Keeping Trey Hillman In Perspective

he was doing from the beginning

yes

the fans who worried about the Spring Training meeting at home plate were probably right.

Except for the experience thing. You don’t need prior big league experience, and I guarantee when “stats” guys take over managing/gm positions they will not have big league experience.

If you hire someone with big league experience they are already a “baseball man” and you will see the same mistakes of misusing bullpens too many bunts, etc. We need to higher someone outside of the cookie cutter realm. Not to mention if this person has big league experience AND is available to hire then he is likely a retread. So why would we want a less successful version of the generic cookie cutter. Why not higher someone who understands business, probability, and basic management?

I would hire a non baseball industrial engineer who knows sabermetrics in a heart beat. Then I would let banny play/manage

Days before the firing, Pods said he doubted Hillman would get canned. Unless I’m remembering incorrectly.

The managerial impact is small, especially compared with other sports. Coaching decisions matter so much more in football, basketball, and soccer

that the idea that Bob McClure can instigate across-the-board improvement with his pitching staff is hogwash.

I’ve touched on this before, but it bears further expansion. Once guys get to the majors, they’re mostly set in their ways. Now, that doesn’t mean that they can’t change. It doesn’t mean that they might not hook up with a coach who can get them to buy into something.

But for every Sammy Sosa that Jeff Pentland straightened out, there’s a handful of Kansas City Royals that he screwed up or couldn’t do anything with. For every future hall-of-fame pitcher from the 1990s Atlanta Braves, there’s a couple of other guys Mazzone couldn’t help. So I guess what I’m trying to get across is that at the major league level, it’s all a crap shoot; almost every manager or coach is going to be able to help some number of players, but almost every manager or coach is also going to either completely fail or actually harm some other number of players.

That, of course, doesn’t mean there’s no “difference” between coaches; it just means that the impact is lessened.

Item two: Your final paragraph fails to take into account the “retirement” of Nick Schwartz, who had widely become a target in the industry for failing to manage the health of the team’s assets. This problem didn’t mysteriously appear with Trey Hillman, either; the Royals excessive injury issues stretch all the way back to the Tony Muser era. Now, that may be an argument that neither Muser, Bell, Pena, nor Hillman could succeed in Philly, I will grant you.

Item three: You keep sticking to this idea that coaching keeps becoming more important the further up you go, and it’s simply not true. I can explain it to you in terms that I’m absolutely certain you can fully grok:

If a coach at the college level or below has a prodigious talent under his wing, and said talent is a jackass who refuses to listen to coaching and behaves insubordinately, what happens to that player? Bench, suspension, or dismissal, right? The college coach doesn’t have to put up with that crap, and the good ones don’t.

Now what happens to the same player once he’s got himself a big-dollar major league contract that the team can’t unload, a GM who’s antsy about paying a guy all this money to ride the bench, a lack of potential trading partners because the player’s antics devalue the player’s trade value, and an inability to actually discipline the player via fines or suspensions due to union rules? Voila, you just stumbled onto 2/9 of the Royals starting lineup.

If the players are protected by a union and are shielded by a contract which the organization cannot afford to eat, or a player’s still in the minors but he signed a contract with a massive signing bonus, that in and of itself degrades the importance of coaching at those levels, because up to a certain breaking point the players can’t be coached unless they’re willing to be. You know why Leo Mazzone was a great pitching coach? Because he had a handful of guys who wanted to listen to him. Is that on Mazzone, or on the players? Well, there’s simply no way for us to know because we weren’t in the clubhouse, although I’d bet good money on the correct answer being “a little of both”.

That’s why I continually argue that coaching is at its most important in college, where the head coach has ultimate authority over everything which happens on the field. The AD’s not badgering him to get Jim Smith some playing time so he can be traded to Auburn. He’s not griping at the coach about wasting all the team’s money by not playing Bob Jones. Hell, the AD’s not even concerned about whether Bill Johnson’s rotator cuff is turning into spaghetti, because in a couple of years Bill Johnson won’t be his problem. A major league GM has to do all of these things, and as a result he’s going to interfere with the field manager’s mojo.

One last thing: I want to stress that all along my “argument” with you was never about whether a manager matters in terms of the overall product. It’s whether the tactical decisions he makes matter that much, because that’s the only thing we have the ability to measure from the outside. I have NO DOUBT that there are coaches and managers on the major league level whose actions “behind the scenes” contribute to wins and losses as much if not more than their tactical decision making, so if you’ve been under that impression I apologize for not being clear. I simply don’t think that you can say that any such “intangibles” are uniform throughout the player staff, nor can you look at a team and draw a conclusion unless the manager or coach in question is way out in front of his peers (like a Mazzone). And a manager who is clearly superior to his peers on a tactical level is a once-in-a-generation thing (Earl Weaver, pre-Cardinals Tony LaRussa). Weaver probably WAS worth about 10 games a year to Baltimore on a tactical level alone. The key point there is “to his peers”. The vast majority of managers are going to do mostly the same things.

But I think you have, in the past, raised a very interesting point which I probably let slide past me: we talk a lot about the real essence of Moneyball, which is seeking advantages which the opposition undervalues. I think an organization which made a point of acquiring potential managerial talent with “new ideas” and setting it loose in the minor leagues would get a leg up on the competition Pretty Damn Quick. Some of those managers wouldn’t work out because their ideas suck; some of them might wildly succeed because they come up with something new.

70 wins was my preseason prediction for wins