Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The (38 page)

In the process of researching this book, I gave John Sickels a list of managers and asked him to count the number of times each man had led the league in various categories. How many times did Whitey Herzog’s teams lead the league in stolen bases?

I wanted this information to refer to in writing comments about the managers, and I used it often in that respect. But I thought the data was interesting in and of itself, so I thought maybe we should take a couple of pages to put it on record, as reference material. Alphabetically:

Walt Alston
Categories in which his teams led the league most often: pitcher’s strikeouts (12), ERA (11), stolen bases (10), shutouts (10), walks drawn (6), saves (6), control (6; fewest walks will be referred to in these charts as “control”). Alston’s teams never led the league in hits, hits allowed, or batter’s strikeouts.

Sparky Anderson
most often: walks drawn (10), home runs (9), batter’s strikeouts (9), runs scored (7), fielding percentage (7), saves (6). Teams never led in strikeouts, errors, or control.

Cap Anson
most often: runs scored (8), doubles (7), home runs (7), slugging percentage (7), complete games (6), saves (5), double plays (5). None of his teams led the league in hits allowed, walks allowed, or control.

Frank Chance
most often: Six of his teams led the league in shutouts, five in ERA. Despite the most famous DP combination in history, none of Chance’s teams led the league in double plays. Also, none led in batter’s strikeouts, walks allowed, or errors.

Fred Clarke
most often: triples (8), control (7), hits (5), slugging percentage (5), runs scored (4), stolen bases (4). None of his teams led the league in errors, walks drawn, batter’s strikeouts, saves, hits allowed, or walks allowed.

Charlie Comiskey
most often: ERA (5), home runs (4). Teams never led the league in triples, hits allowed, walks allowed, or errors.

Joe Cronin
most often: batting Average (8), hits (7), doubles (4), slugging percentage (4), fielding percentage (4). None of his teams led the league in home runs, batter’s strikeouts, complete games, or ERA.

Leo Durocher
most often: walks drawn (8), runs scored (5), triples (5), saves (5), control (5). Fewest: hits (1), hits allowed (1), errors (1), double plays (1).

Charlie Grimm
most often: fielding percentage (6), complete games (5), errors (4). Teams never led the league in hits, triples, home runs, stolen bases, errors, or walks allowed.

Ned Hanlon
most often: triples (7), stolen bases (5), batting average (5). Teams never led the league in batter’s strikeouts, complete games, hits allowed, pitcher’s strikeouts, or double plays.

Bucky Harris
most often: triples (11), hits (6), double plays (6), stolen bases (5), walks allowed (5). Teams never led the league in walks drawn, led only once in doubles, home runs, batter’s strikeouts, complete games, pitcher’s strikeouts, fielding percentage, control.

Whitey Herzog
most often: stolen bases (9), fielding percentage (8), triples (8). Teams never led the league in home runs, batter’s strikeouts, slugging percentage, hits allowed, pitcher’s strikeouts, shutouts, or errors.

Ralph Houk
most often: slugging average (4), hits (3), triples (3), batting average (3), hits allowed (3). Teams never led the league in walks drawn, stolen bases, pitcher’s strikeouts, walks allowed, or shutouts. The 1961 Yankees were the only team Houk managed that led the league in home runs.

Miller Huggins
most often: home runs (10), batter’s strikeouts (8), slugging percentage (7), ERA (6), runs scored (5). Teams never led the league in doubles, stolen bases, walks allowed, or errors.

Hughie Jennings
most often: hits (7), runs scored (6), batting average (6), slugging percentage (5). None of Jennings’s teams led the league in walks given, shutouts, or in any fielding category.

Tommy Lasorda
most often: complete games (8), shutouts (6), errors (6), ERA (6), home runs (5). His teams never led the league in hits, doubles, triples, batting average, walks drawn, batter’s strikeouts, stolen bases, hits allowed, or fielding percentage.

Al Lopez
most often: complete games (6), ERA (6), stolen bases (5), fielding percentage (5), control (5), home runs (4), saves (4). Teams never led the league in hits, walks drawn, batter’s strikeouts, hits allowed, walks allowed, or errors.

