Managers snapshot: Which MLB skippers do what well, and who's No. 1?
— -- The field of sabermetrics has made a lot of strides in assessing performance and value, but one area where it remains difficult to peg who's good and who isn't is evaluating baseball managers. Every single one of them was hired for a reason, almost all of them will eventually be fired for other reasons. Some of them will go to the Hall of Fame, and others you'll forget faster than you can say, "John Felske." But what they do, who they play, what they ask players to do, how well they prepare them, matters. Everybody wants to improve and win, because flags fly forever.
This isn't easy, though. There's a big part of the job we can't describe well, if at all: Leadership or people skills, or whether or not a guy runs an effective management team with his coaches. Most of those things, all critically important to how good a manager might be, handling his players and working with his front office, are usually going to be opaque to reporters and analysts.
Which leaves us looking at the things we can describe. The decisions manager make are integrated into the game's action, and describing how much value to assign to the manager and totaling up the value is something that isn't much easier -- as Casey Stengel said about winning the 1958 World Series, "I couldn't have done it without the players." But there has also been a notable decline in the use of a number of measurable tactical choices: sacrifice bunts and intentional walks are way down, and the pitchout is nearing extinction. So the number of things you might use to try and describe a manager's impact are going down. Some of that information, from Baseball Info Solutions through last week, is at the bottom of the page to refer to.
But on another level, we're evaluating how well managers are doing at creating situations for their players to succeed, and how well those players deliver. As other areas of decision-making decline, how well a manager handles his pitching staff and especially his bullpen has become the most important element of the job. And on another level, if you want to look at managers, you want to ask yourself, "Is this the guy I'd want in the dugout in Game 7 of the World Series?" Looking at the data we have and at the track records, we looked at who's doing what, and who, ultimately, you'd probably want if you have to answer that question.
Top Tier
Among the very best
Solid skippers
Question marks
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