In an unsurprising development, Texas Rangers manager Jeff Banister was yesterday named a finalist to win the American League Manager of the Year award, which is bestowed annually by members of the Baseball Writers Association of America. The voting took place at the conclusion of the season, prior to the playoffs, so the results are already known to whomever tabulates these things for the BBWAA. “Finalist” means that Banister was among the top three vote-getters. The winner will be revealed Nov. 17.
I say this news is unsurprising because the Manager of the Year award nearly always goes to the head coach of whichever club most exceeded its preseason expectations. Why? Because we really have no better way of evaluating the performance of a baseball manager. He never throws a pitch. He never steps into the batter’s box. He’s not nearly as involved personally from play to play, the way an NFL coach is. Most of the time, he’s just sending the next guy up to bat and hoping for the best.
There are certainly ways to pick apart a manager’s in-game decisions, like lineup construction, pitching changes, and use of bench players. But Ned Yost has been roundly (and rightly) criticized on all these fronts at times, and his Kansas City Royals just won the World Series. So who knows?
Most of the writers expected Toronto and Kansas City — which posted the best win-loss records in the AL in 2015 — to be good this year, which likely is why John Gibbons and Yost didn’t make the cut.
Instead Banister’s competitors are A.J. Hinch of the Houston Astros and Paul Molitor of the Minnesota Twins. Here’s why I like his chances.
1. Expectations. The most respected preseason predictions in Major League Baseball are based on Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm) projections. PECOTA was developed by Nate Silver, whom D once commissioned to break up Texas into five states and who is best known now for nailing election results on his FiveThirtyEight site.
On Opening Day, PECOTA said the Rangers were likely to finish in fourth place in the American League West, with a losing record of 79-83. Instead they finished first, at 88-74. By that measure they overachieved by 9 wins.
Meanwhile the Twins outdid themselves by 13 wins. But they fell short of the playoffs, so Molitor (also a rookie manager) can’t claim to be a winner like Banister. And the Astros didn’t do any better than the Rangers, finishing at +9 in the win column, but in second place.
2. Voodoo Magic. Over the course of the 2015 season, the Rangers outscored their opponents by only 18 runs. It’s been well established in the advanced baseball statistics world that the difference between the runs that a team has scored and the runs it has allowed is a far better predictor of future performance than is the actual win-loss record to that point. Great teams don’t just tend to squeak out wins in close games against their opponents. Great teams pummel their opponents into submission. A “Pythagorean formula” uses those two numbers to determine how many games a team “should have” won.
Using that metric, the Rangers should have finished 83-79, five games behind the Astros in the AL West.
Differences between the Pythagorean standings and the actual standings are most often attributed to either luck, an excellent bullpen (better than average at holding single-run leads), or a talented manager capable of coaxing out of his roster more wins that his team has a right to.
So if we pretend the manager deserves this credit, Banister gets +5, Hinch underachieves with his team’s talent, at -7, and Molitor is only +2.
3. Strong Finish. The Rangers looked to be out of contention early on, but they wouldn’t quit, and they came roaring back in the last couple months to take the division crown.
The Astros, by contrast, claimed first place for most of the season, looked like a lock for the playoffs early on, but suffered a mini-collapse in September that saw them barely hold on to the second wild-card berth. And the Twins fell far behind the Royals in their own division fairly early.
So the award belongs to Banister. Does that mean he’s a good manager? I have no idea. It’s only his first year, and last year’s National League manager of the year, Matt Williams (also a rookie manager), found himself fired after the 2015 season. It appears to be easy to misplace one’s managerial acumen.
