Re-Post: When You Change Horses

By The Common Man

Note: Today’s firing of Bob Geren, the first managerial change of 2011, gives The Common Man an excuse to update and re-present his data regarding the benefit of changing managers in the middle of the season, which he originally rolled out in just over a year ago. As he points out in the article below, however, all situations are unique. While TCM’s ultimate conclusions are that changing the manager tends not to actually help all that much, despite what talking heads on baseball broadcasts might tell you, those changes are clearly warranted in many cases. For instance, in this case, it sounds like Bob Geren has effectively lost the A’s clubhouse. In that case, to prevent a further poisoning of the environment around a team, making a move is actually the smartest move you can make. But for the most part, changing managers doesn’t do anything to change the actual performance of a team on the field, at least during the season in question. See below. (Note, all figures have been adjusted to reflect the six in-season managerial changes last year).

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Is it a good idea, in general, to fire the manager during the season? Since the Royals shuffled Trey Hillman out for Ned Yost last year, The Common Man has wondered whether changing horses in midstream is generally a good idea. So he went back and looked at every team that switched managers midseason from 1901 until today, to see what kind of differences a new manager might make.

Seven Games in Three Days (kind of)

As some of you may have ascertained, The Common Man was in Arizona over a four-day weekend to take in the tail end of Spring Training. What follows are a few of the notes and remembrances from the trip:




Mike Sweeney and son after dropping
off the Royals' lineup.

 On Friday night, The Common Man hit up Royals camp in Surprise for their game with the Giants. The stadium the team shares with the Rangers is nice and spacious, clean and friendly. The Baseball Project was playing in front, imploring TCM not to be “another foul-ball fatality,” which was reassuring. Inside, the Royals honored Mike Sweeney on the day he retired by allowing him and his son to deliver the starting lineup to the plate, and to hang in the dugout. Sadly, something like 60% of the fans were there to watch the Giants, and he didn’t get nearly the ovation he deserved. Maybe he’ll get a proper day in KC this year.

MC Hammer, Baseball Pioneer? That Can't Be Right.

By The Common Man
The Common Man came across this story while he was researching Mitchell Page last week.

Most of you (well, not Jack Moore or Nick Nelson) remember the heyday of MC Hammer. While not the first mainstream rapper with crossover appeal into pop, he was the most successful. And along with his success, we learned important things about his life. Born Stanley Burrell in Oakland, Hammer got his first job when Oakland A’s owner Charlie O. Finley saw him dancing for money outside the stadium. Finley hired him as a batboy and to entertain the players, and nicknamed him “Hammer” because he supposedly resembled Hank Aaron.


That’s usually where the behind-the-music story of Hammer’s youth ends, and articles continue on to talk about Hammer’s rise in the music industry and subsequent financial difficulties. But the truth is actually more interesting.

Finley was widely famous for, among other things, his hands-on approach to running his baseball team. He did it on a shoestring budget with a skeleton crew in the front office. Charlie Finley was an incredibly frugal man who did not accept wasted effort or resources. Scott Ostler, writing for the Los Angeles Times in August of 1980 ("A's An Odd Setup," August 4), described it:

“There will be no final judgment here as to whether the A’s are the worst-run organization in sports. Ther’s not much dougt, however, that they are the least run. With the A’s, you don’t get a whole lot of bureaucracy. The front office…consists of a vice president, a controller, a farm director, a ticket manager, a director of promotions and group sales, and a public relations director. Ther is one secretary and two switchboard women, who also do secretarial work. That’s nine people, and the A’s have worked with less. Last year there was no full-time PR man or promotions man.”

This kind of austerity made Finley wealthy, but it also made him
incredibly unpopular with his players and the fans of Oakland.

Hammer is on the left.

It also meant that Finley was always on the lookout for cheap talent to help out. Young people just out of school would call him out of the blue and ask for a job, and Finley often hired them. One of his favorites was the young Hammer, who was 10 years old when Finley first saw him around 1972. Stanley Burrell worked a as a batboy for six years for the A’s, before Finley began adding to his duties. According to Ostler,

“After Burrell turned 16, Finley made him a vice president [actually, Executive Vice President], though his duties were somewhat nebulous. There were rumors that he spied on the players, though this was probably more paranoia than truth. Hammer did phone Finley in Chicago every night from the stadium to broadcast a play-by-play description of the last four or five innings. One night Hammer was allowed to broadcast an inning of a game from Detroit over the A’s regular radio staion, on orders from Finley. The station manager was not happy.”

According to Hammer, on an HBO Documentary about sports in Oakland in the 1970s, he also earned the nickname “Pipeline” because everything he heard got related straight to Finley.  Burrell left his job with the A's (presumably because he was not legit enough, and therefore had to quit) after he graduated from high school, and eventually joined the Navy for three years.  He didn't exactly leave a mark on the game.  But still, thus did MC Hammer become one of the first African-Americans to be an executive of a Major League Baseball team.

3 Questions: Oakland Athletics

By Bill

I've been away for about ten days, mostly on vacation with the family.  Hope everybody had good holidays and such.


It's always a bit hard to get back into the swing, and having to start with the 2011 Oakland Athletics...doesn't make it any easier. (For why, see #3 below.)

The A's finished 81-81 last year.  They finished in second place in the weak West, though a full nine games back of the eventual league champion Rangers. They've added a few pretty decent hitters, and the Rangers have lost a key piece or two.  Is that enough?

