Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The (46 page)

Okay; I made that quote up, because I forgot to save one, but if you listen carefully the next time a manager gets fired, you will hear somebody say how quick “they” are to fire the manager anymore. Of course, if you had listened carefully twenty-five years ago, when Dave Bristol was fired or Eddie Kasko or Ken Aspromonte, I’m sure you would have heard the same thing, so this isn’t evidence, but it introduces the issue: Is managerial stability decreasing? Are teams today quicker to fire the manager than they were a generation ago? Are they slower? Has there been any change?

In 1945 the average major league manager had been employed in his current position for 8.37 seasons. Of course, averages are often misleading, as we all know from the example of the man with one foot in a fire and the other in a block of ice. (On average, he was comfortable.) By 1945 Connie Mack had been employed in his current position for forty-five years, which tends to infarcalate the average.

Taking Connie Mack out of it, however, the average for the other fifteen managers in 1945 was still almost six years. The other managers at that time included Joe McCarthy in New York, where he had been for fifteen years, Jimmie Dykes in Chicago (he had been there for a dozen years, without winning anything), and Joe Cronin, winding up his eleventh year as a player/manager in Boston, where he had won absolutely nothing as yet. Several other managers had been occupying their current positions since the late 1930s.

In the first season of major league baseball (1876) the average major league manager had had his job, obviously, for only one season. From 1876 to the turn of the century this average worked its way slowly upward, peaking at 4.16 years per manager in 1897.

That average dipped a little in 1898, when Cap Anson was forced out in Chicago, and was driven under 2.00 by the startup of the American League, which, of course, had no established managers.

That effect was very temporary, and by 1908 the tenure average was back to 4.06 years. The average continued to ascend over the next two decades, partly because of Connie Mack and John McGraw, but partly for other reasons, as we shall see in a moment. By 1926 the average was up to 7.25 years per manager. Connie Mack was then in his twenty-sixth season with the A’s, and John McGraw in his twenty-fifth season in New York, but the tenure average of the other fourteen managers was still 4.64 seasons. In 1926 only one major league manager took over a new team, that being Joe McCarthy in Chicago.

The winter of 1926–1927 was of great controversy in baseball, and two of the controversies sent a total of three managers moving on toward new challenges. Rogers Hornsby exhausted the patience of Sam Breadon and Branch Rickey in St. Louis, despite leading the Cardinals to their first World Championship, and was traded to New York. Speaker and Cobb were forced from their roosts in Cleveland and Detroit. Normal attrition caught up with other managers; altogether, eight of the sixteen teams had new managers in 1927, dropping the average to 6.18.

But then the average began to click back upward. It went down, of course, when McGraw retired, but another decade of steady progress had pushed the tenure average, by 1945, to 8.37 years, an all-time record.

It is surely not a coincidence that this happened during the war. Baseball men hunkered down and waited for the war to be over. In a sense, the war years were the truest test of a manager’s skills. With almost all of the established stars leaving the game, everybody was scrambling for players. The manager who could make a quick and accurate assessment about a player he didn’t know, the manager who could form and execute Plan B quickly when Plan A went off to war, the manager who could find a use for a one-skill or two-skill talent—that manager never had a larger advantage than during the war.

But at the same time, everybody had an alibi. When a team performed badly, how could you blame the manager? After all, he had lost his cleanup hitter. He’d lost his starting catcher. He’d lost his best pitcher. Every manager had a ready excuse—and, in fact, few managers were fired during the war years.

After the war ended, managers started to drop like flies. By 1949 the tenure average was down to 5.25 seasons, which would have been 2.33 seasons if you didn’t count Connie Mack. Connie retired, and the average dropped to 2.12 seasons in 1952—the lowest it had been since 1902. Thus, when average managerial tenure is plotted on a chart across time, the lowest point in modern history and the highest point are separated by only seven seasons—1952 and 1945.

Average tenure is one way to measure managerial stability, but probably a better way is by focusing on the percentage of teams which have
new
managers. In theory—that is, in a vast universe—these two measurements would be tied in an inverse knot. If one-fourth of all teams replace their manager in any season, then the average managerial tenure has to be 4.00 years. If one-fifth of teams change managers, then the average manager’s tenure has to be 5.00 years.

However, this would only be true if you had a very, very large number of teams. With a limited number of teams, probably the best way to make an estimate of managerial stability is to take a group of seasons and figure the percentage of teams which hired new managers.

In baseball’s opening act, 1876–1979, 68% of all teams had new managers in any season. Of course, in the first season, when there were eight teams, all eight had new managers, so that starts us out at 100%.

