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?
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/
Thanks again...for me, that is a powerful insight that I've not heard before. Appreciate the follow-up.