Carleton: What’s more important for managers, analytical skills or people savvy?
From Russell Carleton at Baseball Prospectus on May 13, 2014:
There are two men in front of you who want to be your team’s manager. One of them is fully up to date on all the latest baseball research. He reads Baseball Prospectus religiously, and that’s not a metaphor. He actually has a shrine to Dan Brooks in his bedroom. (We have a support group that meets on Wednesdays, that’s how I know.) He’s fully on board with the analytical movement, dabbles in his own research, drops the phrase “run expectancy matrix” into sentences, and has pledged that he will make sure that the supercomputer is in the dugout with him every night. He’s also rather boring. Not a jerk, just…boring.
The other guy is a complete troglodyte when it comes to the numbers. He doesn’t need a guy with a Ph.D. who quit playing after seventh-grade summer rec league softball telling him how to manage a baseball team. That guy’s just a talk radio caller who knows more acronyms. Bachelor no. 2 promises to hit the fast guy first and the guy who is really only good at bunting second, use his closer every single time he has a three-run lead in the ninth, and write headlines with bad puns on WAR in them. But my oh my, after listening to him speak, you would run through the Green Monster if he told you to. He embodies every cliché about being a “leader of men” that you’ve ever heard.
If you’d hire the first man as your manager, please turn to page 27. If you’d choose the second, please turn to page 28. Oh…and don’t do the thing where you keep your thumb there on the page so that if you didn’t like the outcome, you could come back. Cheater.
Read the full article here: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=23561
Originally published: May 15, 2014. Last Updated: May 15, 2014.