoted to manager. Terry Ryan stepped aside, and his assistant GM took the helm.

It may not be a perfectly run operation, but it remains a coherent one, one with a notion of what it's about that everybody involved, including the fans, can grasp. That would seem an obvious thing, but it has long eluded the likes of the Royals and Pirates.