That’s more like it!
Yesterday, I was pissed because I had to apologise to the BBWAA. Turns out I called them a whole lot of unkind names over the injustice they were going to commit upon Zack Greinke, and then they showed me who’s the boss by giving him the damn award anyhow. So that was a sad day. But that was yesterday.
Today is a whole new day, and the BBWAA has gotten back to its usual business of concentrated crazy by giving the Manager of the Year award for the best managers of the year to objectionably bad managers Jim Tracy and Mike Scioscia. Exactly like we knew they would. So today I do not have to apologise to the BBWAA. I can call them hair-brained lilly-livered half-wit ignoramooses and all they can do is sit back and take it. Because, today, they’ve earned it.
Jim Tracy is, by all accounts, a really nice guy. I’ve never heard anybody say he’s a dick — the players all seem to like him, so, hey. Nice guy. That’s cool; I like nice guys. But as a baseball manager, he’s about as skilled as average, as long as we can assume that by "average" what we really mean is "average vole." Jim Tracy is one of the most blinkered, by-the-book managers I’ve ever seen. Dude on first with fewer than two outs? The next batter will bunt. Every time, no exceptions. For fuck’s sake, the thing that makes Jim Tracy most famous to me is the time he ordered Troy Tulowitzki and his 1.049 monthly OPS to try to bunt legendary speedster Todd Helton over from second. Never mind how stupid it is to have a dude who’s been not-outing 42% of the time try to bunt. Just focus on the fact that Tulo has exactly nine successful sac bunts in his entire career, and, if he fucks it up, probably Helton gets thrown out at third and he’s effectively bunted the runner back to first base. Manager of the Year my aching ass.
And Mike Scioscia? Nobody likes throwing away outs on the basepaths like Mike Scioscia. The Los Angeles Angels of Azerbaijan led all of MLB in caught stealing in 2009. They successfully completed a miserable 70% of their steal attempts, which is well shy of the completion rate you need to maintain in order to be gaining runs from your steals. That’s right — the Angels would have scored more runs if they never tried to steal a base. For fuck’s sake, giant man Kendry Morales attempted ten steals this year. Kendry Morales! He was caught seven times, yet it did not appear to occur to Scioscia that continuing to have Morales attempt to steal was hurting his team. The one thing the Angels did well was taking extra bases on hits — Baseball Prospectus has them at 10.68 EqHAR for the season, which is a shitload, but they gave almost all of it back with their boneheaded steal attempts and attempts to advance on groundouts and flyouts. They finished the year at a pedestrian 1.3 EqBRR. (If you can’t find the Angels on that chart, it’s because BP weirdly lists them as ANA, because I guess it’s still 1997 in BP-world.)
To put these numbers in some meaningful context, the rule of thumb is that ten runs is roughly equal to one win. So those ten runs of hit advancement earned the Angels exactly one win in the standings. For this one win, people want to give Mike Scioscia the Manager of the Year? For one win? This guy was worth two wins this year. Let’s give him two awards — Backup Catcher of the Year and Backup Backup Catcher of the Year, because he’s a fucking backup catcher. Also, did I mention that Scioscia’s bad decision-making gave that entire win back? Actually, the Angels didn’t get shit from all that basepath unclogging. Oopsie!
The reason I’m assuming that Scioscia got the award due to his terrible baserunning management is because the alternative is that he got it because Nick Adenhart died, and I abjectly refuse to believe that. That is far too banal even for the BBWAA.
And, yes, I know it is not, in fact, too banal for the BBWAA. And, yes, I know it probably really is the fucking reason. But I will persist in this delusion nonetheless.
