It's been a couple days now, but it's worth noting that Mike Quade, not Hall of Famer Ryne Sandberg, was named the new Cubs manager. A lot of people here in Chicago are pretty upset about this. Phil Rogers was upset. Gene Wojciechowski was really freaking upset. Sandberg was a hero, obviously, and it was clear that he really wanted the job. Instead, they named some guy nobody had ever heard of before he was named interim manager (except the Cubs fans who noticed he was their third base coach), somebody who never made it out of the minors as a player.
Here's the thing, though: I don't think anybody has a clue whether Sandberg would be a better manager than Quade, or vice-versa. Not you, not me, not Gene or Phil, maybe not even Jim Hendry. Managing is a hugely opaque thing; there's no WAR or wOBA or FIP that's going to tell you if a guy is or will be a good manager. Winning percentage certainly doesn't do it. What you'd need to do, really, is watch the games as closely as possible to evaluate their decisions. And then interview their players, hang around the clubhouse, really get an idea of how they do at leading a team. If anyone did that, it's a lot more likely to have been the Cubs than, say, Wojciechowski or Rogers or the enraged fans next door.
Let's break down the fans' (and nostalgic hometown writers') arguments, as I see them, for Sandberg:
