Managerial Strategy
September 04, 2006
It’s hard to get a handle on managerial strategy. Bill James has written pages and pages of managerial review, much of it very well done, but his impact in this area has been less significant than in others. I don’t think the fault is James’s; I think it’s just a tough subject.
For instance, Ducksnorts (Geoff Young’s very fine Padres’ blog) has this insightful entry about Bochy’s game management in yesterday’s win over the Reds (and Jerry Narron’s poor performance). This sort of detail is difficult to quantify or pick up in a boxscore. You have to watch the game and think along with the managers, as Geoff did in his post.
MGL takes a good stab at identifying the things he sees as the most frequent managerial errors in The Book Blog. His comments, as well as the following comments, are also thought-provoking.
As Guy points out in one of the last comments, the more sophisticated analyses, particularly ones that hinge on game theory, seem to find that overall managerial strategies are pretty much on target. That doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of clunkers out there; just that it’s hard to find them through quantitative analysis.
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