Managerial stability increased steadily for more than a half-century after that. Teams became less and less inclined to fire the manager. In the 1880s, 52% of all teams had new managers. In the 1890s this figure declined to 48%, then to 36% in the first decade of the twentieth century, then to 33%, then 25%. Of the 160 major league teams in the 1940s, only 34 had first-year managers. That’s 21%. This chart gives the data for each of major league baseball’s first eight decades:

A word of explanation. We counted the number of
teams
with new managers, not the number of new managers—thus, if a team had four new managers in a season, that counts as one, not four. If a team changed managers in midseason, that counted as a season with a new manager, the same as if the change were made the previous winter. If a man managed a team for four years and was forced out in midseason, that counted as the first season for the new manager, rather than the fifth season of the old manager—with a couple of exceptions. We ignored interim managers, and we ignored people who managed only a few games. Joe McCarthy managed the Chicago Cubs until the closing days of the 1930 season, when he was replaced by Rogers Hornsby. That counts as the last season for Joe McCarthy, not the first season for Rogers Hornsby.

Also, for obvious reasons, we ignored the leagues which were only in existence for a year or two, the Federal League, the Player’s League, and the Union Association. Including them would have given us misleading spikes in the data.

Anyway, it is clear that, within this time frame, a trend was in motion. Teams
were
becoming progressively more reluctant to fire the manager.

This ended at the end of World War II. From the 1940s through the late 1980s, the position of managers became more tenuous:

From the 1920s through the 1940s, about one team in four changed managers. From 1950 to 1990, it became one team in three. In this latter era, the tenure average for major league managers was always around 3.00 years. Discounting expansion teams, the percentage of teams with new managers was higher in the 1980s than in any decade since 1900–1909.

Why did the position of manager suddenly become less solid about 1950? The reasons are probably cultural. I came of age in the 1960s. As children of the ’60s, we looked back on the 1950s as a quiet, sleepy period when nothing of much interest happened. I think it is fair to say that this remains the prevailing image of the Eisenhower era.

In retrospect, it is apparent that nothing could be further from the truth. Our country experienced more broad, fundamental changes in the 1950s, I believe, than in any other decade in American history. What we experienced in the 1960s was not underlying change, but something more like a cultural panic. When the aggressive, let’s-do-it-now-and-ask-questions-later attitude which had characterized Americans for 150 years met up with postwar technology and a booming economy, the pace of change exploded. We all became a little quicker, a little more aggressive, a little more bloodless, and a little less committed. In the 1960s, we started to worry about that. The rate of firing managers increased in the 1950s for precisely the same reason that the divorce rate increased, and for precisely the same reason that baseball teams, after fifty years of standing still, began racing around the continent. We turned impatient.

In the 1990s, at least so far, the rate of changing managers has gone back to its pre-1950 levels:

At the start of September 1995, the average major league manager had been employed in his present position for 4.82 seasons. This is the highest average tenure since Connie Mack retired.

As to why this may have happened … I don’t really know, but a few thoughts.

1) It may be that the 1994–95 strike had an effect similar to World War II: it provided every failing manager with a ready excuse.

2) It may be that, as players change teams more rapidly, management looks to managers to provide some stability within the organization. Or, stated another way, it may be that since it is easier to move players, it is less necessary to move managers.

3) It may be, John Sickels suggests, that the large corporations which own most teams today are less impulsive than the independent operators of earlier days. Calvin Griffith would fire his manager because attendance was down.

4) The decade’s not over. The data may change before it is.

One thing I notice is that, in modern baseball, a World Championship seems to inoculate a manager for a period of several years. In the 1960s and ’70s (and before), managers of World Championship teams normally were fired or forced out within two or three years, unless they won another World Championship. From 1962 to 1980 the nineteen World Championships were won by sixteen different managers—only four of whom were still managing the same team three years after their last World Championship. Only Walt Alston, Red Schoendienst, Earl Weaver, and Chuck Tanner were able to hold their jobs for three solid years without winning another invitation to the White House.

But in recent years, winning a World Championship has seemed to guarantee the job. Opening 1996, the winners of the World Championship in 1981, 1987, 1988, 1991, 1992, and 1993 were still employed with the same teams, granted that that’s only three managers. Tony LaRussa, who won the World Championship in Oakland in 1989, stayed there for six frustrating years afterward and left on his own terms. Perhaps Sparky Anderson illustrates the change best. With Cincinnati in the 1970s, nine years of brilliant success didn’t save him; he was let go two years after winning the 1976 World Championship, and he won 180 games in those two years. But with Detroit, one World Series was enough to sustain him through eleven years of sometimes gruesome performance.

