The Manager

by jonk on Apr 14, 2008 3:05 AM EDT

The Phils are off to one of their better April starts in recent memory at a record of 6-7, which boggles the mind since many of us are very frustrated with this start. The pitching has been good and the hitting has been decent, but as I showed last night, the defense has been putrid. I did make one mistake in that blog entry. I said that pitching, defense and hitting make up 99% of the game. While, in concept that is true, it ignores a part of the game that overlaps all aspects, and that is the manager. If you thought analyzing defense or speed in numerical form was hard, try figuring out the worth of a manager.

By all accounts, Charlie is a great clubhouse guy and has helped a lot of players with the bat. I have no idea if this is true, but I am certainly not going to say it isn't. Maybe Pat's reassurgence, Werth's breakout, Rollins' good hitting and even Chase and Howard have a lot to than Charlie for. I really have no idea, but I do have an idea where a manager does have an effect on the team.

Decision making.

If you turn on 610 WIP, you always hear some blowhard (either caller or host) calling Manuel an idiot or having a better idea how to do things (hindsight is always 20-20). How do you judge a manager though? I can poke holes in his lineup, but how much of a difference would it make between his and mine? Maybe at his bullpen usage, but who even knows how it would have turned out otherwise. I think the best way to guage a manager is in games where his decisions are magnified the most. A 7-1 blowout certainly had some effects from the manager, but keeping everything else constant, one change would do what? Make it a 6-2 game? Probably not a whole lot.

While a blowout is likely to be a blowout no matter what, I am not so sure about 1 run games. 1 run games are certainly an enigma when it comes to analysis. Sometimes the best teams have really poor records in 1 run games and often bad teams have good records in 1 run games. I tend to believe that blowouts show how good a team is, but 1 run records show how good management is (and not just the skipper, but the general manager too since he supplies the manager with the players he has).

The Phillies records since Manuel has taken the reigns:

Overall	W	L	1-Run	W	L
2008:	6	7		1	4
2007:	89	73		14	23
2006:	85	77		22	23
2005:	88	74		22	23
Total:	268	231		58	73

The team has a .537 Winning percentage (or 87-75 for an entire year) overall with Manuel as manager. They have a .447 winning percentage (or 72-90) in 1 run games during that time (and really bad the last 2 years). The difference is actually greater than just subtracting those two numbers. The team has a .571 winning percentage in games NOT decided by 1 run. In blowouts (either for or against) they are winning 57.1% of their games (or 93-69).

I don't know how much of this is truely on Manuel, but I beleive that this is the best indicator of good ingame management. The difference between the 1 Run Phillies and the Blow Out Phillies is 21 games over the course of an entire year. Had the 1 Run Phillies had a .500 record, then I'd think that there is really nothing involved other than luck. Or, if the blowout Phillies had an equally bad record, then I'd think it would make sense. But when the Blow Out Phillies are so drastically better than the 1 Run Phillies, it makes me scratch my head and wonder what the coach is doing to hurt this team.

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hard to tell

Although I'm not saying that Charlie's the best in-game strategist there is, I think it's hard to assign blame to him based on this. The big confounding factors are that A) frustrating as they've frequently been, the Phillies have been a pretty good team during Manuel's tenure, and good teams are more likely to win by a lot and lose by a little, and B) he's never had much of a bullpen to work with: Since 2005, the Phillies have ranked 8th, 6th, and 13th in the NL in WXRL. When you're constantly counting on low-strikeout guys to get outs in high-leverage situations, you're going to end up losing a lot of close games. I suppose you could ascribe some of this ineffectiveness to Manuel's usage patterns, but when the front office gives you the likes of Antonio Alfonseca and Jose Mesa, there's not a lot that any manager could do. To his credit, he did a great job of identifying the 3 guys he could count on in the 2007 stretch run, and rode them all the way to the pennant.

by SethC on Apr 14, 2008 4:21 AM EDT 0 recs

Seth is right

Bullpens are usually responsible for success or failure in one-run games. I don't think you can compile a long list of poor bullpen management by Manuel; he just hasn't had much to work with.

Teams usually don't have sustained bouts of success in one-run games anyway.

The D-Backs were 32-20 in one-run games in '07, 22-26 the year before, and 28-18 in 2005. All of three of those seasons, they were managed by Bob Melvin.

If the Phillies' offense wasn't so good, they'd probably be a bit better in one-run games as well. They were 27-20 in blowout games last season as opposed to 14-23 in one-run games.

http://crashburnalley.com/

by Crashburn Alley on Apr 14, 2008 5:41 AM EDT 0 recs

Ummm...

Neither of you have supplied any real data to back up your points. You say it is the bullpen that predicts your wins and losses in 1 run games more than anything.

