With the hype around Craig Counsell last year (and Joe Maddon for years before) does this say something deeper about the true value of MLB managers in modern baseball? A decade or so ago, you used to see people saying that managers were now just conduits for front office strategies. That fell away for a bit with Bruce Bochy and others, but is that thinking more correct than we might want to admit?
Thanks again...for me, that is a powerful insight that I've not heard before. Appreciate the follow-up.
With the hype around Craig Counsell last year (and Joe Maddon for years before) does this say something deeper about the true value of MLB managers in modern baseball? A decade or so ago, you used to see people saying that managers were now just conduits for front office strategies. That fell away for a bit with Bruce Bochy and others, but is that thinking more correct than we might want to admit?
I certainly found that very few managers consistently were able to coax their players to perform better than we would expect based on projections: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-managers-are-headed-to-the-hall-of-mediocrity/