The bottom-line data are pretty clear. Modern teams do
not
hurry to fire the manager—in fact, quite the opposite is true. Managers today are not quite college professors, but they’re not fruit flies, either.

This is ten degrees off the subject, but it is something I feel strongly about. Marge Schott is the owner of the Cincinnati Reds. In a report broadcast on ESPN on March 5, 1996, Ms. Schott was asked about an armband swastika that she reportedly had in her house. Yes, she said; she did have such an object. It was taken from a Nazi soldier in World War II, and given to her by her husband, a World War II veteran.

Sensing a minefield, she attempted to cover herself—by defending Adolf Hitler. Hitler, she said, “was good at the beginning, but he went too far.”

Ms. Schott has a history of insensitive remarks, and so the media world landed on her shoulders and began to kick viciously at her teeth. Talk show hosts quickly revised their monologues to include Marge Schott jokes, Marge the Bigot. A tabloid television show had a poll question for the day, “Should Marge Schott be thrown out of baseball?”

Another ESPN reporter asked acting commissioner Bud Selig whether any disciplinary action was planned, implying that some such action was appropriate. Ms. Schott issued a quick apology, but on May 8, 1996,
USA Today
reported in a front-page story that “Bud Selig says (the apology) is inadequate and that disciplinary action could be expected.”

Am I the only one here who is profoundly offended by the idea of punishing Marge Schott for what she says? To deal with the smallest issue first, I am mystified by how it is decided that we should take offense at these remarks. We live in a society in which offensive behavior is commonplace. I can walk two blocks from my office and find 500 things at which I could, if I chose, take offense—obscenities spray-painted on the sides of buildings, homeless people begging for money, posters of naked women hanging in the windows of music stores, tobacco ads, gay couples making out in the park, and people playing their car radios loud enough to wake Beethoven. Our culture dictates that we put up with these things. I’m okay with that, but how in the world, in such a society, do people choose to be offended by some essentially innocuous comments by a daffy old woman a thousand miles away?

It’s a free country; you can choose Marge to be offended by, if you want to. But even so, when did historical ignorance become a punishable offense? To me, the idea of censuring Marge Schott because she doesn’t have a firm grip on the history of the Third Reich is a great deal more offensive than anything she said.

Marge Schott, says a friend of mine, was acting as a representative of the Cincinnati Reds, and thus as a representative of major league baseball. Freedom of speech means that the law will not punish her for what she says—but major league baseball may.

This is not an argument about
how
we should punish people who express opinions that we disagree with. It is an argument about
whether
we should punish people who express opinions we disagree with. Voltaire said, “I may disaprove of what you say, but I will defend until death your right to say it.” What are we saying here? I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will only punish you by civil sanctions, as opposed to criminal penalties?

I have learned, in middle age, that I have a far different concept of what it means to be liberal than does most of our society. Liberalism is not grounded in sensitivity, which is the determination to say or do nothing which might give offense; rather, it is grounded in
tolerance
, which is the determination not to
take
offense.

Taking offense is a cottage industry in this country. We have an antieverything defamation society, so that no matter what you say about anybody, it is somebody’s job to take offense. Whenever someone who is vulnerable to this kind of attack says anything which can be contorted into an objectionable statement, fifty reporters will immediately check their Rolodexes to see whose job it is to be offended by this.

The people who do this are not going to stop as long as it keeps working. But, backing away from the immediate controversy, why are we doing this? Is that subsection of the media which generates these controversies serving us well, and should they be allowed to drive the national discussion in this way? Or should we, as a culture, start to nod politely and ignore them?

In the last twenty years TV networks, school districts, corporations, political candidates, and baseball teams have been forced to fire someone who made “insensitive” remarks. The time has come, I would suggest, to stop and ask ourselves whether we are doing the right thing. What if, the next time an owner (or a broadcaster) makes a statement which some people may find offensive, we first stop to ask ourselves a series of simple questions.

• Has this individual used a racist or otherwise objectional epithet?
  
• Has this person
  intentionally
  advocated policies we find reprehensible?
  
• Has this person made remarks which are derogatory to some group of citizens—not merely
  offensive
  to them, but actually insulting?
  

If an answer in there is yes, then there may be a legitimate cause of action against the offender. But if the answers are all no, then maybe his employer should, instead, release a prepared statement.

This won’t satisfy anybody, so three days later you’re going to need to release another statement:

That won’t shut them up, either, so seven days later, you issue another statement. Don’t say anything that isn’t true—rather, say what
is
true: that freedom of speech is a higher value than pandemic sensitivity.

