Credentials for five NL Manager of the Year candidates

— -- The email looked as if it had been written in ancient Sanskrit. "BBWAA Voter," it read, "this is the link to your official BBWAA ballot for the 2015 National League Manager of the Year Award."

There were no further instructions beyond telling us to state our name and affiliation. No clarification about how to gauge who the best manager of 2015 was. No statistical guidelines or handy hints. Just three empty fields in which to list our picks, plus the power of our imaginations.

When the National League and American League Manager of the Year awards are announced Tuesday night, you can bet that the winners will meet most, and very possibly all, of the following criteria. The teams they manage will have winning records. Those teams will almost certainly have made the playoffs. And they'll have done so despite preseason consensus among the experts that said their teams wouldn't be all that good. Throughout the years, voters have used that formula again and again to decide the manager of the year -- team beats expectations, manager gets the credit and that's that.

As a first-time voter for the manager of the year award (in this case, National League), I didn't come in with any set voting formula or really any precedent at all when it came to voting. In fact, I came in with far more questions than answers.

How much credit for a winning team's success should go to the manager?

Are there any metrics we can use to evaluate a manager's performance beyond team wins?

Can a manager's performance vary widely from one season to the next?

How do we even know how to spot a good manager?

To try to answer these and other questions, let's consider the credentials for five different NL managers, and the case for each one as 2015 NL Manager of the Year. (Note: As a voter, I'm not allowed to divulge who I voted for until the results are announced.)

Joe Maddon, Chicago Cubs

He's probably going to win. The Cubs were coming off a 73-89 season in 2014 that was also their fifth straight losing campaign. Then they surged to 97-65, the third-best record in baseball and a mark that would've been good enough to win any division except the one they played in.

You can find many factors to explain the Cubs' huge improvement this season. Maddon's bosses were aggressive in the offseason, reeling in not only premium starting pitcher Jon Lester but also key complementary players such as Dexter Fowler and Miguel Montero. Jake Arrieta went absolutely nuts, reeling off arguably the best second half for any starting pitcher in major league history. An armada of young talent burst onto the scene, led by NL Rookie of the Year Kris Bryant and featuring fellow rookies Kyle Schwarber and Addison Russell as well as Jorge Soler playing in his first full major league season. The Cubs fielded a dynamic group of players that likely would have won a bunch of games no matter who was managing the team.

So is there anything we can say about Maddon, besides the fact that some pundits badly underestimated his team during spring training, and that he happened to be in the dugout for a whole bunch of wins?

Well, rookies rarely play as well as this group did, so you could argue that Maddon provided the kind of loose environment that enabled Bryant, Schwarber and Russell to flourish. Maddon came into this season with a strong managerial reputation, one forged thanks to four playoff berths while at the helm of the poorly funded, underdog Tampa Bay Rays. He's generally considered a strong in-game tactician who's highly receptive to new, analytical ideas. He's also hailed as a player's manager, someone who'll do everything from cancel batting practice to help ease the strain of a long season to fostering dress-up-themed road trips, pregame high jinks and postgame dance parties to keep his players loose.

Combine the Cubs' big leap this year with some strong anecdotal evidence, and Maddon has a fine case for the award.

Mike Matheny, St. Louis Cardinals

While the Cubs were preseason underdogs, the Cardinals were the opposite. With 14 winning seasons in their past 15 campaigns, four straight playoff berths, two straight division titles and a World Series win just four years ago, the Cards were widely expected to win the NL Central. And win it they did, notching an MLB-best 100 wins.

So if you're scrutinizing Matheny for NL Manager of the Year, nothing to see here, right? Team with huge expectations plays really well, manager doesn't mess anything up, the end.

But here's the thing: Given everything that happened to this team in 2015, the Cardinals had absolutely no business winning anywhere near that many games. Staff ace Adam Wainwright got hurt and tossed just 28 innings. Starting first baseman Matt Adams played in just 60 games; starting left fielder Matt Holliday just 73. Yadier Molina forgot how to hit, then got hurt. Center field was a revolving door. There was also nothing anywhere close to an MVP, Cy Young or rookie of the year candidate on the roster. These are the kinds of setbacks and defects that might've torpedoed other clubs. Only they didn't make a dent in the Cardinals ... at least not until playoff time, and this is a regular season-only award.

For more perspective on Matheny's impact on the Cardinals, I asked ace St. Louis Post-Dispatch writer Derrick Goold for his thoughts. While there's always some risk of bias when questioning a local beat writer's thoughts on the manager (or players) he covers, Goold has been frequently critical of Matheny's in-game tactics; he's as even-handed a beat writer as you'll find in the game. Goold said Matheny's biggest strength lies not with the strategic buttons he presses within a game but rather the confidence he instills in his players.

