Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The (20 page)

The ten most successful managers of all time are John McGraw, Connie Mack, Joe McCarthy, Casey Stengel, Walt Alston, Sparky Anderson, Earl Weaver, Harry Wright, Bill McKechnie, and Leo Durocher. I can make this statement because

a) I have studied the issue,

b) I like making definitive statements on subjects about which no reasonable person could claim to have definitive information,

c) It’s my book and you can’t stop me, or

d) All of the above.

What this book is definitely not about is who is a good manager and who is a bad manager. It is occasionally useful to have a frame of reference. Jimmy Collins, for example, enjoyed a certain degree of success as a manager just after 1900. He managed for six seasons, keeping his first five teams over .500. He managed the first modern World Champions in 1903, and defended his league title the next season, when John McGraw chickened out of a World Series. But in the context of history, what is that? Are there a hundred guys who have achieved this level of success, or 25, or 500? How would you balance his accomplishments against those of, let us say, Gil Hodges or Bobby Cox?

The easiest way to rank managers is just to rank them according to how many games they won, or how many games their teams won while they were at the helm. Let’s do that. The top ten managers of all time according to games won through 1996 are:

Jimmy Collins, with 455 career wins, ranks as the one hundred eleventh most successful manager of all time in this list. Bobby Cox is thirty-first.

The problem with this, of course, is that it considers four seasons of 50 wins to be the same as two seasons of 100 wins. Win totals without losses are not particularly instructive, and when you put the wins beside the losses, you discover that the number-one man, Connie Mack, is actually behind the league:

Three of the top ten men had more losses than wins.

As a second try we could rank managers according to won-lost percentage. Ranked according to pure won-lost percentage, the top three managers of all time are Mel Harder (3–0), Dick Tracewski (2–0), and Clyde Sukeforth (2–0). (Incidentally, ranked according to either of these methods, the
worst
manager of all time was George Creamer, one of five unfortunates to have skippered the Pittsburgh Alleghenys in 1884. He had the job for eight games, all of which the Alleghenys lost.) If we require a minimum of ten games managed, the ten top managers would then be:

If you’ve never heard of these men, they’re mostly nineteenth-century guys who managed a season or a part of a season when they weren’t busy doing something else. The worst manager of all time, requiring ten games, would be Malachi Kittridge of the 1904 Washington Senators—1 and 16. Bobby Cox ranks eighty-fifth on this list, at .539, and Jimmy Collins ranks sixty-sixth.

If you want a list of real managers, you need to require at least a thousand games managed. That list would be:

The twelfth man at the moment would be Davey Johnson. This is a list of legitimately outstanding managers, but it is also a ranking method that places a premium on quitting while you’re ahead. Does Frank Chance, who managed for eleven seasons, really deserve to rank ahead of John McGraw, who managed three times as long and had almost the same career winning percentage?

Well, what about ranking managers by games over or under .500? Frank Chance was 298 games over .500; John McGraw was 825 games over. Ranked according to games over .500, the race for the distinction of the greatest manager ever is a two-man contest. John McGraw and Joe McCarthy are almost even; nobody else is on the screen:

Bobby Cox is now ranked twenty-fourth, Jimmy Collins forty-eighth. An interesting note: there are only 36 managers in baseball history who finished their careers 100 games over .500. If you can have a couple of good years, you can move up the list in a hurry. The
worst
manager of all time, either by winning percentage (with a minimum of a thousand games) or by wins minus losses, was Jimmie Wilson, who managed the Phillies in the 1930s and the Cubs in the 1940s.

The flaw in this, as a ranking method, can be seen by looking at the bottom of the list. The most unsuccessful managers of all time, by this method, would be:

Connie Mack, who won more games than anyone else ever born, is now listed as the third least-successful manager, more than 300 notches behind Ted Turner, who was 0–1. Another note: Of the 581 men who have managed in the major leagues through 1996, slightly less than one-third have winning records. 33% of all managers have winning records, 64% have losing records, 3% are right at .500.

It’s a sobering thought, if you’re a young man who would like to be a manager some day: The odds are two to one against you. I suspect this is probably true throughout the coaching profession. If you studied college basketball coaches, for example, I’m certain you would find that many more have losing records than winning records, for the simple reason that those who win keep their jobs much longer than those who lose. The same is true of baseball pitchers: Most of them have losing records. They have to, because some of them get to be a hundred games over .500, but nobody gets to a be a hundred games
under
.500.

College or high school basketball coaches, college or high school football coaches … this can be generalized to any competitive profession, from acting to running a barber shop. About 70% of small businesses fail within two years. Could a government policy designed to help small businesses change that percentage? No, for the same reason. Money coming in and money going out can be seen as wins and losses. Businesses and people exchange money with one another; if you have more going out than coming in, you’re failing. Those which succeed will force those which fail out of business, which will mean that the turnover among failures has to be much faster than the turnover among successes, which means that over time there have to be more failures than successes. No policy can change this. The Peter Principle notwithstanding, failure is commonplace, but not enduring.

Anyway, at last report we had Connie Mack ranked 300 notches behind Ted Turner, which anyone except perhaps Jane Fonda and the Florida Democrats would recognize as a flawed ranking system. Connie Mack’s teams won five World Championships. This is not something that just inevitably happens to you if you hang around long enough.

If a team wins the pennant in one season, whatever they do in the following season does not take that away from them. This is the flaw in the ranking system: It fails to recognize the winning of pennants and World Championships as a permanent accomplishment.

Well then, we could simply count the number of World Championships won. That ranking of the greatest managers ever would start with Casey Stengel and Joe McCarthy: