Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 85: Manny Acta and the Blue Jays’ Managerial Job

Episode Date: November 19, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss whether Manny Acta’s lousy career win-loss record has any bearing on his likelihood of success if he becomes the Blue Jays’ manager.

Good morning and welcome to episode 85 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. It is Monday, November 19th. I'm Sam Miller in Long Beach, California, and I'm with Ben Lindberg in New York, New York. Ben, how are you doing? Great. I found out that the Royals signed Brandon Wood to a minor league deal, so I figured we could discuss the implications for the AL Central. And I found out that Brendan Ryan's middle name is Wood, so he is Brendan Wood, and his offensive

numbers are very similar. I wasn't sure how to develop that into a full thought, but it is something that I discovered this weekend. Yeah, well, that's probably more than I accomplished this weekend. So, it's your turn to bring a topic. Yeah, and I brought one this time. I thought we could talk about Maniacta. Okay.

Uh, so the latest rumors surrounding the Blue Jays now that they've gone a couple of days without making a major player move, uh, is that they are getting close to announcing their manager. Uh, Buster only hears, he heard this, that the club is now close to naming a new manager. He mentioned Jim Tracy and Jim Riggleman initially. Then there were subsequent reports that Jim Riggleman had not even been contacted.

And then there was a report after that. Buster only tweeted, Manny Akta has been strongly reviewed by Jays, who are expected to soon announce their manager. So it sounds like they're going to go with a veteran manager. And right now it sounds like there's a decent chance that it could be Maniacta. I thought we could talk about him a bit as he is a guy that I wrote about after he was fired near the end of the season by the Indians. And I kind of looked at, I don't know whether he was to blame for not succeeding in that role with the Indians and in his prior role with the Nationals. in that role with the Indians and in his prior role with the Nationals. Maniak had managed the Nationals from 2007 until about halfway through 2009 when he was fired. And then he was hired the subsequent year to manage the Indians,

and he lasted until almost the end of the season. And he has been very unsuccessful, or you could look at it as his teams have been very unsuccessful while he has been their manager. I believe his Wikipedia page still says, Only two managers in Major League Baseball history have managed more games than ACTA and had a lower winning percentage than ACTA's 418 mark. Of course, that's guys who stopped after that point. mark. Of course, that's guys who stopped after that point. There are managers who started out worse and got jobs after that and raised themselves above that level. So who are the two? Is one of them Buddy Bell? I don't know offhand. Maybe I can look it up while we talk. But so Maniacta has kind of traditionally been this guy who is popular with sabermetric people because he is one of them or one of us.

He says all the things that we like to hear and that we don't typically hear from managers. He has talked about reading Baseball Perspectives. He called Mind Game one of our books, his favorite book. He talks all the time about how important outs are and how he doesn't like to give them up by bunting and how efficiency is important when stealing and strikeouts aren't so much worse than any other kind of out and how important leverage is. And he talks about BABIP. So he says all these things that we're not accustomed to hearing from a major league manager. And yet he is also a former professional player and a former big league coach. And when he's taken over his prior two jobs,

he came really with rave reviews as a communicator and a motivator. There was, I mean, he was seen as almost like the perfect managerial candidate. Everyone could approve of him. And yet he or his teams have failed pretty spectacularly. And so the question is whether he really had anything to do with that. He took over bad teams and they were worse probably by the time he left them. So the question is whether it's because of him. So there were some whispers, I guess, when he was let go by the Indians. Nick Camino, who's a beat writer for the Indians, tweeted some things. He said, talked with two different players besides Indian closer Chris Perez, who felt Maniakta was part of the problem here in Cleveland.

