Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Excerpt: "Ned Yost and Chip Kelly"

"So we end up with Ned Yost making decisions he is, on a very basic level, not qualified to make for a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars. MLB picks its managers based almost entirely on soft factors: how they handle the media, how they relate to the people around them, how they build the confidence of the players in their charge. It's convenient, because there's no good way to measure whether managers actually do that. We end up with a version of Nichols' Law of Catcher Defense for managers, assuming that someone poor at the baseball stuff must be quite a leader of men because why else would he have the job? We end up with managers whose ability to pick the right batter with second and third and one out in the ninth inning of a must-win game never came up in the interview."