Jaffe: Evaluating Charlie Manuel’s career
From SABR member Chris Jaffe at The Hardball Times on May 1, 2012:
Charlie Manuel is an unusually difficult manager to try to depict and evaluate. Well, all managers are tough to evaluate. That’s why sabermetrics usually steers clear of trying to do so. We’re better at analyzing hitters or pitchers or even fielders because it’s easier to get concrete data on their performances. Evaluating physical performances isn’t so difficult.
But a manager? Well, it’s impossible to evaluate managers perfectly. However, imperfection isn’t a synonym for useless. That was a key belief I had when I wrote my book, Evaluating Baseball’s Managers, 1876-2008. And I came up with a few tools and techniques for trying to understand managers in it that someone must’ve thought worked well, because it won the Sporting News-SABR Award for outstanding baseball research.
I covered 89 managers in that book, but Charlie Manuel wasn’t one of them, in part because he hadn’t been on the job very long. But he now has a decade of managing under his belt, so let’s look at him.
The first thing to note is that Manuel really is an unusually difficult manager to get at. He’s been particularly blessed in his career to have an enormous amount of talent at his disposal. You can fill an All-Star team or two with men who played under Manuel.
Read the full article here: http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/evaluating-charlie-manuel/
Originally published: May 1, 2012. Last Updated: May 1, 2012.