Connie Mack
most often: pitcher’s strikeouts (16), home runs (13), walks allowed (12), errors (12), fielding percentage (9), batter’s strikeouts (9), slugging percentage (9), batting average (8). Least often: walks drawn (1), stolen bases (2), control (2), triples (3), saves (4).

Billy Martin
most often: fielding percentage (4), saves (4), complete games (3). None of Martin’s teams led the league in triples, hits allowed, double plays, or control.

Joe McCarthy
His teams led the league in walks drawn 14 times, in home runs 13 times, in runs scored 13 times. Other high categories: slugging percentage (10), ERA (10). None of McCarthy’s teams led the league in hits allowed, only two led the league in walks allowed, and only two led in control.

John McGraw
most often: saves (17), runs scored (14), stolen bases (12), home runs (11), batting average (11), control (11). Only one of McGraw’s teams led the league in hits allowed, only one led in triples, and only two led in complete games.

Bill McKechnie
most often: complete games (9), fielding percentage (5), triples (4), stolen bases (4), saves (4), shutouts (4), ERA (4), double plays (4), control (4). None of his teams ever led the league in home runs, hits allowed, walks allowed, or errors.

Danny Murtaugh
most often: double plays (7), triples (6), hits (5), batting average (4). None of his teams led the league in walks drawn, batter’s or pitcher’s strikeouts, stolen bases, hits or walks allowed, shutouts, errors, or fielding percentage.

Steve O’Neill
most often: complete games (7), control (6), shutouts (6), doubles (4), pitcher’s strikeouts (4). Teams never the league in home runs, batter’s strikeouts, stolen bases, errors, double plays, or hits allowed.

Frank Selee
most often: home runs (4), complete games (4), fielding percentage (4), control (4), walks drawn (3), shutouts (3). His teams never led the league in hits, triples, batting average, walks allowed, batter’s or pitcher’s strikeouts, errors, or double plays.

Billy Southworth
most often: hits (6), complete games (6), shutouts (5), batting average (5), doubles (5), slugging percentage (4), pitcher’s strikeouts (4), ERA (4). None of his teams led the league in saves, errors, or walks allowed.

Casey Stengel
most often: double plays (10), saves (9), shutouts (7), runs scored (6), slugging percentage (6), pitcher’s strikeouts (6), home runs (5), batting average (5). Teams never led the league in doubles, stolen bases, fielding percentage, or control.

Earl Weaver
most often: ERA (8), fielding percentage (8), complete games (6), walks drawn (4), shutouts (4), control (4). Teams never led the league in hits, hits allowed, walks given, strikeouts, or errors.

Dick Williams
most often: control (4), doubles (3), home runs (3), pitcher’s strikeouts (3), shutouts (3). None of his teams led the league in errors or fielding percentage.

Harry Wright
most often: shutouts (6), saves (5), home runs (5), doubles (5). His teams never led the league in batter’s strikeouts, hits allowed, or errors.

There are a couple of huge charts at the end of this article, and what are they doing there? The creation of data is a holy act; not really, but occasionally I need to feed my own caricatures.

This data is here because it isn’t anywhere else. All discussions of the sacrifice bunt are starved for data. Baseball fans can discuss the theory of the sacrifice at great length, so long as the discussion does not require specific facts. When it does require specific facts, you’re out of luck, because no baseball reference book contains any significant historical information on sacrifice hits.

These charts are intended to repair the oversight. The charts contain the number of sacrifice hits by each major league team in each season since 1893, whatever the sac hit was at that time. Therein lies a tale, a tale best told by John Schwartz in the 1981
Baseball Research Journal.

Sacrifice hits have been a part of baseball since 1889, but the definition of a sacrifice has changed more times than OJ’s alibi. For the first four years of that period, 1889–1892, I have been unable to locate any systematic data on team sacrifice hit totals. The 1893 data is presented in the chart. According to Schwartz, in 1893 a player received credit for a sacrifice “for advancing baserunners on bunts, ground outs and fly balls,” and a sacrifice was charged as an at bat, not exempted as it is now.

