Managers of winning baseball teams are often hailed as geniuses. History suggests that ballplayer talent counts for more, but that good managers can make a difference.
Although winning baseball managers have been hailed as geniuses for over a century, the jury is still out as to how much of a difference they really make. Statistics indicate that ballplayer talent is more important, but there seems to be room for managers to make significant contributions in the right circumstances.
John McGraw and Connie Mack were the dominant managerial figures of the first third of the last century. McGraw led the New York Giants for thirty years, winning a record ten pennants, including a National League record four in a row from 1921-24. Mack, the Philadelphia Athletics' original manager from 1901 on, had won nine American League pennants and five World Series by 1931. Both were considered excellent judges of talent, aggressive recruiters, and clever field tacticians.
But McGraw had his consistently highest winning percentages while Hall of Fame pitcher Christy Mathewson was compiling his 373-victory career. When Mathewson fell off to an 8-14 season in 1915, McGraw was suddenly a last-place manager. To his credit, he rebuilt his team to win those four consecutive pennants in the early 1920's, but he never won a league title after that. As for Mack, he had an overall losing record over fifty years after twice trading or selling off his top stars because the fans had lost interest in perennial winners. He also happened to be the club owner.
Yankee managers make fascinating case studies of the managerial role. Joe McCarthy, holder of the highest victory percentage of all time at .615, had led the Chicago Cubs successfully for five years before taking over the Yankees in 1931. He won eight pennants and an unprecedented seven World Series over the next thirteen years with rosters that included Lou Gehrig, Bill Dickey, Joe DiMaggio, Red Ruffing, and Lefty Gomez. By the early 1940's, he was being derided as Pushbutton Joe, with the implication that anyone could win with players like those. McCarthy actually earned more universal respect when he managed World War II-depleted Yankee teams to respectable finishes in 1944 and 1945.
By contrast, Casey Stengel and Joe Torre became Yankee skippers with prior losing records. Stengel went on to tie McGraw's league championship record of 10 and McCarthy's World Series record of seven in only 12 years. He, too, had outstanding players in DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Phil Rizzuto, Allie Reynolds, Vic Raschi, and Whitey Ford, but many observers held that his manipulation of lineups in close pennant races often gave his team a winning edge. Torre's popularity and recent tenure may make it difficult to gauge his contribution to a team that seemed always to be adding talent at any price. At any rate, Torre won four world titles in his first five years, then two pennants and five also-rans in the next seven with glittering and costly casts.
Among today's managers, Tony LaRussa and Jim Leyland are admired for having turned mediocre or struggling teams into division, league, and world champions. But an examination of their records shows those teams going into decline again as key players left or underperformed. Leyland's Florida Marlins are the most glaring example: from the 1997 world championship they went to a last-place, 108-loss season in 1998 as the club conducted a Mack-like selloff of the most valuable players.
Clearly, there are important differences in the ability of managers to inspire extra effort, to know when a pitcher is tiring, to match pinch hitters against relief pitchers, and to recognize a hot bat. Bbut those abilities are just as clearly limited by the talent of the available players. Perhaps the comedic Stengel said it best when he was lauded for the Yankees' come-from-behind World Series triumph in 1958: "I couldn't have done it without my players."
