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“The management and analysis of data, whether it be scouting reports, statistics, medical information or video, is a critical component of our operation. We look forward to developing a customized program that utilizes the most advanced and efficient technology available in the marketplace today to facilitate quicker, easier and more accurate access to all the sources of information we use to make baseball decisions.”—Cubs President of Baseball Operations Theo Epstein, January 2012

“[Statistical analysis] helps but doesn’t tell the whole story of the game. There is a lot of gut feeling you got to make. If you have a stat and see a flashing number and you see that this guy is doing very good against this other guy, you can use that in a game during a key situation. Yes. But we cannot just depend on stats alone. You got to depend on many other things… I don’t like to become a fantasy manager. The goal for a good manager is to have players who are able to manage themselves on the field.”—Unsuccessful Cubs managerial candidate Sandy Alomar Jr., November 2011

“I do my due diligence and video work and prepare as much as anybody. As far as the stats, those are what they are, and we can use them to our advantage. It's a big part of the game now. It's helping us win a lot of ballgames, the stats and the matchups. That's just part of the game now, and you use what you can."—Successful Cubs managerial candidate Dale Sveum, November 2011
 

Last month, I tried to size up the state of the game’s front offices in an article called “Keeping Up with the Friedmans.” My point, to the extent that I had one, was that hiring a smart, saber-savvy GM with an interdisciplinary background is no longer innovative. Treating team-building like a science instead of an art is now the norm. Anteing up for an executive capable of putting a progressive process in place was once a suitable subject for a bestselling book, but by the time Moneyball hit theaters, Oakland’s story had spawned so many sequels that the A’s edge had evaporated. In 2012, a baseball team being smart isn’t the exception. It’s the rule.

It’s easy to see this process in action. A couple weeks after my article appeared—not that I’m taking any credit—new Astros GM Jeff Luhnow hired the Cardinals’ Sig Mejdal as director of decision sciences.* A couple weeks after that, Houston made a scientific decision to hire Mike Fast, who joined former public PITCHf/x analysts like Joe P. Sheehan, Dan Fox, and Josh Kalk in transitioning to a top-secret team job. The Cubs, having already imported much of Boston’s former braintrust, partnered with Bloomberg Sports to build “a state-of-the-art player evaluation system.”** Just like that, two teams that had been criticized for being slow to adapt suddenly fell into lockstep with the rest of the league’s forward thinkers, leaving precious few backward thinkers behind.

*Until recently, the Astros were a team that mostly tried to decide things like, “Which Phillies player and/or prospect should we try to trade for?” and “How much money can we offer Brandon Lyon without making him suspicious?” Now, not only do they have decision-making down to a science, but they’re probably asking better questions, too.

**Disclaimer: I also work for Bloomberg Sports. I don’t know if I had to mention that, but it seemed like something a professional journalist would say, and technically I’m supposed to be one.

We’ve established that teams are getting smarter. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to discover something their competitors don't already know. And as I wrote in December, “the less variation there is among GMs, the stronger the correlation between spending and winning will become.” But maybe what teams know isn’t all that matters. Maybe what they do with what they know now matters more. Before we give up on the underdogs and leave baseball to the big-market teams, it’s worth pausing to consider whether the biggest inefficiency out there is right in front of our faces.

***

“I think one of the pieces of our strategy going forward is to make decisions based on the best and most timely pieces of information that you can have at your fingertips at the time you need to make the decision.”—Astros GM Jeff Luhnow, January 2012
 

As long as there’s been baseball, there’s been baseball’s tendency toward specialization.

It used to be that baseball was played by amateurs. That’s not to say the players weren’t skilled, but they didn’t devote all their time to playing and practicing. They spent their days doing whatever unsavory and unhygienic things 19th-century people did to make money, taking breaks to play baseball. Then people started paying to watch them play. Once someone realized there might be some money in being good at baseball, the first openly all-professional team came along and beat the amateurs 89 consecutive times. Now playing baseball is an occupation in its own right, and when those of us who pursued other occupations want to play, we're forced to seek out other people who aren’t very good at it, either.  

For a while, some players pitched and also played other positions. Some of them were among the best at both. But hitters got better at hitting, and pitchers got better at pitching, and before long—the occasional Brooks Kieschnick aside—it became almost impossible to split your time between pitching and hitting and have a career. Later, the American League let roughly half the pitchers stop pretending they could still compete at the plate. Hitters continued to improve, and teams reacted—maybe overreacted—by adding many more pitchers, each of whom pitched less. Monte Ward pitched 76 percent of the innings for the 1879 Providence Grays, who used two pitchers. Justin Verlander was the hardest-working pitcher in baseball last season and was on the mound only 17 percent of the time for the Tigers, who used 26.

Specialization isn’t unique to baseball. You’re reading these words on an advanced piece of technology that’s probably a total mystery to you. Admit it—you have no idea how your computer works. Don’t feel bad. I wrote the words you’re reading, and I don’t know either. Not only could you not assemble your computer from scratch, but you probably couldn’t put it together if you had all the parts. You just press the power button, and it turns on. If one day you press the power button and it doesn’t turn on, you’ll call someone else who knows how to fix it. And that’s okay. If you’d taken the time to learn how to build a computer, you wouldn’t know everything else you know. Whatever it is you do know, the people who can fix your computer probably don’t. (Except for your passwords and the websites you’ve been browsing. Those, they probably know.)

Now that I’ve mentioned it, you might feel miffed that you’re so dependent on something you don’t understand. But damage to your ego aside, the system works. If we all get good at something, we can collectively be better at more things. And whether we all understand how we do it or not, we can build amazingly complex machines capable of handling incredibly demanding tasks that we couldn’t perform without them. Then we can use all that processing power to read articles about baseball on pixels instead of on paper.

What does not knowing how computers work have to do with baseball’s biggest inefficiency? It’s less noticeable, but coaching staffs have undergone the same transformation that players and society as a whole have. In baseball’s early days, there was only one coach: the manager. As managing became more demanding, skippers began to delegate, led by John McGraw. That meant more coaches. At first, all-purpose coaches appeared, and then they too became more specialized. Pitching coaches. Bullpen coaches. Base coaches. Hitting coaches. Eventually, coaching staffs were capped at six (not including the manager), but teams are starting to find even that allowance restrictive. St. Louis has two hitting coaches, only one of whom wears a uniform. The Cardinals won’t be the only ones this season, since the Padres think that idea sounds swell.

*Edit* Another sign of coaching specialization I meant to mention: we haven't seen a player-manager in the majors for almost 30 years.

But managers aren’t slacking off with all that extra help around. With millions of dollars riding on the outcome of every game, it’s even more important that they keep their players motivated and in line, a task that probably hasn’t been made easier by sky-high salaries, a powerful Players Association, and the plethora of languages, nationalities, and ethnicities that make every major-league clubhouse a miniature Babel. On top of that, they have to spend hours each day providing injury updates, explaining decisions, and answering questions asked by mouth-breathers like me. They have to break bad news to struggling players. They have to report to their superiors. And on top of all that—which amounts to more than a full-time job—they’re supposed to manage the games.

For the most part, they’re very good at managing those games, though you might not know it to watch one on TV with a typical fan. The typical fan has been known to claim that anyone (him, for instance) could do better in the dugout. The typical fan is wrong about that. But someone probably could.

In a chapter in our upcoming Extra Innings book called, “How Can We Measure the Impact of Managers?”, Steven Goldman looks into how we can—well, you can probably guess. What he found is that the worst managers may have cost their teams several wins in a single season through poor tactical decisions—namely, sac attempts, intentional walks, and low-percentage stealing. Managerial seasons that bad don’t happen very often—skippers who cost their teams several wins were the Brandon Woods of bad managing. But there were some decisions that Steven’s analysis didn’t consider: starting the best possible players, removing starting pitchers at the optimal times, replacing them with the best possible relievers, pinch-hitting, hitting and running, ordering lineups, and the like.

It’s hard to say how many wins a typical manager costs his teams through decisions we know to be suboptimal. But we do know a lot about how tactical choices affect a team’s chances of victory, and teams know more than you or I (unless you work for a team, in which case congratulations on knowing things the rest of us don’t and please stop hiring our authors). And what we know suggests that managers are either costing their teams wins or failing to secure them, depending on your point of view.

