Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The (39 page)

a) there was a lot of garbage in the stats, and

b) the Giants exactly matched the league average.

The 95 sacrifice hits recorded by New York in 1925 were the lowest total by any major league team in the years 1908–1930, when sacrifice flies were included in the sacrifice hit category. The 49 sacrifice hits by the Giants in 1932 is the lowest total by a National League team in the first half of the century.

The Giants in 1911 stole 347 bases, which remains a modern major league record. What appears to have happened, in part, is that McGraw decided that, if you have the speed, the stolen base is a better gamble than the bunt.

Relative to the other managers of his time, McGraw may be the most notable nonbunter ever. The key words are, relative to the other managers of his time. In McGraw’s time, teams bunted with tremendous frequency. In the game of 1907, when teams scored 3.52 runs per game, that may have made sense. Through most of the next twenty-five years, run frequencies went steadily up, and bunt totals, logically, should have dropped. It may be simply that what the data shows is that John McGraw was a faster learner than most of the other managers.

Joe McCarthy
didn’t bunt much, and if Gene Mauch had had his teams, I’m not sure Gene Mauch would have bunted much, either. Seven of McCarthy’s Yankee teams were last in the league in sac hits, as were the Red Sox in 1948 and 1950. The 1941 Yankees bunted only 49 times, lowest total in the American League in the years 1901–1950.

Bucky Harris
managed Detroit in 1929 and 1930, Boston in 1934, Washington in 1936, 1940, and 1942, and Detroit in 1956. All of those teams were last in their leagues in sacrifice hits.

Frankie Frisch
was himself an outstanding bunter. Frisch played for John McGraw, and was, up to a point, a John McGraw disciple. Of course, Frisch and McGraw quarreled, which led to Frankie’s departure from New York in midcareer, but Frisch later managed St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and the Cubs. All three teams were last in the league in sac bunts at least once while Frisch was there.

Ralph Houk
managed the 1961 Yankees and nineteen other major league teams, most of which weren’t terribly good. The ’61 Yanks were last in the league in sacrifice bunts, from which we would not infer anything much, but Houk also had six other teams which were last in the league. In 1973 Houk managed the Yankees; they bunted only 27 times, which was then a major league record low. In 1974 Houk moved to Detroit, and in 1974 the Tigers were last in the major leagues in sac bunts.

Earl Weaver
, of course, spoke freely of his dislike for the sacrifice bunt.

Bob Lemon
managed the Kansas City Royals in 1971 (45 bunts, major league low), the White Sox in 1977 (33 bunts, major league low), and the Yankees in a long series of partial seasons.

Billy Gardner
played for Paul Richards for several years and speaks highly of Richards, who made him a regular after he had spent years as a bench player. Nonetheless, Gardner was probably the most enthusiastic nonbunter in major league history. He managed for parts of six seasons, and usually bunted less than thirty times a year.

Bill Virdon
was a dour man who managed the Astros for many years and also managed the Pirates, Yankees, and Expos for a year or two. In the early part of his career his team’s sac hit totals are notably low, although later on this is not true.

Danny Ozark
managed the Phillies in the 1970s, always finishing near the bottom of the league in sacrifice hits. He also managed the Giants part of the 1984 season, when they bunted only 39 times, lowest total for any National League team in the 1980s.

Tom Kelly, an admirer of Ralph Houk, has become the most notable nonbunter among contemporary managers. Kelly bunted an average amount early in his career, but has dropped to about twenty bunts a season.

S
ACRIFICE
H
ITS
National League 1894–1995

S
ACRIFICE
H
ITS
American League 1901–1996

I wrote a couple of articles earlier about lineup selection, which argued that

1) it is impossible to evaluate all of the alternative batting lineups a manager could select, because the number of options is so astonishingly large, and

2) to the extent that we can study the subject, we find that it doesn’t make any difference anyway.

Now I’m going to go in a different direction for just a moment. Even though I know, from studying the issue, that it makes virtually no difference what order you put the hitters in, there are two things that managers do with their batting orders which seem to me to be questionable. One is to waste the number-two spot in the batting order.

Almost any manager can recognize a good leadoff man if he has one, and all managers put their best hitters with some power in the three-four spots in the order. Those aren’t variables. What varies is the use of the two spot. Some managers will fill the two spot with the best hitter available who isn’t a leadoff hitter or a power hitter. Other managers, however, will put a little singles hitter there who hits about .260 with a .315 on-base percentage. I’m not sure why they do this; they’ll talk about “bat control” and “moving the runner into scoring position,” but the effect is to divide the leadoff man from the good hitters:

Look, the number of runs you can generate by “moving runners” is essentially zero. If you ask a baseball fan how many times per season a runner would be on first base when a single is hit, he might very probably say, “I don’t know. Two or three hundred?” It
seems,
in the absence of evidence, as if it might be common for this to happen.