One player I spoke with said Indian manager Maniakta may have lost some of the club, including veteran guys during the 2010 season. Two Indians players I spoke with today felt Maniakta was better with the media than he was with them, felt he did not connect well. And Chris Perez, who of course has an opinion on everything, said most of the problems walked out the door last week, referring to Manny Acta being fired. And I had heard through a different source, kind of secondhand, that some of the American players on the team felt that Acta had connected

with the Latin American players better and that there was some sort of click going on with the team felt that the that ACTA had connected with the Latin American players better and that it was there was some sort of click going on with the team so there were these kind of whispers but you didn't know whether it was just kind of the standard thing that you hear when a team loses a lot and things go badly because of the losing as opposed to the other way around. So I guess now that Akta is possibly poised to take over for the first time a contending team, would you have any qualms about this or do you think that it's just been entirely him in the wrong situation or in a team that wouldn't have won regardless of the manager? I mean, well, they certainly wouldn't have won regardless of the manager? I mean, well, they certainly wouldn't have won regardless of the manager. I mean, it's probably the most, the two pieces of information,

well, I guess there are three pieces of information that we really actually know. One is that some player said bad things about him on his way out. That is absolutely relevant information. It doesn't necessarily damn him. I mean, there are probably guys on every club who dislike the manager. Yeah. I mean maybe they wouldn't like it, but they would think it at least. Yeah, certainly.

And maybe it's just his bad luck that the guys who didn't like him are the ones who talk. But I mean that is relevant information and um it would have been probably i think a lot easier uh to defend him if when he'd walked out the door his you know clubhouse had stood up and said you know whatever that thing is about oh captain my captain right well i do remember there was an article i think on the indians official website about some players standing up for him and absolving him of blame, which I think I linked to in my article. So there was definitely a mix, at least.

It wasn't all negative. So number two piece of information we have is that teams want to hire him, even though he's losing. I mean, they know more than we do because they've spoken to him, they've got an idea of what they want to do with their club, and they still choose him. So, I mean, that's kind of a cop-out, but anytime an organization wants to hire a manager, it is a pretty positive indicator for that manager. Now, obviously, it's a zero-sum sport, and half the managers are worse than the other half, or get worse results than the other half. So, it doesn't mean that he's going to be good,

but it is relevant information and the third thing is that all things being equal there are very few things that we can can really truly judge a manager on but the five percent or so that we can which is kind of the most basic tenets of in-game strategy he seems to not only have a philosophy that is coherent, but it's generally executed fairly well. So that's 5%. That's only 5%. It's hard to say anything about a guy for 5%. But given that it's the 5% we know, it's a pretty good thing. Now, I think there's another factor, which is that a manager, I think more and more, his job is not simply to get along with his team or to control his team, to manage his team. But he's really got to be a liaison with the front office, and the front office is going to be a lot more involved, I think, in on-the-field decisions, in sending some fairly advanced research through him and it means

I think it means a lot for or it is a significant skill probably in this era to be a manager who can communicate with that kind of a front office and I'm not sure that that is universal. Ken Rosenthal wrote a piece at the very end of the year about the tension between Mike Socha and Jerry DiPoto. I think that for the most part, they managed to keep it bottled up throughout the season, so it didn't really get out until the end of the season. But Socha has, according to the report from Rosenthal, butted heads with Scott Service, the blah, blah, blah. What is that title?

Assistant General Manager. And he's had some tense conversations with DePoto, and he seems to not be that interested in some of the statistical analysis that has been sent to him. And I like Socha as a manager, but that seems to be, from Rosenthal's piece, a deficiency in his ability. And I think that maybe 10 years ago, that wouldn't have been a deficiency. It didn't really matter. He kind of could have been his own sort of, you know, the dugout is his own kingdom, but it's not going to be that way anymore. And I think that if you're a general manager now, and you sort of see the direction that teams are going and where the power is kind of shifting

toward, you want a guy who is going to be comfortable having these conversations with you. And Acta seems to be that guy. Yeah. I mean, when he was hired in Cleveland, I think it was Mark Shapiro did an interview at BP where he talked about how on the same page they were about analysis and how you could share all these things with him. And he would take them to heart and be just as enthusiastic about them as the front office would. And there were various things during his tenure there where there were articles written about how closely they could work together. And yet he was still let go. It seemed like the complaint from ACTA detractors, whether it was things I've read on various blogs or on the comments on my article, the major complaint seems to be, and of course, people always have complaints with a manager relying on a particular player too much or doing something weird with his lineup or bringing out the wrong reliever at some point.

