Buck Showalter has been terrific for the Baltimore Orioles. He has seemingly transformed the franchise from a perennial doormat that served as a farm system for the best teams, one that free agents stayed away from for fear of getting the stink on them, to an annual winner that other teams are loathe to visit. Orioles fans were simultaneously shocked and unsurprised at JJ Hardy signing a 3-year extension to stay an Oriole because he wanted to play for a winner and liked being in Baltimore, and continue to wear the two emotions as contract negotiations with Nelson Cruz progress. Surely, Buck Showalter has been a steady, driving, positive force, perhaps instilling the Oriole Way again, perhaps a supreme motivator, perhaps a sage teacher. Orioles fans wouldn’t trade his leadership for any other dugout presence in the league. We’re quick to hand Showalter Manager of the Year honors in 2014, just as we were in 2012. But is he the best manager in baseball?
Discuss Buck Showalter’s rank among AL and MLB managers on the BSL Forums.
Ignoring the question of whether he’s deserving – of course he is, and many others can make the case to be deserving of MOY honors – and focusing on how Buck Showalter has impacted the Baltimore Orioles in 2014 can help us to determine whether he was 2014’s best manager. There’s another little complication: this isn’t a Most Outstanding or Most Valuable Manager award (though I’ll be treating it like it is, because those would allow for objective analysis), but a Manager of the Year. The name of the award leaves open to interpretation by the voters the meaning of a vague award. Did Manager A lead his team to a dramatic turnaround? Did Manager B have a terrific story off the field that makes his and his team’s on-field work that much more impressive? Did Manager C embrace advanced statistics and embody what baseball in 2014 looks like?
I don’t care. I’ll be judging Manager worth in an arguably quantifiable way and handing out my award from there. I’m writing this before seeing any data specifically so I can say this: I don’t always agree with Buck Showalter’s in-game tactics, but I’m hard pressed to think of a Manager that would be better for the Orioles right now than he is.
And don’t you forget it.
I’ll be ranking Managers by the difference between their team’s Pythagorean wins and actual wins. Run differential may be telling, but it doesn’t mean everything. Orioles fans know full well that a team can outperform a poor run differential by consistently winning close games. For this exercise, we can merge this fact with the idea that a Manager’s decisions have a greater impact on close games. In a 5-run contest either way, bullpen management is largely for setting up tomorrow night and sac bunts mean nothing; in a 1-run game, the right stolen base (or 7, if you ask Ned Yost) can mean the world. If the Manager is assumed to make all of those small-ball calls, it stands to reason that the difference in a team’s Pythagorean wins and their actual wins is attributable to the Manager that made the right calls from the dugout.
By this metric, the top five Managers in each league are as follows, with their win value:
| Manager | Team | Win Value | Manager | Team | Win Value | |
| Joe Girardi | NYY | 7 | Mike Matheny | STL | 7 | |
| Ned Yost | KCR | 5 | Rick Renteria | CHC | 3 | |
| Robin Ventura | CHW | 3 | Ron Roenicke | MIL | 2 | |
| Brad Ausmus | DET | 3 | Bud Black | SDP | 2 | |
| Terry Francona | CLE | 2 | TIE | ATL, LAD, PIT, SFG | 1 |
Buck Showalter managed a great Orioles team this season, one that surpassed all preseason expectations, but the team did well in both record and run differential. The O’s recorded a win expectancy of 95 wins and won 96 – a great season to be sure, but not one that shows Showalter to be handed lemons and squeezing wins from them.
I’d like to point out that four of the five AL Managers to have their teams exceed their run differential enough to make this list are from the Central Division. The three best NL Managers by this measure are from the Central Division also, though one, Rick Renteria, was just dumped in favor of Joe Maddon.
I guess Girardi did preside over an aging Yankees team that nobody thought would be competitive and actually was for the majority of the season, but Ned Yost feels like such a better choice for this award between the two. He either purposefully or accidentally got a ton of value out of anti-sabermetric tactics like sac bunts that ended up not being so anti-sabermetric when viewed in the context of a low-scoring environment and a team without any ability to hit home runs. Plus, I just can’t give the Yankees an award. Mike Matheny, despite possibly managing his team out of the NLCS, did a good job of keeping his team in contention in a very competitive division and without their Molina for a good chunk of the season.
Patrick was the co-founder of Observational Studies, a blog which focused on the analysis and economics of professional sports. The native of Carroll County graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Loyola University Maryland. Patrick works at a regional economic development and marketing firm in Baltimore, and in his free time plays lacrosse.