Manager gets credit, but it’s team game
Skipper makes call, but top to bottom everyone has input
It’s worth noting that the World Series, which opened Tuesday night at Fenway Park in Boston, features two managers who had never held the position until they accepted the jobs they currently have.
Dave Roberts was a coach with the San Diego Padres when the Los Angeles Dodgers hired him the winter before the 2016 season. His performance thus far: three division titles, back-to-back National League pennants — with a world championship still a possibility.
Alex Cora was a coach when the Houston Astros won last year’s World Series, after which he took over the Boston Red Sox. All he did for a debut was win more games than any manager in the 118-year history of the franchise, then open the post-season with seven victories in nine tries against a pair of 100win teams.
So, the modern Major League Baseball formula, it would seem is: Build a superior roster, then hand it to someone who has never done the job.
The cool thing about this matchup: It’s the first time two minority managers — Cora is Puerto Rican; Roberts was born to Japanese and African American parents — will face each other in a World Series. If that gets even a single owner or general manager to expand the way he thinks about who might make a good candidate to steer his club, that’s tremendous.
Hopefully, though, we’re past that point, and we’re simply reaching an annual autumn tradition. On the eve of each World Series, a quest begins to find commonalities between the pennant winners. Here are two for this fall: Both the Red Sox ($228.4 million, according to spotrac.com) and the Dodgers ($199.6 million) spend exorbitantly on player salaries,
ranking first and third in the major leagues, respectively. And both handed their championship-worthy rosters to former players — former teammates, actually — who had never managed a game in the minors.
The point, though, really isn’t the experience. The point is the requirements for, and parameters of, the job. Those have changed — and swiftly.
Whether it’s Cora and Roberts or the two men they beat in the league championship series — Hinch and Counsell, respectively — it’s worth reflecting on what is expected of the modern manager. It’s not what it was when Boston’s Bill Carrigan trounced Brooklyn’s Wilbert Robinson in five games to take the 1916 World Series — the only time these franchises have met in the post-season. It’s not what it was when Tommy Lasorda and — pick one — Don Zimmer or Ralph Houk or John McNamara oversaw these franchises in the 1970s and ’80s. Heck, it’s not even what it was when Cora’s and Roberts’ predecessors
— John Farrell and Don Mattingly, respectively — manned the dugout.
Since they are the face of the post-season, managers get an inordinate amount of exposure. In the post-season, clubhouses are closed to reporters before games — a system that diminishes the number of players’ perspectives that are shared publicly. But managers speak to the media twice daily. They are interviewed between innings in the dugout. The focus is always on the manager because he is the only figure constantly in position to be focused on.
That gives the manager the appearance of outsized importance. But just an appearance.
Anyway, the years of the manager as the personality and pulse of a club are dwindling — by design. The manager no longer dictates how a club will be run. More than ever, managing a season — or a series, or a game, or an inning — is a team sport. The team includes not just the coaching staff, but the general manager and other front office staff.