But in fact, the answer is twenty to thirty-five for a typical player, maybe fifty once in a great while. And
any
runner will go from first to third on a single sometimes, no matter how slow he is, and any runner will be stopped at second sometimes, no matter how fast he is. So the potential for that play to make a difference in runs scored is just not as large as many people would imagine that it is.

The same with all of the other plays on which speed and bat control might interact—scoring from first on a double, for example, or moving up on a ground out. The actual number of times per season that these plays occur is not as large as many people would imagine that it is, and the number of additional runs that result from runners advancing on outs is very small.
The greatest difference in baseball is between a runner being on base and being out.
Everything else is trivial. If you get runners on base, you’ll score runs. If you don’t, you won’t. Once in a while, of course, there is an out that results in a run—but even in those cases, a hit would have resulted in the same run. As a rule, there is no such thing as a “good out.”

So what I say is, forget about getting “good outs” from the number-two spot in the order. Forget about bunting and forget about hitting to right field, and concentrate on getting somebody in there who gets on base. In the long run, you’ll score more runs. The baseball leadoff hitter in baseball history is Rickey Henderson. The best number two hitter would be Rickey Henderson, too.

The other thing that bothers me about the way managers pick lineups is the use of the five-six spots in the order. Who is a typical number-five hitter, in modern baseball? It’s the old power hitter, the guy who used to be a cleanup hitter but isn’t anymore. The typical number-five hitter is a thirty-five-year-old right-handed hitter who hits .270 with 28 homers, but can’t run. Cecil Fielder, Eddie Murray, Gary Gaetti, Tim Wallach. Moose Skowron batted fifth for the ’61 Yankees; Gabby Hartnett batted fifth for the 1930 Cubs. These are prototypical number-five hitters.

To back off and run at this from a slightly different direction, a major league team will usually score more runs in the first inning than in any other inning, for obvious reasons. The first inning is the “structured” inning, the inning in which the leadoff hitter leads off, and the cleanup hitter cleans up.

But in which inning do teams score
the fewest
runs? The second inning, of course. The top of the order usually bats in the first, the bottom of the order usually bats in the second. After that, it drifts toward a random alignment; a team will score as many runs on average in one inning as they will in another.

Few people are aware of this, but if you combine the first inning and the second inning and compare it to the rest of the game, there is no net increase in runs scored. The second inning, in the aggregate, tends to be as far
below
average as the first inning is above average.

It seems to me that based on this one fact, one can make an argument that there is something seriously wrong with the traditional batting order. Managers, in structuring their lineup, are attempting to maximize runs scored in the first inning—but in effect, they are structuring not one inning, but two. And on balance, they’re not gaining anything. Managers, given just one opportunity a game to “fix” an inning, contrive to do it in such a way that they are in general no better off than they would be if they simply started the lineup at some random point.

And if you think about it, who is most often leading off the second inning? Of course: those number-five hitters. The thirty-five-year-old right-handed power hitters who can’t run.

I believe you’re better off to put a line-drive hitter in the number-five spot and shift the aging right-handed power hitter down to number seven or number eight. There are two possibilities: either the number-five hitter does bat in the first inning, or he doesn’t. If he does bat in the first inning, he is most likely going to be batting with a runner in scoring position, so then who do you want up there: the line-drive hitter, or the low-average power hitter?

If he
doesn’t
bat in the first inning, then he’s got to be batting first or second in the second inning. And if he leads off the second inning, who would you rather have up there: the line-drive hitter, or the low-average power hitter?

Either way, I would argue, you’re better off with the line-drive hitter hitting fifth and the power hitter hitting seventh or eighth, given that the two hitters are of equal ability.

Of course, my studies show that it doesn’t make any big difference one way or the other. In the 1990s, unlike any other period in baseball history, we have offenses which consist of just wall-to-wall power hitters; power hitters leading off, power hitters hitting eighth. The cleanup hitter is now just the best power hitter.

If there were such a thing as a manager who could “create” runs by maximizing his batting order, one would think that his team would score more runs than predicted by the runs-created formula. If there were managers who were losing runs by misaligning their batting orders, one would assume those teams would score fewer runs than predicted by the formula.

In fact, however, there are no teams which consistently outperform or consistently underperform their expected runs created. In any season, of course, there will be some team which has 750 “formula runs,” but which actually scores 780 or even 800 runs. But if you look at the same teams the next season, you’ll find that they don’t score any more runs than expected.

Any real “trait” or “ability” of a team will tend to be at least somewhat predictable from season to season. The teams which hit lots of home runs in 1997 will tend to hit lots of home runs again in 1998. The teams which steal bases in 1997 or which have good pitching in 1997 will tend to be the same in 1998. Having an efficient offense or an inefficient offense is not a trait which can be predicted, or which persists from season to season; it’s just a random occurrence.

If batting order
did
have a significant impact on the number of runs scored by the team, one would not expect this to be true.