Was Torre’s success with the Yankees because he finally had a team with talent, or because he took what he learned from his failures (or both?) Was Maddon the right guy for Tampa because the players were finally ready?

In 2003, the fans & writers in Chicago hailed Baker for ‘getting the Cubs back to respectability’, apparently because they had made the playoffs.

The previous 5 years (which were apparently so horrible and embarrassing) included an appearance in the NLDS, and a 2001 season under Baylor where the Cubs finished with the same record as Baker’s 2003 club.

In 2001 that left them 3rd (5 games out) in their division … and helped get Baylor fired halfway into the next year. In 2003 it gave them the NL Central title — and if they’d been in any other division in baseball, would have been, at best, a 2nd place finish and not close to taking the Wild Card.

He is absolutely awful (witness his attempts at coaching Allen Iverson) at coaching a team with egomaniac superstars.

[cough]Gary Payton[cough]

as far as I can tell, George does well with a team until his own ego rises and gets in the way

I don’t think you can put up a metric for managers or coaches, because they don’t perform on the field. And their role is to fit the team they have, not to make the team fit them.

An example I’ve posted about before is George Karl. In his first couple years with the Sonics, he was a tremendous coach, because he is very good at working with players without a lot of ego and getting them all to play together and play defense. He is absolutely awful (witness his attempts at coaching Allen Iverson) at coaching a team with egomaniac superstars. Whereas Phil Jackson is good at the latter and not so good at the former.

Lou Piniella may have been the right manager to take over the Cubs after they fired Dusty Baker and signed Soriano; he was not the right manager to take the Rays where Joe Maddon took them. Joe Torre sucked with the Mets and Cardinals and won four titles in New York. There is no statistic for “times ran interference with the front office” to show what his actual impact might have been.

Management is all about managing individuals. The key to baseball management, which is quite different from football or basketball coaching, is that they play everyday, and a manager has to be able to motivate a diverse group of men to prepare to play that grueling schedule. Different groups of men take different kinds of motivation, and we’re just not going to be able to see it in some statistic.

That being said, the fact that the M’s have a lack of talent and some untradeable contracts doesn’t point to one kind of manager, pitching coach, bench coach, hitting coach or anything else. We’re playing by ear here, and frankly the only thing that will matter is the results.

Properly, the difference here is that “results-based analysis” merely draws conclusions from results, whereas a sabermetric approach attempts to analyze results.

“Analyze” meaning sabremetrics tries to reduce causes their component parts and tries to consider and rule out, if possible, alternative explanations. (In other words, looks deeper and looks truer).

When a management team with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.

If you give this coaching staff (or any coaching staff) poor players they are going to have poor results. It doesn’t matter how good Riggleman was as a manager, Bryan LaHair wasn’t going to be a .300/.400/.500 first baseman.

Hiring based on a good track record alone is a bad idea, but hiring someone with a lousy track record because you are comfortable with them is not an automatic upgrade. Nepotism isn’t something new and I don’t think it would be considered part of running a successful business in the 21st century.

Maybe these guys will be great hires, but I see no reason to have any reaction to this move (positive or negative).

Oh, man. I miss Burgermaster.