sk7326

He is terrific. This is stuff Bobby Cox and Earl Weaver also had down too.

There has been a lot written since this - so I am going to try to address more than just the quoted point ... 1. The manager is the press guy. That takes up a decent chunk of time - and in Boston more than that. Would it be better to have a trained press guy doing the day to day - possibly in isolation, but it clearly would be poor for the customer relationship. Fans want that connection to the club every day, and so someone who is in the dugout is best served to do it. 2. There are a non-baseball demands which have to be worked. Community relations, marketing, the people who get photos onto things, NESN spots. There are more stakeholders who want a piece of the players - and the players still have their actual work to do. So the manager has to help facilitate that stuff. 3. How do you optimize performance? Now, there is a ton of publicly available information (obviously) about stuff players do - and heartfelt attempts to measure them. The org probably has proprietary versions of all of these - and do things with Pitch F/X data which we'll never know. There are also the advance scouts who are sending intel back on tonight's opponent. All of these functions are theoretical inputs into performance. I mean, knowing all this stuff helps - but how does that get translated into stuff that the player and manager can use. That is a big piece - processing lots of data (or more accurately, somebody else's analyses) - into actionable stuff. 4. What is the goal of the organization? Now, who doesn't want to go 162-0? But there are 83 win seasons which don't move the org forward, and there was 65 win seasons that do. That's the managers job too, no? Putting the management's plan and goals (hopefully the manager has some input here) into action. The best example is seeing how hopeless Pedroia looked in a 2006 callup - and then having management decide "he's gonna do this" and Francona not pulling the Alex Cora lever hyperactively. (of course Pedroia had to have rewarded that) 5. The in-game decisions are significant obviously - but I reckon you're basically looking at a decision tree which has been plotted out fairly comprehensively beforehand. If some situation occurs at some point in the game, we'll do this. The manager is not executing this robotically - but yeah, most of the decisions made in a game are not interesting, and fairly obvious. Managing a pitching staff (especially during the season) is probably the most obvious tactical thing a manager does - especially balancing the goal of tonight (Win) vs the longer term (say, why don't we pitch Sale on 2 days rest??).

Life with having options. It was evocative of the 2007 Buchholz no-no ... a burst of sunshine coming out of nowhere

they could not have gotten more for him. i suspect he will be here for a longer haul soon enough.

if you keep generating baserunners - at some point you will sequence them correctly

oh i don't know. it's more like a boss in a real job. Managing assignments, removing obstacles for getting the work done - fostering a good atmosphere, supervising the assistant coaches, communicating with the C-level folks. That is a lot more than a babysitter can do.

Bradley - yes ... although this is the JBJ exprience. There will be a month he will turn into Mike Trout at the plate ... I am zen with this being the reality Panda? Who knows - the good thing is we got zilch from 3B last year - so any improvement will be striking.

The Sox production at catcher is fine - and realistically the option of Swihart could open up later in the year if he has satisfied their goals defensively and Vasquez turns into a pumpkin. (which I am not predicting - but is a fair thing to be bearish on)

Porcello is not as good as the 2016 model - and not as bad as the 2015 1st half version. In some ways, this is what he is (albeit a slightly below median outcome) - guy whose value comes more from inning eating than dominance. Not that he is in reality a bad pitcher - he's not ... but the value is more in churning a lot of "decent-pretty good" ... certainly in bulk more than enough to justify his contract,

John McNamara was an awful manager. Hell, Ned Yost made back to back WS doing a lot of suboptimal things.

There are managers who do help their team (Bochy, Francona, Maddon, a couple others) ... and a few who actively hurt their team (those Matt Williams seasons in Washington, Dusty Baker). The rest are in the middle. Farrell was crucial in 2013 when the Red Sox just needed a normal human being to occupy that position after the Bobby Valentine season. The most direct impact he can have is managing the staff - and while how he has managed relievers has not had amazing results, I am not sure the raw material has been great either. At least this year he seems to have a reliable back of the pen.

The strategy thing is a weird claim. Strategy on the offensive end is mostly bunk anyway. Indeed - the only reason the 2009 Yankees lost games at all in the postseason was because Girardi managed the team like a cellar dwelling NL club.

Shaw got off to a nice start last year too - he is still more likely to turn into a pumpkin than continue this. The Sox got nothing out of 3B last season, and that has persisted this season. Fourtunately, they won 95 last year with zippo from that position.

He averaged fewer than 6 innings a start - the bullpen never got relief in his outings.

I look at this way. The team is 22-21 ... an 83-84 win pace ... with very few things going right (Sale, Rodriguez, Kelly, Kimbrel - that's it), against a fairly stern schedule. I think there is a measure of credit here for the team to keep its head above water while a lot of things just haven't gone too well.

He was ... but he was a ghastly watch at times ... like Matsuzaka. Not finding the strike zone, working slowly. Dice-K's 2008 was the worst "good" pitcher I ever saw.

OPS is good for its purpose (to me) - which is a good training wheel statistic for people who have been raised on batting average and RBIs. Now OBP matters more - even if you did not have the correlation in front of you ... a team with a 1.000 SLG could be retired (1 homerun and 3 outs) while a team with a 1.000 OBP would never finish a batting inning. That said, it HAS been annoying to watch. But the indicators lean strongly toward this turning around.

a little bit of a red herring here ... OBP and SLG are not independent. While OBP is a lot more important, they are going to correlate quite a bit. The Sox 4th/19th split is truly unusual - again, everything they are doing indicates this will solve itself. Team is 6th in the league in line drive rate, 4th in hard contact, 4th in doubles. Now the interesting thing is that the Sox are the hardest team in the league to strike out by a mile (the 2nd place Astros are closer to 16th than they are to the Sox). Has there been a connection between contact and trying to lift the ball. I don't know. That is the interesting question to me.

Probably - but I do think Dombrowski won't be deterred. The question is whether they think the kid can handle batting 9th, and figuring out stuff on the fly. Once you get to the bigs, instruction is harder. Butterfield is an industry admired fielding coach - but obviously, with games every night - there is a lot of self study required.

Trout could have won the last 5 MVPs!!! Keith Law once talked about his scouting story - and how everybody missed on Trout's evaluation. Trout was in high school in New Jersey - which was a problem anyway, after the Orioles disaster with Billy Riddell. But his high school senior season iirc was 2009 - with that brutal winter. Scouts simply couldn't get in to see him play - the games kept getting cancelled.

i don't know if its decided yet. I'd go Devers too.

I don't know who is "worst" ... but Matt Clement is probably the worst "watch" ... Dice-K (though he was good) was also agonizing to watch

Now I'll argue some nuance here. Kimbrel is (or would be) more valuable as he is asked to enter games in 8th innings from time to time. It's not just coming in with the bases empty. (which happens most of the time, but it's a long season and managing wear is okay) My issue is the notion (which I think some of the "pro paying big money" sentiment gets to) that the 9th inning is some sort of magical formula which requires paying a guy a lot of money. For the most part, it is just not that difficult a job.

I agree - but it also depends on the kid. Scouting the stat line is a problem in any direction.

He did draw 3 walks in these 5 games and the strikeouts are not crazy either - we'll see how he rides through this - but again, it seems like something a ball finding a gap can fix.