Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The

• The Bill James Guide
  
• Copyright
  
• Contents
  
• Introduction
  
• Decade Snapshot: 1870s
  
• Decade Snapshot: 1880s
  
• Decade Snapshot: 1890s
  
• Decade Snapshot: 1900s
  
• Decade Snapshot: 1910s
  
• Decade Snapshot: 1920s
  
• Decade Snapshot: 1930s
  
• Decade Snapshot: 1940s
  
• Decade Snapshot: 1950s
  
• Decade Snapshot: 1960s
  
• Decade Snapshot: 1970s
  
• Decade Snapshot: 1980s
  
• Decade Snapshot: 1990s
  
• Connect with Diversion Books
  

Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com

Copyright © 1997 by Bill James
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
Originally published as
The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers: From 1870 to Today.

For more information, email
[email protected]

First Diversion Books edition April 2014
ISBN:
978-1-62681-263-5

Introduction

Decade Snapshot: 1870s

Decade Snapshot: 1880s

Decade Snapshot: 1890s

Decade Snapshot: 1900s

Decade Snapshot: 1910s

Decade Snapshot: 1920s

Decade Snapshot: 1930s

Decade Snapshot: 1940s

Decade Snapshot: 1950s

Decade Snapshot: 1960s

Decade Snapshot: 1970s

Decade Snapshot: 1980s

Decade Snapshot: 1990s

Hi, I’m Bill James. When not used in connection with baseball, the term “manager” is not normally a title of great distinction. Look around at your life and find the people who have the word “manager” attached to them. You’ve got office managers, supply managers, production managers, service managers, branch managers, account managers. Do you want any of these jobs? Franchise restaurants have store managers. None of these positions is in the path toward a vice presidency. A manager is not someone who excels; a manager is someone who
copes
. I’ll manage somehow.

Your computer has a file manager, and then there is baseball, where the term “manager” has somehow settled onto
both
of the glamour jobs—field manager and general manager. This book is about field managers.

A manager’s job, broadly speaking, is to organize the work of all of the members of a baseball team. Whitey Herzog once said that George Brett was the only player he ever knew who didn’t need a manager. George kicked himself in the butt every morning; he didn’t need somebody to do it for him. This is unusual. Brett found his own weaknesses and directed himself at the task of removing them. This is not common.

Suppose that you have been assigned to hire a baseball manager. You don’t get to hire Dave Johnson or Bucky Showalter; you start out knowing nothing or almost nothing about the candidates. What do you look for? Genius? What does genius look like? How do you spot that? You want knowledge of baseball? What, are you going to hire Peter Gammons?

There is one indispensable quality of a baseball manager: The manager
must
be able to command the respect of his players. This is absolute; everything else is negotiable.

This book began to form in the back of my mind about twelve years ago, with an entry I wrote for one of the annual editions of the
Baseball Abstract
. The discussion of baseball managers, I realized at that time, was the most disorganized, unproductive, and ill informed discussion in the world of sports.

And I wasn’t helping.

People like to talk about baseball managers, about Tony LaRussa and Bobby Cox and Joe Torre. The talk focuses almost entirely on who is a good manager and who is a lousy manager. The average fan has a one-dimensional image of a manager: He’s good, or he’s bad. If he’s real good, he’s a genius. If he’s real bad, he’s an idiot.

When the discussion turns to why a manager is good or why he is bad, you realize how little solid information is being used. On a talk show, 97% of all explanations as to why the local manager is an idiot will begin with the words “Well, one time he …” One time he bunted with the number-six hitter, sent up a pinch hitter, Felipe Alou walked the pinch hitter and then the number-eight hitter grounded into a double play; see, Felipe Alou outsmarted him there. One time he took out his starting pitcher with a three-run lead in the seventh inning, and his relievers didn’t have anything.

Much of what the average fan uses to form his impressions of a manager is no doubt valid—for example, if a player fails with one organization, goes somewhere else and succeeds, he may give interviews in which he explains how one manager helped him, and the other didn’t. Even if he doesn’t, if the fans see that a manager repeatedly takes over players whose careers are going nowhere and gets good performance from them, as Johnny Oates did from almost a dozen players in 1996, the fans may well interpret that to the credit of that manager. Conversely, if a manager lets his star pitcher throw 155 pitches on a cold day and the pitcher pulls up with a sore arm, the fans may connect the dots.

But people who discuss baseball managers—I include fans and professionals—have, in my experience, almost no conceptual framework within which to store these observations. Working with a one-dimensional concept of a manager’s job, we use what we learn to push managers up and down the scale, toward the “idiot” pole or toward the “genius” pole. This is all we know.