Since a sacrifice was credited essentially any time a baserunner moved up on an out, there is a simple relationship between “sacrifices” and team performance: The best teams have the most sacrifices. They have to, because they have the most baserunners. The Pirates, who led the league in team on-base percentage (.377), also led in sacrifices, 360, while St. Louis, a bad team with few baserunners, was last in the league in what could more accurately be called BABO, or “baserunners advanced by outs.”

In 1894 the National League adopted the modern sacrifice hit rule—bunts only, no at bat charged. The average number of sacrifices per team dropped from 276 to 96—actually, not that far from a modern norm.

In the mid-1890s a huge number of runs were scored, which tended to argue against the use of the sacrifice bunt. Over the next few years the number of runs scored dropped steadily and in dramatic increments, from 7.36 runs per team per game in 1894 to 5.88 in 1897, to 4.96 in 1898, to 4.43 in 1902, and 3.52 in 1907. In twelve years, runs scored fell by 52%.

As runs scored fell, sacrifice bunts increased—from 83 per team per season in 1895, to 94 in 1897, to 112 in 1898, to 114 in 1902, to 161 in 1907. Sacrifice bunts per game nearly doubled, while the number of baserunners fell sharply.

At this point, our story is interrupted by a rules change. In 1908 both leagues decided to include what we would now call sacrifice flies in the “sacrifice hit” category. The number of sacrifices per team jumped from 161 in 1907 to 204 in 1908.

Sacrifice totals dropped somewhat after 1920, when the lively ball era pushed runs scored back up, and thus made the sacrifice bunt a less attractive option. In 1926 the sacrifice hit category was further expanded to include fly balls moving runners from second to third.

This creates so much noise in the data that in the era 1908–1930, and in particular 1926–1930, it is difficult to say what the record shows. It appears, for example, that Connie Mack bunted relatively little; this, at least, is the conclusion we would draw from studying the data of the years 1901–1908, 1931–1938, and the early 1940s, when we have clean data. (In fact, in the sacrifice hit data, you can almost “see” the date when Connie faded into the background and allowed his son Earle and then Al Simmons to run the team. As long as Connie was in charge, the team was below average in sacrifice bunts. The totals shot up when his assistants took over.)

Anyway, the A’s were generally below average in sacrifice bunts—but led the league in sacrifice hits in 1926, 1929, and 1930, and were second in 1927. The conclusion I would draw from this is that Mack’s teams, like Tom Kelley’s teams today, must have been exceptionally good at moving up on fly balls.

In 1931 all fly balls were taken out of the sacrifice hit category, and the modern sacrifice hit rule, which had been in effect from 1894 to 1907, was essentially reinstated. It has been in effect ever since then, except for the 1939 season, when sacrifice flies were again counted as sacrifice hits.

At the turn of the century, the teams with the most sacrifice bunts were the best teams. The New York Giants led the National League in sac hits in 1903–1904, and the Cubs, Frank Chance’s great Chicago Cub teams, led the league in sac hits in 1905, 1906, 1908, 1909, 1910, 1911, and 1912. The White Sox, a perennial contender, led the league in sac hits several times, and the other league leaders were generally pretty good teams.

This is the only era in which sacrifice hits are closely related to team wins.
Sacrifice hits are statistically connected to wins and losses through at least twenty different bridges, the four most important of which are power, speed, strategy, and skill:

Power
discourages a team from bunting. You don’t bunt with Harmon Killebrew at bat or on deck.

Speed,
in a similar way, discourages bunting.

Power and speed tend to create an inverse relationship between sacrifice hits and wins. The best teams have the most power, and therefore the least need to bunt in the early innings.
Strategy
and
bunting skill,
on the other hand, tend to create a positive correlation between sacrfice hits and wins—strategy, because a team is much more likely to bunt when they are two or three runs ahead than when they are two or three runs behind, and skill, because good teams in the aggregate tend to be good at everything, including bunting. Good teams tend to be good even at things which are clearly distant from wins and losses—for example, good teams commit 35% fewer balks than bad teams. The numbers involved are so small that the balks themselves are insignificant, but good teams commit fewer balks simply because good teams tend to be good at everything.