I don’t entirely trust myself to reach that kind of conclusion. Most of my clubhouse visits have been brief. I’m a second-hand sabermetrician. I sometimes mentally mispronounce “misled” as “my-sild” thanks to a childhood reading session gone wrong. In short, I might not be right. So to sanity-test the theory that teams are hamstringing themselves by giving old-school managers relatively free rein when it comes to in-game moves, I did what any internet writer with delusions of grandeur and a brand-new BBWAA card on the way would do: I polled several front office sources.* Here’s what I asked them:

Say you have two managers. One is an average major-league manager in all respects. The other is equally good off the field and in the clubhouse, but he also does everything optimally on the field, win expectancy-wise. Every tactical decision he makes—bunting, intentionally walking, removing starters, using relievers, pinch-hitting, hitting and running, allocating playing time, etc.—is perfectly in line with what the best front office analyst would recommend. How many more wins, if any, would an identical team win under the second manager?

*And by “several,” I mean “seven.” Why seven? Because that’s roughly when I ran out of front office sources. Kevin Goldstein talks to seven front office sources before he gets out of bed in the morning. Let no one say I’m well-connected.

The responses ranged from “1-2” to “5-10.” The average was approximately three wins. That seems reasonable, if not conservative, given how many crucial managerial decisions come in high-leverage spots. It’s generally accepted that a manager can’t make a bad team good or a good one bad, and that’s probably true. But three wins is an awful lot. Three wins cost a fortune on the free agent market—much more than any manager might hope to make. And adding these three wins wouldn’t require any elusive discovery—finally figuring out defense, say, or learning how to keep pitchers healthy. These three wins are achievable with what we already know.

Let me make a couple things clear. I don’t think managers are dumb, and I don’t think anyone with a win expectancy table could do their jobs better. But I do think teams might be well-served by altering what “manager” means, which they’ve done plenty of times in the past. Thirty years ago, it made sense for the manager to pull all the strings. Front offices weren’t any better-equipped to make tactical decisions than the manager was. Things are different now. Managing people is just as important, and managing the media is more important than ever. But more of our hard-won knowledge about what makes teams win has found its way to the front office than the manager’s office, which suggests that more of the decisions should, too.

If anything, I'm arguing for the same beer and tacos served in the front office to be displayed in the dugout. Those three wins aren’t worth tuning out the intangibles. I’m not suggesting that teams simply tell the smartest stat guy on hand to take over, or that they drape a jersey over a laptop, insert some tobacco into its ExpressCard slot, and let it simulate every move before making one. (Laptops aren’t allowed in the dugout, though that’s probably the least of the problems with that idea.) But there are a few less drastic things they can do instead.

Most feasibly, teams can target a Joe Maddon type, a managerial candidate who can connect in the clubhouse but also has the open-mindedness to practice what the front office preaches. There may not be many Maddons out there, but there must be more on the way. Remember those Cubs quotes at the top of the page? There’s a reason why only one of those guys got the job, and it likely has a lot to do with a willingness to make data-driven decisions.

A team could also reinvent the bench coach role. Instead of letting the manager bring on his own best drinking buddy to sit by his side, a team could make the bench coach its conduit for real-time tactical input. Maybe that six-coach limit could be expanded to include a coach devoted to tactics alone. More ambitiously, a manager could be brought on with the understanding that making moves that go against the sabermetric book isn’t part of his purview. If that arrangement were to become known, of course, it could damage the manager’s credibility in the clubhouse, jeopardizing everything else he’s paid to do. So there’s that to consider. But it might also prevent (or delay) a firing in the future, when a progressive front office comes to realize that it can't live with a manager who doesn't view the game the same way.

I probably don’t need to tell you that there are a number of other reasons why most of these things haven’t happened, and why they probably won’t happen anytime soon. For one thing, there’s the fact that they haven’t been done before. A managerial candidate accustomed to making all the moves himself wouldn’t take kindly to having that responsibility stripped from him, which might force an early adopter of the new managerial order to bypass the most attractive options on the market. (Remember how Hollywood Art Howe reacted to Hollywood Billy Beane’s instructions to start Scott Hatteberg?) But being a general manager used to be a one-man job, too—now, even the smartest executive has to rely on a sizeable group of assistants who oversee certain aspects of his club’s operation, freeing the GM to make more media appearances and tend to other recently-added aspects of the job. If a GM can surrender some control to run a team more efficiently, a manager can make the same sacrifice.