doing something weird with his lineup or bringing out the wrong reliever at some point. But with Akta, the major complaint seemed to be his lack of passion or his lack of visible passion. And that really seems to me to be the sort of thing that is just entirely context-driven, how it's perceived. If it's a successful team, then he is the calm leader at the helm, not being phased by anything. Whereas if it's an unsuccessful team, then he is not doing enough to fix it and he's not inspiring anyone and he's losing the clubhouse. That's how it seems to me, because you can certainly think of examples of managers who had that demeanor and were extremely successful with it. So, I mean, I'm kind of, I guess, rooting for ACTA in a way to show that he can be a successful manager. And it's possible that I'm just entirely biased by all the sabermetric stuff, because you as you say it is possibly a small portion

of the manager's job and if he's the best at that but behind the scenes he's terrible and he's doing everything wrong and and the players hate him uh then the tactical stuff wouldn't matter much so it's it's certainly possible that i'm just getting duped by that stuff into wanting to believe that Akta is a good manager or could be a successful manager. But I mean, in my article, and it's kind of a stretch as a comparison, but I mentioned that Casey Stengel in his 13 seasons with non-Yankees teams, both before and after his time in New York, had a.397 winning percentage, much worse than Akta's. He never came close to winning a pennant for a team other than the Yankees. And, of course, in 12 seasons with the Yankees, his winning percentage was.623, and he won seven World Series. So not that that's going to happen for Akta,

seven world series. So not that that's going to happen for ACTA, but it just is one data point that shows that being extremely unsuccessful with a team doesn't necessarily say anything about whether you can succeed with a different team. ACTA finished fifth in manager of the year voting in 2007 when he took the Washington Nationals to a 73-89 record, which was a two-game improvement from the previous year. Yeah, and then 2011 he finished fourth in manager of the year voting and then was fired partway or most of the way through the next season. Yeah, I wonder. I don't know how many votes it takes to finish fifth in manager of the

year voting. It might be, it might be like two third place votes or something, but yeah. Well, finishing even winning manager of the year is no guarantee of job security. Yeah. It is also the, I mean, I said there were three pieces of data that we had about him. I guess the fourth is that he's been fired twice by, by front offices that had hired, you know, that had liked him enough to hire him three years previously. And I don't know. I don't know if it's, I don't know if this is true or not, but the fact that he's been fired, you know, technically mid-season both times seems a little bit worse than if he were fired after the season. Although, with the Indians, he was fired basically in the second to last week of the year or something.

So I don't know a whole lot of insight into how good they are. And so the expectation that you and I are going to crack this is probably a bit much. But I mean, yeah, I'm certainly, I think that just in general, I like things that are different in baseball, and Acta is a little different. I feel like it's good that he's around, that he's getting another chance, because we are learning a little bit more about the game, because Maniacta provides kind of a different take in the dugout.

And giving him a better team, we'll learn still more about baseball because of him. And I don't think that it's necessarily exaggerating to say that the future of managing is, you know, in part going to be a result of how well Maniac did. Yeah, although, I mean, it's not like he was ever just a pure stat head or anything. I mean, he had all the non-stat head resume points too as a former player and a coach and being successful in clubhouses.

It wasn't like he was looked at purely as a number cruncher. He also came highly recommended as a communicator and just a clubhouse guy. So he seemed like the perfect mix of both. But I'm already looking forward to watching the Blue Jays this year just because of how they have remade themselves and I think they would be even more

interesting to me if they were to hire Akta and we could see whether he is capable of succeeding with a good team. It would be kind of depressing if he fails. Yes, it would. I wonder if he gets another chance if he does. That might be it.

Yeah, three strikes might be. The first two he had no. I think it's unfair to conclude anything from those two. But I don't know. Yeah. Let's see. Just if you well doggone it why can't I find it

okay Buddy Bell as manager nine years 418 winning percentage so that is worse is that worse or is that I think that's yeah that's exactly that's exactly what he has right now okay well all right so now we know Is that worse or is that – I think that's – yeah, that's exactly what he has right now.

Okay. Well, all right. So now we know. Yeah. All right. Send us questions and stuff so we can answer them on Wednesday at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. Okay. Yeah. Not you but the listeners.

All right. Okay. All right. That's all. We'll talk to you tomorrow.