Tolerance for what other people say flows naturally from an understanding of why they say it. Adolf Hitler received positive press comment in this country up until 1939. Marge Schott is old enough to have been influenced by that.

One of the things that bothers me about these sensitivity lynchings is that almost all of the victims are older citizens, like Marge Schott, Al Campanis, and Jimmy the Greek. This is America; respect for our elders is strictly optional. But what this is, really, is Baby Boomers punishing members of the prewar generation for their inability to navigate the rapids of post-1960s political sensitivity.

Marge Schott’s husband fought in World War II. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel the generation that actually fought the war has earned the right to say whatever the hell they want to about Adolf Hitler. Al Campanis was a teammate and friend of Jackie Robinson, one of the people who actually
helped
when the bullets were flying in that war. He is entitled, by virtue of that, to try to tell us whatever he wants to about race relations.

Was he right? Of course not; he was expressing old ideas, and old ideas are often wise, and often foolish.
But we can listen
. We are not
required
to ram his comments back down his throat.

No one’s speech is “too wrong” to be heard.

This would be a different argument if Ms. Schott had said something which was
truly
intolerant—if, for example, she had used an ethnic slur, or if she had advocated policies of racial injustice. When someone associated with the game crosses that line, we have a conflict between our desire to respect her freedom of speech, and our legitimate need to dissociate ourselves from what she says. Even in that case, I would argue that our efforts to dissociate ourselves from what she says must not trample on her right to say what she thinks.

But that’s a harder case. Marge Schott in the ESPN interview did not
mention
Jews. The question here is, has baseball’s compulsive fear of being accused of insensitivy so overwhelmed our respect for freedom of speech that
any
speech may be punished if anything “insensitive” may be inferred from it?

For many years, businesses discriminated against African Americans on the theory that their other customers demanded segregation. “We can’t serve Negroes,” a restaurant would argue, “because it would upset our white customers.”

Well, this is a similar situation. Baseball teams and television networks are trampling on the free speech of their employees and associates, on the theory that the public demands them to. The public has no right to that demand. Let me suggest that the law could allow businesses to punish inappropriate political commentary by employees or associates only when they can demonstrate that

a) there have been actual negative consequences to the inappropriate speech, rather than merely the
fear
of repercussions, and

b) they have attempted other remedies to cure the problem.

Almost any enterprise could claim to have met that burden, including baseball in the case of Marge Schott, but the existence of such a law would enable a person accused of insensitivity to fight back. If a business fired someone or took some other action against them based on a careless remark, the ex-employee could sue, just as, under current law, the ex-employee would be able to claim sex discrimination, age discrimination, or whatever. Businesses, being wary of lawsuits, would have to balance the fear of criticism with respect for the rights of their employees before they took action.

A book I would like to read—tell me if there is such a book—would be an account of the role of the media in lynchings. I would guess that if you studied lynchings, you would find, in more cases than not, that the local newspapers played a key role in whipping up hysteria against the victims.

Well, this is essentially a modern lynching. Why did people participate in lynchings, anyway? They participated to prove to themselves that they were better than those they attacked. What is gay bashing? It’s an infantile effort to prove oneself morally superior to the person being attacked.

And that’s what’s happening here, too. We’re beating up Marge Schott to prove to ourselves that we’re better than she is. But are we, really? Which of us has no bigotry in our soul, no dark pockets of unvented anger? We may be more clever than Marge, more discreet in our bigotry, but I don’t really believe that the Lord made any of us tolerant by nature.

We have an instinctive urge to band together and destroy invaders. Denied that urge by a society so compulsively open that no one may be targeted as an outsider, we act out our defensive aggression against those who deny our shared values. But this is a tragically closed circle, for what is dangerous about intolerance is the anger and self-righteousness that it occasions, and not merely that it is directed at “innocent” targets. Intolerance directed within the society is not
less
dangerous than intolerance directed at external targets, but
more
dangerous.

But, says my friend, what Marge Schott says may harm baseball. If you were Jewish and lived in Cincinnati, would you still go to Reds games? If a restaurant owner in your hometown made remarks offensive to you or those in your group, would you still patronize that restaurant?

If it was a good restaurant, absolutely.

There is much more to be said for forgiveness and tolerance than for self-righteousness and hypocrisy. The principle that citizens may be punished for “erroneous speech” is a short road to hell. The idea that we should punish people for expressing erroneous ideas is a million times more dangerous than the idea that Adolf Hitler was good in the beginning.

Give the lady a break. You’ll need it yourself some day.