So when you try to talk about what, specifically, one manager does
different
from another one, the average fan has no way of knowing. My idea, a few years ago, was to back off, disengage from the issue of who was a good manager and who was a bad manager, and to try to organize my own thinking about how one manager was
different
from another. What,
specifically
, does one manager do that another manager would not do? Does he pinch-hit a lot, and if so, under what conditions? Does he like to platoon? Is he aggressive about using his bullpen? Does he hit and run much? Is he prone to bring the infield in? Does he favor the intentional walk? Simple, objective questions which have simple, objective answers.

In a sense, this book is a continuation of the discussion which began at that time. What I have done in this book, in the main, is not to try to say who was a good manager and who was not, but to focus on how one manager was different from another. Having thought about the issue for much of my professional life, and having organized my own thinking about managers to some limited extent, I have written this book in the hope that I can help other people to think a little more clearly about baseball managers.

Managers are fascinating people. Of the twenty-five greatest managers of all time, at least eighteen were alcoholics. Is this a coincidence, or is there a reason for it? Should we, in looking to hire a manager, make sure he has Betty Ford on his resume?

A manager earns his daily bread in the gunsights of 30,000 rifles. The manager meets the press each day and greets us with an icy calm that could easily be mistaken for terror. Although, as a group, they know virtually nothing about math, they look constantly for what they call percentages, and find them in the most improbable places. Good managers, with few exceptions, are notable for their intelligence and personality. They are forceful men, often loud, often crude, sometimes hilarious. They are manipulative, cunning, intense, and selfish. All good managers have a strong need to be the center of attention. They are rarely, if ever, trusting, naive, or open.

Within that range, they are of infinite variety. In a hundred years, the job description of a baseball manager has changed enormously, yet the men who were good at the job a hundred years ago seem familiar to us now, as if we had just seen them on Channel Eight. This is a book about all of those things—the job, the men who have made the job what it is, the personalities, the percentages, the pratfalls, and the press clippings. The world of a baseball manager is a world of exhilaration and failure, intelligence and stupidity, hope and satisfaction, fear and disgrace. Occasionally there is a John McGraw, a Casey Stengel, a Sparky Anderson—and for every one of those, there are two hundred of the others, the ones who work a lifetime for one moment in the shadows next to glory.

Most Successful Managers:

1. Harry Wright

2. Dick McBride

3. Bob Ferguson

Harry Wright was, in essence, the
only
successful manager of the decade, the co
mpletely dominant manager. His Boston Red Stockings
won the National Association in 1872, 1873, 1874, and 1875, and won the National League in 1877 and 1878.

Most Controversial Manager:
Bob Ferguson

Others of Note:

George Wright

Albert Spalding

Cal McVey

Bill Craver

Stunts:
In the 1870s the rules didn’t require the manager to name his lineup until the players actually came to the plate. Cap Anson would often wait to see how the first inning developed before deciding whether he would hit third, fourth, or fifth.

Typical Manager Was:
Just an experienced player.

Percentage of Playing Managers:
68%

Most Second-Guessed Manager’s Move:
I could be wrong about this, but my impression is that the business of second-guessing manager’s moves is a relatively late development in baseball history. Nineteenth-century fans had no expectation that the game would pivot constantly on small strategic decisions, and thus no concept of the manager as a chess player.

Until 1905 virtually all games were completed by the starting pitcher, except for a few games when the pitcher was beaten up early and the game was lost. The sacrifice bunt didn’t become common until 1890, and pinch hitters were so infrequently used that until 1905, you could lead the league in pinch hits for the season with three.

Lineups were basically constant, and in the 1870s most teams used only one or two pitchers. Without pinch hitting, pinch running, pitching changes, or sacrifice bunting, the second-guesser’s field of opportunities was tremendously limited.

Chicago owner John Hart did quarrel openly with Cap Anson about Anson’s dislike of the sacrifice bunt, but as a general rule, even when these things did develop, it took some time for fans and reporters to be familiar enough with them that they felt qualified to say what the manager
should
have done.

This is not to say that fans and media of the nineteenth century gave managers a free ride, because they certainly didn’t. The nineteenth-century concept of a manager was of a leader, a teacher, and a man who could find good ballplayers and get them to come play for him. If, in the eyes of the fans, the team didn’t have much “fire” or didn’t make the plays they were supposed to make, that was held against the manager, and the manager was often skewered in the press. But that criticism never focused on strategic decisions in the way that it would in the twentieth century.

Evolutions in Strategy:
Far too numerous to discuss. The rules were still changing very rapidly at this time, basic stuff like the number of balls and strikes and the dimensions of the field. Under these conditions, strategies could be dominant one year, obsolete the next. The “fair/foul bunt,” a sort of swinging bunt which bounced once in fair territory, then rolled into foul territory, was tremendously important for two or three years, but disappeared when the rules were changed to make it a foul ball if fielded in foul territory.