There’s also the fact that managerial hirings aren’t always the GM’s call. Owner interference won’t go away as long as rich guys with big egos and business backgrounds can buy baseball teams—in other words, forever, or at least as long as there are baseball teams to buy. It would take a combination of a particularly pliable owner and an especially autonomous GM to push for a fundamental restructuring of the balance of power between coaching staff and front office. Of course, if a team was crazy enough to try the “College of Coaches,” anything is possible. I don't know from football, but my understanding is that most head coaches leave the tactical heavy lifting to their offensive and defensive coordinators, while they limit themselves to giving pep talks, looking angry on the sidelines, and taking occasional Gatorade baths. There might be something to that.

Just as it once might have seemed unthinkable that a manager would outsource most of his hands-on coaching to a group of subordinates, it seems far-fetched now that one might not make all of his team’s tactical moves. But in a business as competitive as baseball, potential advantages don’t stay unexploited for long. Teams are spending more and more money to acquire both data and the teams of executives qualified to distill it into actionable information. Front-office types become as impatient with misguided managerial moves as anyone watching at home—if not more so, since their own jobs, reputations, and investments of time are at stake. Managers will always be important, since their presence in the clubhouse means they know things a statistical model might not. But look at that Luhnow quote again. If teams are aiming to make “decisions based on the best and most timely pieces of information that you can have at your fingertips,” how much longer will they entrust that information to someone liable to go with his gut? 

Thank you for reading

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SaberTJ
1/31
I really liked this Ben.
SaberTJ
1/31
I meant to say more, but mis-clicked. I think the 2011 playoffs heightened the need for additional help on the tactical side more than ever. I hope teams are closer to utilizing your ideas than you expect. It is hard to believe that teams will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on players, but not take the extra time to ensure managers can make proper decisions in the most important games of the year.
mswain784
1/31
I agree there is typically too much of a burden put on the manager in terms of sheer number of tasks.

I love your suggestion of moving towards the college football model, wherein the manager would function as CEO. Keep everyone happy in the clubhouse, make sure his coaches know the vision and overall strategy, and be the face of the team. Then delegate the rest to the sizable coaching staff he's allowed. Bench coach as tactician is a great idea.

Overall, really thought provoking piece.
mattymatty2000
1/31
Excellent work, Ben. But I can't shake the feeling I've read this before somewhere...
bornyank1
1/31
Impossible. Not only has no thought that appeared in this piece ever been had by anyone else before, but I definitely didn't send you a draft of the article early this morning.
mattymatty2000
1/31
Yes... that's true. I certainly did not read a draft of the article early yesterday morning. I was.. uh... asleep! Yeah, that's the ticket.
Robotey
2/01
Ben--did you catch the story in the latest New Yorker about Brainstorming?
bornyank1
2/01
I haven't read it yet. Just checked out the abstract--looks interesting. I always hated brainstorming in school.
Robotey
2/01
check out the story - it debunks the myth of Brainstorming as roadmap to creative holy grail -- there's a few paragraphs discussing how specialization leads to efficiency which echoes what you wrote about the same.
Ogremace
1/31
the my-sild part was the best. I hate when that happens.
bravejason
1/31
I agree with your article 100%.

If you assume that by numbers tatics are the soundest approach, you could incorporate it gradually. What you do is have a private conversation with the manager and tell him no more bunting except under certain circumstances. If anyone asks - and no one will unless something goes wrong in an "obvious" bunt situation - the manager can just say that during the preseason meetings the front office decided that the team would be better served with a more aggressive hitting strategy this season. That helps take the "blame" off of the manager. Simiarly with intentional walks, you privately tell the manager under what specific situations he can order intentional walks. If someone ask why player X wasn't intentionally walked (probably after that player hits a game winning homerum), the manager can say that during the preseason meetings the front office staff decided the team would benefit from a more aggressive pitching strategy. The manager can further cover his tail by saying the front acknowledged that there would be times when the strategy would backfire and that he personally would have walked that player.