1. Can Brett Anderson stay healthy?
It's not all that often that a pitcher feels like the one real key to a potentially contending team's season, even less often that that pitcher isn't yet 23 and hasn't yet thrown 200 innings in a season or been selected to an All-Star team.  But when healthy, Anderson is the real deal. Alone among A's pitchers, he's good at both striking guys out and not walking them, and his ability to keep runs off the board isn't completely at the mercy of the defense (and he gets ground balls and keeps the ball in the park, too).  He may have been the best rookie in the AL in 2009 -- his excellent pitching was obscured by his 4.09 ERA and .500 "won-loss record" -- and coming back in 2010, driven mostly by an improved defense behind him and better luck, the results were starting to match the effort.  But arm injuries kept him out for most of the late spring and early-mid summer, and he ended with just nineteen starts and 112 innings (but a sparkling 2.80 ERA).

Anderson was healthy and absolutely on fire in September and October, putting up a 2.09 ERA in his final seven starts.  That's obviously encouraging, and if he stays healthy he has to be somewhere close to the top of the list of Cy Young candidates for 2011.  But again, it's a pitcher with a pitching-arm injury, so you've got to be a bit nervous.
 
2. Can you win games in the AL West without ever scoring any runs at all?
On the SweetSpot Network's A's blog Baseballin' on a Budget, Dan did an interesting post using his own projections for the 2011 team.  And while the results seem pretty good -- 85 wins, which sounds totally reasonable given last year's 81 wins and the changes that have been made -- it's worth noting that there are only three players who really project as better than average hitters.  That would be new additions Hideki Matsui and Josh Willingham, and 2010 breakthrough Daric Barton, and it's not as though any of these guys are world-beaters.  He doesn't have anybody with more than 20 homers, and not a whole lot of doubles, either.  Contrary to popular belief, OBP alone can score runs, much better than power alone does...but they don't have a ton of that, either, once you get past the three named above (and only Barton is a real standout in that area).

This is a better offense than they had in 2010 -- good new additions in the two above and David DeJesus, and no one who figures to drop off too much, plus two in Kurt Suzuki and Kevin Kouzmanoff who figure to do considerably better -- so I'm confident that, yeah, they can win with that offense.  But it's pretty awful, and it's kind of hard to see how the team manages to get it done.  It would be a lot easier to take them seriously if (in addition to Suzuki and Kouzmanoff coming back) Barton suddenly started showing some power (that's never been part of his game in the majors or minors, but at 6'0", 225 and as a former top prospect at first base, you have to think he has it in him somewhere), but other than that, there's just not much upside here.  This team isn't going to score any runs, and they're going to be at least okay anyway.

3. Seriously, has there ever been a more boring pretty good team, ever?
The funny thing about this is that in the old Moneyball days, people would complain about how boring the A's were.  They hit for low averages and plodded around, and just walked a lot and hit home runs and pitched brilliantly (in front of mostly terrible defenses) and won baseball games.  But can you really tell me that those teams were more boring than this one?  They're still going to hit for low averages, and they're still going to depend on the walk (they just won't do it as well as they used to). They'll steal some bases and play good defense, which the other guys didn't.  But they'll hit almost no homers, and their pitchers, behind Anderson and in front of Andrew Bailey, are really just mediocre-to-pretty-good throwers who simply let the other team put the ball in play, figuring the ballpark will keep it in and the defense will get an out out of it.  Maybe it's just me, but I'd much rather watch two walks and a three-run homer, backed by good pitching, than a walk and two singles backed by okay pitching and good defense.  If you're not already a fan, it's just kind of hard to watch.

I don't mean to insult the A's.  I generally like and root for the team.  Huge Billy Beane fan.  And I think they've got a pretty decent chance at winning the division (you've still got to favor the Rangers, but they're not that far apart).  And there are some fun things about this team.  There's Anderson, and it's not like good defense isn't fun to watch in its own way, and then the five or six times Adam Rosales goes deep this year might be the five or six most enthralling moments of the season (seriously, check out #3).  And I'd think most people would rather watch them play than the Pirates or Royals.  But for a team that's likely to win something between 80 and 90 games this season, by and large, this is a really dull squad.  Mark Ellis and Cliff Pennington might be the best middle infield combo in the league, but that's not going to make anybody really want to watch them.  Right?

Happy Birthday...

Eric Chavez!

Born on the 32nd anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor and on Johnny Bench's 30th birthday (also Noam Chomsky's 49th, Tom Waits' 28th and Larry Bird's 21st), Chavez turns 33 today.

Selected tenth overall in the 1996 draft by the A's -- Chavez easily became the greatest player of a pretty disappointing first round, taken behind future teammates Mark Kotsay and Billy Koch --  Chavez looked like a star from day one. His first year's numbers as a pro look pretty underwhelming, but you have to keep in mind that he was playing a full season in high-A ball straight out of high school. He was the youngest position player on that team, and he led the team in homers and slugging percentage.

Then came 1998, in which Chavez transformed from a promising young player to an ubermonsterprospect. He hit .327/.388/.603 between double- and triple-A, then debuted in the majors on September 8, still just twenty years old, and even did well there, hitting .311/.354/.444 in his sixteen-game cup of coffee. He entered 1999 as Baseball America's #3 prospect, behind J.D. Drew and Rick Ankiel of the Cardinals.  And, of course, he entered 1999 as the A's starting third baseman.