These various cross-correlations tend to cancel one another, so that in modern baseball there is essentially no overall relationship between sacrifice bunts and team wins. Good teams are neither more likely nor less likely to bunt, on the average, than bad teams.

But the baseball of 1900–1920 was different in two key respects—one, that there was virtually no power in the game, and two, that teams bunted a great deal more. Teams bunted, when they got a leadoff man on and weren’t two or three runs behind, a very high percentage of the time. Everybody did; all teams, so the teams with the most sacrifice bunts tended to be simply the teams with the most baserunners. After 1920, however, this is never true.

This is not an article about the wisdom or advisability of bunting; that article, “
Rolling in the Grass
”. This is just about who bunts how much. A list of managers who bunted a lot: Fielder Jones, Frank Chance, Jack Barry, Bill McKechnie, Charlie Grimm, Joe Cronin, Billy Southworth, Paul Richards, Walter Alston, Gene Mauch, Dave Bristol, John McNamara, Dick Williams, Tommy Lasorda. Managers who bunted very little include John McGraw, Joe McCarthy, Bucky Harris, Frankie Frisch, Earl Weaver, Bob Lemon, Billy Gardner, Bill Virdon, and Danny Ozark. Some notes about those lists:

Fielder Jones
played for the Brooklyn Bridegrooms for several years before Ned Hanlon came over to manage the team. He played for Hanlon for a couple of years, then for Clark Griffith for a couple of years, taking over the White Sox in 1904. His Sox teams were very successful, and became famous as the Hitless Wonders of 1906, a World Championship team which hit .230 for the season, with seven home runs. Most of Jones’s teams led their league in sacrifice hits, including the White Sox in 1904, 1905, 1906, and 1908, and the St. Louis Terriers (Federal League) in 1915.

Frank Chance
managed the Cubs from 1905 to 1912, leading the league in sacrifice hits every year but one. They missed the lead by two (197–195) in 1907.

Jack Barry
was the shortstop on Connie Mack’s $100,000 infield, an outstanding bunter himself. He managed for only one year, but that team, the 1917 Red Sox, recorded 310 sacrifice hits, a modern (post-1900) major league record. Less than 50 of these would have been sacrifice flies; probably more than 250 were actual bunts.

Bill McKechnie
managed in the majors for twenty-five years. About twenty of his teams were over the league average in sacrifice hits, and his Cincinnati Reds led the league in 1938, 1939, 1940, and 1945.

Charlie Grimm
managed the Cubs 1932–1938, during which time he successfully prevented McKechnie from leading the league in sacrifice bunts. Grimm took over the Cubs in midseason, 1932, and managed them until midseason, 1938. His first two pennant-winning teams, the 1932 and 1935 Cubs, both led the league in sac bunts, as did the 1936 and 1937 teams.

In Grimm’s second managerial assignment, Chicago 1944–1949, he did
not
bunt very much, but with Milwaukee he led the league in sacrifice bunts in 1954 (110) and 1956 (142).

Actually, Grimm was replaced early in 1956 by Fred Haney, but the 142 bunts recorded by that team, under Grimm and Haney, were the most of any major league team in the 1950s, and are more remarkable because it was a power-hitting team with Henry Aaron, Eddie Mathews, Joe Adcock, Bobby Thomson, and Del Crandall in the everyday lineup. Joe Adcock, who hit 38 homers that year in 454 at bats, also laid down 11 sacrifice bunts. Johnny Logan bunted 31 times, Bill Bruton 18 times, Danny O’Connell 16, and Lew Burdette, a pitcher, 11.

Many times a first-year manager will have an atypically high bunt total, presumably because the new manager is checking out his personnel. Ordering bunts is a way to find out who can bunt.