FrankL
2/03
I believe that saying an obviously "wrong" move was due to a conversation with management would lead to a shorter career/quicker firing than simply obeying orders and taking the blame and fallout. Management does not want to be be blamed for those "wrong" moves. There's real value in being an organization guy.
doncoffin
1/31
The NFL has already moved in this direction, with play-calling mostly delegated to offensive coordinators and defensive alignement decisions to defensive coordinators. So there's a clear and obvious precedent for this sort of development.
yankeehater32
1/31
I don't know from football, but my understanding is that most head coaches leave the tactical heavy lifting to their offensive and defensive coordinators, while they limit themselves to giving pep talks, looking angry on the sidelines, and taking occasional Gatorade baths. There might be something to that.

yankeehater32
1/31
Blockquote HTML didn't work, so there's that.
cfinberg
2/01
Incomplete, dude. You forgot the most important part, which consists of getting paid by "beer" companies to be filmed saying incredibly stupid things. This is why Rex Ryan needs to retire yesterday: He won't need to say that stuff pro bono anymore!
SaberTJ
2/02
I don't believe that Belichek runs his team that way.
mhmosher
1/31
Is it just me or does Alomar sound incredibly obtuse in that quote? Wow...
Peter7899
2/01
Are we sure some of this delegation hasn't already been occurring? I feel like the Don Coopers and Dave Duncans of the world probably have a lot of input on at least pitching changes.
johnsamo
2/01
I suspect this type of team would not be a magnet for the best coaches, and by coaches, I mean all the coaches throughout the system who help players get to and excel at the Major League level. The numbers of baseball are as much the consequences of years of coach/player interactions as they are the in-game decision of the manager. Stepping too far into the coaches terrain is likely to rub coaches the wrong way, and they'll go to teams where there is more autonomy.
bornyank1
2/01
That's a completely valid concern. I hinted at it, but you expressed it better.
rawagman
2/01
Wonderful article, Ben. I have given the subject a fair bit of thought since the Jays hired John Farrell last year. There was lots of talk about increased analytics in the day to day managing of the team. And then the season started. And the Jays ran Luke crazy. Not just Rajai Davis, but lots of guys. And then they calmed down. As if a storm had ended. Yet their reputation as watching base runners was maintained. And teams were apprehensive when the Jays had runners on first with second open. And so I thought, maybe Farrell gave away a few outs in April and May for a few runs in August and September. Is that crazy? Can the best of analysis not account for mind games?
bornyank1
2/01
It's possible. Or maybe they shifted tactics on the fly. In recent years, I've seen a bunch of managers pay lip service to sabermetrics in their interviews and introductory press conferences before seemingly abandoning its principles after taking over. Maybe that's because they get overwhelmed by their other responsibilities and fall back on old habits. And maybe it's because they know managing against the traditional "book" will subject them to even more scrutiny.
bravejason
2/01
mattymatty2000,

If you can't shake the feeling I've read this before somewhere, I'd like to point you to a comment I made in May 2011. Here's a snipet of it:

"If a manager's ability to lose a game is far greater than his ability to win a game and if a manager with superior tactics/strategy will win only a very small number of games more than a manager with mediocre tactics/strategy, then does it makes sense to hire a manager who is a great teacher and motivator...

...any managerial tactical or strategical deficiencies can be corrected or compensated by providing the manager with a set of rules regarding lineup, pitcher usage, when to sacrifice bunt, when to steal, etc..."

My comment doesn't develop the topic to the depth or breadth Ben's article does, but it is aimed at the same basic idea of altering the responsibilities of the manager. In this case, the tatical decision making responsiblities are removed from the manager.

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/a/13960
jrathkey
2/02
Cool article. I have thought about this topic before and wondered if/when the transition would happen.

I suspect that Josh Byrnes was thinking along the same lines when he hired AJ Hinch during his stint with the DBacks. By hiring someone with no managerial experience, but someone who was comfortable with the statistical approach Byrnes was trying to narrow the focus of the manager role. If that is true, then Hinch was ironically unprepared for the more traditional managerial tasks and flamed-out quickly.