Year of Birth:
1835

Years Managed:
1871–1893

Record as a Manager:
1,225–885, .581

Wright’s teams were 225–60 in the National Association, and 1,000–825 in the National League. He managed Boston in the National Association/National League from 1871 to 1881, Providence in 1882 to 1883, and Philadelphia from 1884 to 1893.

Managers for Whom He Played:
None.

Characteristics As a Player:
He was a center fielder and pitcher, strong, fast, very smart, and with an outstanding arm. He was not a great player; he was good. He is believed to have been the first pitcher to throw a changeup.

OTHERS BY WHOM HE WAS INFLUENCED

Harry Wright was, in essence, the first manager.

Wright was born in England, but his family moved to the United States when he was a baby. His father, Sam Wright, was a professional cricket player and was employed by a New York City cricket club as a club pro.

In about 1855 baseball had a surge of popularity in New York City. Wright played both cricket and baseball, was a member of the New York Knickerbockers baseball club, and was one of the better players in New York. According to
Baseball in Cincinnati
(Harry Ellard, 1907), “Harry Wright, so well known in baseball circles in the early days, was previous to his coming to Cincinnati the bowler for the New York Cricket Club, working only during the summer at $12 per week, and at his trade (that of jeweler) during the winter, but in August, 1865, he was engaged by George B. Ellard, at a salary of $1,200 a year, to play in the same capacity for the Union Cricket Club, which position he held until November 22, 1867, when he was engaged to act as pitcher for the baseball club at the same salary.”

Like his father, Wright had become a club cricket pro. The Union Cricket Club in Cincinnati arranged matches against other teams, both in cricket and baseball. A cricket match goes on for several days, and the public didn’t have much taste for that; they drew better when they tried baseball—thus, in 1867, the Unions decided to switch to baseball.

Baseball teams in this time were organized into the National Association of Baseball Players. The NABP extolled amateurism, although many of its players had phantom jobs, and were in fact professionals. Wright persuaded the Union club, in 1868, to add six of these quasi-professional players.

This gave the Unions the best team in Cincinnati. Wright and some friends designed their uniforms, which had long pants and bright red stockings; the sox would eventually give their name to two major league teams. Flushed with success, Wright approached the new president of the team, a Cincinnati lawyer named Aaron Champion, and attempted to persuade him to abandon the pretense of amateurism, and put together a professional team of the best baseball players in the country.

Champion was uncertain at first, advancing the commonly held belief that the public would never accept athletes who played for money, and also expressing the fear that the professional team would be blacklisted by the NABP. Wright argued, however, that the NABP rules were pure hypocrisy, since there were dozens of professional players around the country, and also that the Association lacked the ability to enforce its rules.

Wright prevailed, and was authorized to hire a team of professional baseball players, the first openly professional team. Champion financed the venture by selling $15,000 stock in the team, and Wright, by the spring of 1869, had nine baseball players under contract.

In 1869 the Cincinnati Red Stockings went on a grand tour, playing 57 games, 56 of which they won, and the other of which ended in a tie; this is, of course, one of the most celebrated events in baseball history. This provoked another wave of popularity for baseball, and businessmen from other cities began to bid for the best players as a matter of local pride, trying to build up their teams to compete with Cincinnati. Major league baseball is an outgrowth of this competition.

The Red Stockings won another 27 games in 1870, finally losing to the Brooklyn Atlantics; they would lose 5 games before the 1870 season was over. They also failed to show a profit, despite their dominance on the field, and Aaron Champion was ousted as president of the club. The team began to break up, the best players being lured away with better offers.

Throughout 1869 and 1870, the rift between the NABP and the amateurs grew increasingly sharp, and on March 17, 1871, Wright and some other prominent baseball men formed a new organization, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players. Later that spring a group of businessmen in Boston contacted George Wright, Harry’s younger brother, and asked him to come to Boston and be the “manager” (meaning captain and business manager) for their team in the new professional league. George Wright, twelve years younger than Harry, was the best player on the Cincinnati team, and probably the best player in baseball at that time. George, however, didn’t want to try to be both a player and a manager, and recommended to the men in Boston that they hire Harry to be the manager.

Harry accepted. According to George Wright, in an interview with the New York
Sun
in 1908, “His first move was to go to Rockford, Illinois, and sign A. G. Spalding, the Rockford pitcher, Ross Barnes, their second baseman, and Fred Cohen, their left fielder.” Continuing to add outstanding players, and playing cohesively in a way that no other team did, the Boston Red Stockings dominated the National Association, winning the competition by such margins that other teams began gradually to lose interest. In 1875, the last year of the National Association, the Red Stockings were 71–8, 15 games better than any other team.

WHAT HE BROUGHT TO A BALL CLUB

Was He an Intense Manager or More of an Easy-to-Get-Along-With Type?
Wright was not difficult to get along with. He was competitive, of course, but until 1880 he was more of a “captain” than a modern manager. He was a first-among-equals, a team leader who worked with his men.

According to Lee Allen, “he was a decent, quiet man who did not believe in playing baseball on Sunday. In an uncouth age he had the respect of even the rowdiest players and was, in many ways, much like Connie Mack.”

The
1893 Reach Guide
, writing about Harry Wright nearing sixty, said that Wright “has kept himself in step with the new ideas of the game, and never showed a disposition to cling to the things which were primitive or ancient. As a controller of men he has no peer, and in controlling base ball players successfully he shows unwonted powers, because, as a rule, professional ball players are a rather untractable set. It is Mr. Wright’s system to never find fault after a defeat. It is when the team wins that he takes occasion to criticize the player’s work, because they will then be in a frame of mind to take criticism kindly. If Mr. Wright, as a manager, has a fault, it lies in an over kindness and a lack of severe methods in dealing with the men.”

Was He More of an Emotional Leader or a Decision Maker?
More of a decision maker.

Was He More of an Optimist or More of a Problem Solver?
He was the ultimate problem solver. He was pro-active in everything, a man who figured out how things
should
be and began to move them in that direction.

HOW HE USED HIS PERSONNEL

Did He Favor a Set Lineup or a Rotation System?
He used a set lineup.

Did He Like to Platoon?
Never heard of it.

Did He Try to Solve His Problems with Proven Players or with Youngsters Who Still May Have Had Something to Learn?
The form of this question assumes a structure. Wright operated in a more open system. Finding good young players was something he liked to do.

How Many Players Did He Make Regulars Who Had Not Been Regulars Before, and Who Were They?
Everybody he signed was, of course, a first-time regular in the major leagues.

Did He Prefer to Go with Good Offensive Players or Did He Like the Glove Men?
What was most outstanding about his teams was their pitching and defense.

Did He Like an Offense Based on Power, Speed, or High Averages?
In 1869, when the Cincinnati team was on tour, baseball was a very high-scoring game. George Wright hit 59 home runs for the Redlegs, in 58 games, and the team scored an average of more than 40 runs per game.

For reasons that I don’t fully understand, this changed dramatically in the following few years. Runs-scored totals fell to modern levels, and home runs became relatively rare.

Did He Use the Entire Roster or Did He Keep People Sitting on the Bench?
He dealt with ten- to fifteen-man rosters. There wasn’t room to have players sitting around.

GAME MANAGING AND USE OF STRATEGIES

Did He Go for the Big-Inning Offense, or Did He Like to Use the One-Run Strategies?
One-run strategies weren’t really developed until the late 1890s.

Did He Pinch-Hit Much, and If So, When?
Nobody used pinch hitters in the 1870s.

Did He Use the Sac Bunt Often?
It hadn’t been invented.

Did He Like to Use the Running Game?
There are no statistics until 1887, near the end of his career.

In What Circumstances Would He Issue an Intentional Walk?
Unknown. The intentional walk was used at this time.

Did He Hit and Run Very Often?
Hit and run wasn’t invented until the 1880s at the earliest, and not common until the 1890s.

How Did He Change the Game?
It has been written many times that Harry Wright invented professional baseball. This is an oversimplification; many other men were involved with Wright at each step of the way as baseball made its ten-year transition to open professionalism. Nonetheless, it is certainly accurate to say that Harry Wright made changes in the game far more far-reaching and profound than those of any other manager.

HANDLING THE PITCHING STAFF

Did He Like Power Pitchers, or Did He Prefer to Go with the People Who Put the Ball in Play?
The question doesn’t really apply to 1870s baseball. Until 1887, the batter could call for a high pitch or a low pitch. In 1870s baseball strikeouts and walks were relatively rare, and players who couldn’t throw hard weren’t used as pitchers.

Did He Stay with His Starters, or Go to the Bullpen Quickly?
In this era, pitchers could be replaced only with the consent of the opposition, so teams had nearly 100% complete games. Wright was an exception; he did like to make pitching changes. In 1876, the first season of the National League, he used 21 relief pitchers in 70 games, whereas the other seven teams combined used only 29 relievers during the season.

Did He Use a Four-Man Rotation?
No, but Wright was closer to a pitching rotation than any other manager of his era. In 1876, when most of the other teams in the National League used only one pitcher, Wright used three. He went with one starter in 1877–1878, but as the schedule expanded rapidly in the 1880s, all teams shifted to using more and more pitchers. Wright was always a step ahead in this march. By the early 1890s he was using a three-man rotation.

What Was His Strongest Point As a Manager?
He had an almost phenomenal ability to persuade people to go along with his plans.

If There Was No Professional Baseball, What Would He Have Done with His Life?
There wasn’t any professional baseball. He invented it.