Joe Cronin
ranks with Frank Chance, Billy Southworth, Paul Richards, and Gene Mauch as the five most committed “bunters” in baseball history. He managed the Washington Senators 1933–1934; they led the league in sacrifice hits both years, by good margins. Moving to Boston in 1935, he led the league in sacrifice hits there in 1935, 1936, 1938, 1941, 1942, and 1946. This is notable in part because Cronin managed big-hitting teams in a hitter’s park, Fenway Park.

Cronin himself, as a player, did not bunt a whole lot, and was not famous for his bunting skill. He bunted five to ten times a season.

Billy Southworth
bunted more than any other manager of the 1940s, and more than any manager since.

Southworth’s idea was to get the lead—get a man on base, bunt him over, get a run, put the pressure on the other team. He had teams with extremely high batting averages, and he usually had one or two players who drew an exceptional number of walks. His teams led the league in bunts in 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1947, and 1948, and the 1943 St. Louis Cardinal total of 172 sac bunts is the highest team total since 1931, except the 1939 season when sacrifice fies were counted as sac hits. That team (the 1943 Cardinals) won 105 games.

Paul Richards
bunted more than any other manager of the 1950s. He managed the White Sox 1951–1954; they led the league in sacrifice bunts the first three of those seasons. The Orioles, managed by Richards 1955–1961, also led the league in sac hits in 1957 and 1959.

Walter Alston
did everything a lot—bunted a lot, stole a lot of bases, made a lot of pitching changes, used a high number of pinch hitters and pinch runners. The Dodgers led the league in sacrifice bunts almost every year in the Maury Wills era (1959, 1960, 1962, 1964, 1965), but even when Alston had the power-hitting team in Brooklyn in the mid-1950s, he was still consistently above the league average in the number of sacrifice hits.

Gene Mauch
is, of course, famous for playing “Little Ball.” He managed in the majors twenty-six seasons, with his teams leading the league in sacrifice bunts fifteen of those twenty-six years. All four of the teams that he managed (Philadelphia, Montreal, Minnesota, and California) led the league in sacrifice hits at least three times while Mauch was their manager. The Minnesota Twins in 1979 bunted 142 times, the most of any major league team since the schedule expanded to 162 games in 1961.

Dave Bristol
was a journeyman manager who managed Cincinnati (1966–1969), Milwaukee (1970–1972), Atlanta (1976–1977), and San Francisco (1979–1980), with no particular success. His teams led the league in sacrifice bunts when he was with Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and San Francisco, and finished second his one full season in Atlanta.

John McNamara
was another journeyman manager of the same era; he managed Oakland, San Diego, Cincinnati, California, Boston, and Cleveland, with very limited success. He led the league in sacrifice bunts with San Diego (three times) and California.

Dick Williams
was also another revolving-door manager of the same era, although he was extremely successful. With Boston in 1967 he bunted 85 times, just missing the league lead (88). The Moutache Gang in ’72 and ’73 led the American League in sac bunts, as did California in ’74 and ’75, when Williams managed them.

Williams managed Montreal 1977–1981; they led the league in sac hits three times during that period (1977, 1979, 1981). Moving on to San Diego, he again led the league, in 1983.

Williams’s first sixteen teams were all above the league average in the number of sacrifice bunts, but at the end of his career he either changed his mind about the value of the bunt or, more probably, just didn’t have any good bunters. His last few teams didn’t bunt much.

Tommy Lasorda
’s Dodgers led the league in sacrifice bunts six times. The 107 sac hits recorded by the Dodgers in 1993 are the highest total of the 1990s.

Among (younger) contemporary managers, the two most inclined to bunt are probably Bob Boone, a Gene Mauch disciple, and Jeff Torborg. Torborg led the American League in sac bunts, with Chicago, in 1989, ’90, and ’91.

On the other side, we have a list of managers who did not tend to use the bunt.

John McGraw
bunted a lot in his first years as a manager, but suddenly lost enthusiasm for the bunt after 1908. The Giants were below the league average in sacrifice hits every single year between 1911 and the end of McGraw’s career except 1930, when