It’s humbling to be asked one’s opinion on anything, and it’s an honor when the Baseball Bloggers Alliance is doing the asking. And to be asked one’s opinion of the best manager in the National League, well, it’s a bit like being asked who the best fans are. Somewhere has the best fans, but how much of an impact they had and how we could know for sure are beyond our ken.

As Nick from Pitchers Hit Eighth points out, studies like The Hardball Times’s, indicate that managers have a nominal impact on wins and losses (only about a couple either way). Still, someone has to be the best, even if it’s difficult to know. Our framework for thinking about who the best might be is simply and probably flawed: Determine the teams who made the biggest leap in actual wins from their preseason predictions and who had the biggest difference between actual wins and third-order adjusted wins (what they should’ve done). The idea is that the manager may have had some bearing on the team overachieving in both categories (we stress may):

That yields Florida’s Fredi Gonzalez, Colorado’s Jim Tracy and St. Louis’s Tony La Russa. Are there any reasons to disqualify one or more of them and move down the line?

Gonzalez gave young players a chance to play (though in Florida, a manager doesn’t really have much choice), including the league’s top rookie run creater, Chris Coghlan. He had the league’s youngest and the least supported team (the Marlins’ per game attendance of 18,075 is the number of people who get to Busch Stadium two hours early for Ozzie Smith bobblehead night). Of course, those may be favorable managing circumstances and therefore more reason to vote against Gonzalez, but we don’t think so. And even though reliever Matt Lindstrom got 15 saves, Gonzalez preferred using his better pitchers for the highest-leverage situations (e.g., Leo Nunez, Kiko Calero and Brendan Donnelly).

Tracy inherited the team after 46 games from Clint Hurdle and tweaked the lineup by benching disappointing third baseman Garrett Atkins. He wisely deployed his best relief pitchers, Huston Street and Rafael Betancourt, in the most demanding spots (Street had the team’s highest average leverage index; Betancourt the highest game LI), even if he did use Street rather conventionally (few appearances other than the ninth inning).

We suppose we owe an explanation on why hometown manager Tony La Russa didn’t receive our vote: Since the Cardinals ranked third in our framework, TLR needed a spectacular resume to jump ahead of the others. Instead, he disappointed by giving way too many plate appearances to OBP killers Rick Ankiel and Khalil Greene. And he parted from his trailblazing strategy to bat the pitcher eighth, which precludes him from appearing atop our ballot for both on-field and off-field reasons. After all, what’s Nick to do with his domain now?

NL Manager of the Year: Fredi Gonzalez (Jim Tracy, 2nd; Tony La Russa, 3rd)

This entry was posted by Pip on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 9:34 pm and is filed under by the numbers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.