Last year the Phillies had a bullpen ERA of 4.50, which is bad, but better than their starters and went 14-23. The year before they had a bullpen ERA of 3.81 and still had a mediocre record of 22-23 and the year before that they had an ERA of 4.23 and had the exact same record of 22-23.

I'd expect to see a much better record 2 years ago with an ERA of 3.81 if there is any sort of correlation. Show me some correlation and I will agree, but I really don't see any. Just pointing to the Diamondbacks or the Phillies isn't enough (not that I expect you to run regresion analysis on the entire league).

I am not claiming there is a 1:1 ratio here. Melvin had 2 very good years and an average year. Manuel has had 2 average years and a very bad year. Nothing works perfectly in a bubble, but I certainly think that the manager's role plays largest in 1 run games.

For Who? My teammates.

For What? To Win.

How Much? Where do I sign?

by jonk on Apr 14, 2008 8:26 AM EDT 0 recs

Re: Ummm...

Neither of you have supplied any real data to back up your points.

I disagree. I at least implied two pieces of data: The Phillies' winning percentage (good) and the team's WXRL (bad).

I find ERA to be a somewhat poor measure of a bullpen's performance, as it completely ignores not only inherited runners, but also game-specific context: Preventing runs in close games counts as much as preventing them in mop-up duty. 2 years ago the Phils were 3rd in the NL in bullpen ERA, but as I pointed out above, just 6th in WXRL. It's just anecdotal evidence of course, but this does square a bit better with their 25-27 bullpen W-L record that year.

Also, I don't think it's important whether the bullpen has been better than the rotation; my point is that it's been objectively mediocre-to-bad.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that these two factors completely explain the disparity between the One-Run Phillies and the Blowout Phillies, although, in addition to dumb luck, they just might. But I really do believe that they explain a lot more of it than Charlie Manuel.

by SethC on Apr 14, 2008 8:55 AM EDT up 0 recs

also...

I guess you wanted me to justify my assumptions better. I find the logic behind them to be pretty sound, but here's an article from the Hardball Times that explores the issue in more detail. I especially like the graph about halfway down.

by SethC on Apr 14, 2008 9:20 AM EDT up 0 recs

ERA is a much better indicator of a bullpen's performance than a reliever's performance. It does not completely ignore inherited runners, but just inherited runners from your starter. While that could count as maybe half of all inherited runners, it still counts inherited runners from other relievers (which often is the case with this team). I think you may find that it actually is a pretty decent measure as the bullpen will also not let a significant number of inherited runners from a starter score and they get no real benefit from that.

My point isn't so much what determines the result of a 1 run game, but what does a manager influence, on a per game basis, more than a 1 run game? I don't think a heckuva lot and Charlie has been average at best in those circumstances.

For Who? My teammates.

For What? To Win.

How Much? Where do I sign?

by jonk on Apr 14, 2008 9:09 PM EDT up 0 recs

one-run games

The THT article Seth cites, and the James article linked from that one, are useful in thinking about this.

I always felt that the key inputs regarding one-run outcomes were bench and bullpen, and for most of Manuel's tenure, the Phillies have been weak in both areas. This isn't his fault as much as it is Wade's and Gillimarbuckle's, but there you go.

What's so annoying, and I'll have more to say about this later today, is that this year's team has the best bullpen and bench of the Manuel era, but they've lost four out of five one-run decisions. That, I think, is mostly on the defense and the team's inability thus far to hit with RISP.

Still, jonk is definitely right that few if anyone would cite in-game management as Cholly's great strength.

by dajafi on Apr 14, 2008 11:40 AM EDT 0 recs

Burrell and bunting

Those are two things that bother me most about Charlie. He regularly takes out one of 3 best hitters in the 6th/7th inning. Not including position value, Burrell is a better hitter than Rollins as he gets on base alot more (his OBP is usually 50-60 points higher each year) and hits for roughly the same power (his SLG was higher in 05 and 06, with Rollins being better in 07). Even now when Burrell is on a tear Maunel keeps taking him out. This is mind boggling.

Also Manuel has been giving position players the bunt sign a bit more which is never a good thing. I can somewhat understand giving it to Bruntlett against the Mets since he can't hit, but Bruntlett should have never been hitting 2nd to begin with.

I don't think he's responsible for the early season swoons. The Phils are a hitting team, and those teams tend to do better later in the season when pitchers have lost a few mph on their fastballs and their breaking balls aren't quite as sharp. Pitchers' arms are fresh in the beginning of the season and it is harder to hit them now. Come the All-Star break their arms will tire and the Phils' bats will start putting up some big numbers and the wins will come. It would be nice if we had the pitching to carry us in the first half of the season, while the hitting carried us in the second half, but that isn't Charlie's fault.

FJM, down in the trenches doing the Lord's work.

by zdavis2512 on Apr 14, 2008 10:27 PM EDT 0 recs