TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/071690/0716260.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.7 KB | 123 lines

                                                                                SPORT, Page 78

Get Rid of the Manager!


Baseball pilots come and go, but the changes don't always help

By WALTER SHAPIRO


    They put on a uniform -- one leg at a time -- before every
game, yet they never play. They come in two basic shapes:
potbellied pinups for prepackaged diet plans and tightly wound,
taut-skinned, tanned Marlboro men. Their first names usually
end with that boyish diminutive, the letter y, as in Casey,
Whitey, Sparky, Tommy and Buddy. We are, of course, talking
about big-league baseball managers, one of the strangest breeds
in pro sports.

    Managers talk funny, often spitting tobacco to punctuate
their sentences. For public consumption, they lapse into the
inspirational language of after-dinner speeches. Listen to Los
Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, baseball's answer to
George Jessel, rattle off run-on cliches about his mediocre
team: "We got to keep going out there and battle. We've got to
believe that we can win." But the most striking thing about
managers is their preternatural awareness that they have less
job security than the East German government. "Every manager's
job is in jeopardy," says Houston Astros skipper Art Howe, who
is in enough jeopardy to be a contestant on the TV game show.
"Managers are hired to be fired."

    These days, almost everyone else in the upper echelons of
American life is cushioned from the consequences of failure.
Congressmen bask in a 98% re-election rate, Donald Trump is
rescued by a last-minute bank bailout, and CEOs almost never
face executive outplacement after a few quarters of skimpy
earnings. But there are no banked turns on the tenure track in
baseball, where the typical dugout denizen lasts two years and
a manager has been fired during every season since 1942.

    Already this year three managers have been asked to seek
challenges elsewhere in the private sector. And just last
Friday master strategist Whitey Herzog suddenly quit after
eleven years as skipper of the St. Louis Cardinals. Earlier in
the season Davey Johnson, who led the New York Mets to a World
Championship in 1986, was terminated despite a career winning
percentage of .593. Bucky Dent was the latest casualty of the
mercurial reign of New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner,
who must believe that God loves Yankee managers since he made
so many of them. And in Atlanta's answer to Watergate, Russ
Nixon was fired to cover up the failure of Braves owner Ted
Turner to field a competitive team. This gospel -- "When in
doubt, fire the manager" -- is baseball's contribution to
American business theory.

    But -- the indefensible Steinbrenner aside -- is this a
rational form of organizational behavior? Many in baseball
defend the practice, more as a psychological tool to motivate
multimillion-dollar egos than as a strategic gambit. "I can get
you ten to 15 people who can sit in the dugout and know when
to change pitchers," contends Mets general manager Frank
Cashen. "But I can't get you ten to 15 people who can
communicate with 25 ballplayers." Cashen looks like a genius
for his decision to replace Johnson with third-base coach Buddy
Harrelson. In the ensuing six weeks the Mets have gone from
Bart Simpson underachievers to the Shea-hey kids, winning 70%
of their games, including a streak of eleven in a row. "This
is a real team now," Harrelson says with pride. "They think as
a team and act as a team. It's not me, it's the whole
situation." But would the talented Mets have turned their
season around no matter who was in charge? Harrelson shrugs,
"Who knows? That's passe."

    The resurrection of the Mets is far from unique. When Joe
Morgan was tapped as manager of the Boston Red Sox in July
1988, the supercharged team immediately won twelve straight
games and the division crown. So too with last year's Toronto
Blue Jays and fill-in manager Cito Gaston, who inherited an
unmotivated team mired in sixth place and spurred it into the
American League play-offs. Gaston modestly insists, "You can
only do what you can with what you have in terms of talent."
There is no way to precisely quantify managerial
might-have-beens. But author Bill James, the game's most artful
analyst of statistics, has concluded that over time "teams
which change managers in midseason tend to exceed expectations
by a tiny amount."

    Make no mistake: not every freshly anointed manager is the
second coming of Casey Stengel. In fact, Stengel had only one
winning season in the 13 years he piloted a team other than the
Yankees. Steinbrenner's Bronx Bumblers still boast the worst
record in baseball, despite new manager Stump Merrill, who says
bravely, "I just hope I can survive and stay here." Atlanta
managed at least briefly to climb out of last place under Bobby
Cox, who swapped the general manager's office for a seat in the
dugout. But as Lasorda, in his 15th year as Dodger manager,
puts it, "The players win and lose games, not the manager."

    The Dodgers are a testament to the virtues of stability; the
team has needed just two managers since 1954, and Lasorda was
rewarded with a new contract that will keep him bleeding Dodger
blue until 1992. But baseball's other senior statesmen have
found losing almost impossible to endure. Last season Detroit
Tigers manager Sparky Anderson needed to take a month off to
recover as his team plummeted to the basement. Herzog was
admirably frank as he resigned from the last-place Cardinals:
"I couldn't get them to play better. Anybody could have done
better than me." Too bad the owners never seem to take the same
rap for bad teams.