"He takes the depth that's given to him, and convinces guys they can contribute, that they can keep the train rolling," Goold said. "You don't have to be Holliday or Wainwright, but we'd really like you to be the best Tommy Pham you can be. He'll say, 'I want them to feel like they're the king of the world that day.' He brings that up especially with pitchers: 'They put me out today, not anybody else.'"

There's a larger debate to be had here about what exactly the biggest role of a manager is: making the right moves during a game, or getting the most out of his players through other means. Is Matheny a boob for, say, religiously saving lights-out closer Trevor Rosenthal for save situations, given how much more valuable a top pitcher becomes in a tie game with runners on as compared to ahead three runs entering the ninth with the bases empty? Or is he playing the long game to perfection, given Matheny's own admission that he uses Rosenthal that way in large part to help the closer rack up as many saves as possible and thus earn more money -- which could also foster fierce loyalty and higher workplace satisfaction from a key player?

These aren't questions we can answer definitively, of course. But they're certainly food for thought the next time we witness a case of #Mathenaging. And they offer a good reason to ponder a non-Maddon choice when filling out a manager of the year ballot.

Terry Collins, New York Mets

After a blazing hot start to the season, the Mets played sub-.500 baseball for three months, found themselves hovering around .500, and looked set to end the year with a respectable but still slightly disappointing second-place finish. Then one of the craziest weeks in franchise history happened. Then the Mets steamrolled the rest of the league and rolled to an NL East title, eventually winning the NL pennant, too.

Was Collins a lousy manager from late April to late July who suddenly honed his craft at the trade deadline? Or did he hugely benefit from the trades for Yoenis Cespedes, Tyler Clippard, Kelly Johnson and Juan Uribe, a return to health for Travis d'Arnaud and other key contributors, and the emergence of dazzling rookie Michael Conforto? The most reasonable explanation is probably the latter, though it's also possible that the Mets responded well to Collins' leadership and optimistic tenor somewhere along the way.

At any rate, here's another case where simply crediting a manager for a team winning more games than expected oversimplifies the situation -- even if Collins might in some ways have a reasonable case for the award.

Clint Hurdle, Pittsburgh Pirates

It's a mad, mad world when the Pirates making the playoffs comes off as expected or routine. But the Bucs did crack the postseason for the third straight year. Then again, Pittsburgh has done more with subtle, analytical moves both on the field and off than nearly any other club over that three-year span, and Hurdle's conversion from old-school skipper to open-minded analytics enabler has helped make that happen. Does a manager of the year award necessarily have to go to whoever's in charge of an out-of-nowhere climb up the standings, or should continued excellence get its due?

Bruce Bochy, San Francisco Giants

This is where the tomato-throwing starts. The Giants won the World Series in 2014. In 2015, they won 84 games and missed the playoffs. If we apply the same post-hoc reasoning that leads voters to reward managers of surprisingly successful teams with hardware, shouldn't Bochy be a top candidate for worst manager of the year?

I don't see it that way. In fact, I gave serious thought to casting my ballot for Bochy, despite the fierce competition he faced from the others on this list.

During last year's playoffs, I argued that Bochy wasn't just one of the best managers in the game today -- he was also one of the best of all time. His ability to masterfully run his bullpens, get the most out of veteran hitters and coax impressive results out of young players who were never seen as elite prospects makes him a cut above most other skippers. When it comes to stats beyond raw win totals that argue in a manager's favor, I noted that Bochy was one of the game's best at guiding his team to more wins than you'd expect based on its raw runs scored and runs allowed totals. If you want to argue that great bullpens tend to produce those kinds of results, then we can always revert to that signature Bochy skill and note that when it comes to in-game tactics, a manager's ability to effectively shepherd a pitching staff trumps all others.

Chris Jaffe wrote the go-to guide on evaluating baseball managers, called (appropriately enough) "Evaluating Baseball's Managers." When I posed the question of Bochy's candidacy for manager of the year on Twitter back in September, Jaffe argued that a manager's most important task is to successfully interact with his players. Further, he said that because human behavior is so volatile, that can in fact make a manager's year-to-year performance more volatile than that of the top hitters or top pitchers in the league.

If that's our working theory, it's entirely possible that Bochy wasn't quite at the top of his game in 2015, which was part of the reason the Giants fell back after their 2014 World Series triumph. Of course, we could also argue that any team that can bid goodbye to a key contributor like Pablo Sandoval, lose key players like Hunter Pence and Joe Panik to injuries for as long as the Giants did, and get something between mediocre and nightmarishly bad results from multiple starting pitchers (most notably Matt Cain, Tim Lincecum, Ryan Vogelsong and Tim Hudson) should end up well below .500, not on the fringes of a wild-card race.