Who is the 2012 AL Manager of the Year?

I DIDNT SEE A NED YOST BUTTON

probably Buck

Casting an advance ballot for Albert Belle in '13.

clearly a headscratcher btwn Showalter and Melvin. I am more convinced of the nonflukiness of Oakland's performance.

buck will win, award remains stupid no matter what

aside from a team's w/l record - how else do you gauge one manger vs another?

who knows!

i can tell you that i've watched the majority of o's games this season and buck makes terrible in-game decisions daily. he's stubborn as hell, it takes half a season for him to move a failing player down in the lineup (or never, if you're jj hardy), he always waits three batters too many to remove a SP.

that said, maybe he's manager of the year, maybe all the media is correct and he's been willing the team to never give up or whatever. it might say more about baltimore's past 15 years, bc buck seems like the first manager since davey johnson to actually have a hold on the team.

opinions vary; I don't know. Some balance of roster management and exceeding Pythag record is usu a part of it.

xp

record in one-run games lol

My real answer is Showalter. Not so much the exceeding pythagorean, which is obviously sustained luck, but just the fact that he has this team believing in itself (which I can only judge from a distance--zachlyon would know that better).

yeah, I mean Arizona had one of the worst postseason tactical managers I've ever seen the year they won it all. Somehow.

Still "the Orioles would've won 100 if it wasn't for Buck" is not an easy argument to make.

xp's

No, actually no one outside the clubhouse can measure "the team believing in itself," tho damn I shoulda known that was coming.

You don't believe such a thing exists? I do. I don't have any proof that it does. Do you have any that it doesn't?

eh the attitude is obv different this year but it's hard to tell if that's buck or if it's just the confidence from having a really really lucky first half

again, if he changes the spirit it's largely bc he's like an actual manager and not just another in a series of interim managers given their first big shot. that alone should inspire some faith like we haven't had in years.

Different managers succeed different ways. Stengel supposedly used a "the team believing they'd be traded to Kansas City if they didn't do well" system.

Is Showalter historically better with veterans or young players, and how does that jibe with Baltimore's composition? Cito Gaston was great with veterans--gave them space, stuck with them in ways that sometimes took a while to pay off but did. (And sometimes didn't.) He wasn't nearly so good with young players.

I'd vote Melvin but he's the only AL manager I've followed closely, so.

You don't believe such a thing exists? I do. I don't have any proof that it does. Do you have any that it doesn't?

take it to a religion thread

tbf no al manager this season has stood out quite like bobby valentine

Ha--once I wrote that I regretted it. I thought someone would come back with a Lochness monster comment. But I do believe that's one of the jobs of a manager, baseball or otherwise. As a teacher of kids, if I can't get students to buy into whatever it is we're doing, that's a big problem.

(If this guy teaches, why does he post all day? I've got a student teacher in right now.)

yes, I just have no fucking way of telling when and where it exists on a MLB team, and neither do you (aside from believing sportswriters and u know...).

xxxxxxp

or on a parallel track, how many years did it take for us to hear that Oriole players chafed at veteran Saint Cal's royal treatment? Nope, hero to the team, they wrote in the late '90s.

http://www.midwestsportsfans.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/buck-showalter.gif

He had to make a pit stop!

The '74 A's hated Alvin Dark, if I'm remembering correctly--I'm sure many teams win without being especially fond of their manager.

I guess my next question would be, if Showalter isn't much of a Gene Mauch tactician, what do you think he's contributed to Baltimore's success? I don't know--I'm just asking.

Maybe nothing--maybe it's 100% Pythagorean luck.

If Ozzie Guillen can guide a team to a championship, anything can happen.

i think its mostly luck - they have a .500ish run differential but won all their close games. it happens.

like if i was looking for causation i'd look at whether they have an outstanding bullpen or whether showalter used pinch hitters and other late-game tactics exceptionally well. my guess is no but i havent actually looked

I hope that will be the topic of the Oriole chapter in the BP annual, or maybe some keen online writer will do it soon.

Sincere question: if you think there's no rational basis for choosing between these guys, Morbius, why did you start the poll? And if you do think there's a rational basis, what do you think it is?

anyone still looking at run differential/extreme luck as the basis for the o's success isn't paying attention. the win total absolutely had a boost the first half of the season and the team wouldn't have been in the same position to succeed without it, but the current team is a different one than what was being thrown out there in the first half. the run diff from August onward has a 100+ win pythag pace. best differential (+50 i believe) in the majors in september.

and for that, dan duquette should take the most credit but buck takes some credit too. bringing up machado and sticking him at 3B where he had no experience (he's been amazing there despite some errors), moving reynolds to first (amazing, in spite of what UZR says), trading for nate mclouth and moving him to LF (much improved from center and great at leadoff so far), taking chris davis off the field most games, moving matusz to the pen (absolutely killer, our best BP arm right now), moving hunter to the pen, moving arrieta to the pen, rotating roleplayers at 2B pretty effectively, having faith in johnson gonzalez and tillman

basically dan and buck did an offseason's worth of work in the middle of the season. it's a different team now, and the team on the field now is scoring more runs than it allows. whether that translates to quality next year is shaky but this year they're doing it.

bcz this is the mothership of irrational polls, c

trading for nate mclouth

ok c'mon this was luck

last two posts otm!

Nate McLuck

If the A's win tonight, gotta wonder did a single pro writer pick them to win the West? Valuing Buck over Bob when Oakland seems to have at least equal Cinderella status smells a bit of East Coast Bias.

r u under the impression that teams don't scout for players who may be diamonds in the rough, esp ex-all stars who are still pretty young, maybe having enough know-how to predict that his crappy CF skills could translate well into a corner

iirc one of duquette's biggest moves was totally juicing up/replacing the scouting department

xps

unless u are taking "A's manager is a cog" Moneyball view

xp

east coast bias exists bc the east coast is better duh

r u under the impression that teams don't scout for players who may be diamonds in the rough

every team does this - and when you're looking at a player who's had a negative WAR for the three previous seasons, you're going to be praying for some luck no mater who the player is.

nate mclouth hit .140/.210/.175 in 34 games for the pirates this year. he is 30 years old.

we joked earlier about norfolk playing an entire 2004 all-star squad, but i refuse to believe that dan duquette looked at nate mclouth and said 'there's a guy who can succeed in the al east'

i mean i'm glad it worked out, n8 seems like a good guy (did u know that an ilxor used to babysit him?), and go birds but i don't think it makes dan duquette some sort of evil genius either

This is definitely Dan Duquette's best performance since his role in Damn Yankees.

eh i don't think someone with a skill set like mclouth's is ever a long shot to rebound at his age. and that's how the o's were playing it when they added him... and moyer, and tejada, and a hundred other old guys... to the AAA roster. they brought him up when they were forced to, played him marginally until he started to prove himself and eventually he got a starting spot.

it's a good strategy imo, filling AAA with potential comeback players. even if only one good major leaguer comes out of it, that's probably more than you'd get from your AAA roster anyway.

lol xps

None of that stuff makes the Orioles unique. What is unique is that it worked.

man i know mclouth has sucked for a few years but am i the only one who always thought he was never done? is it just cause he was so great on my old fantasy teams and i have good will saved up for him?

that sounds likely

the extent to which the o's filled up norfolk with vets was definitely unique. if they do the same thing next year that's basically a new organizational philosophy of "AAA isn't for prospects anymore"

AAA being for fringe veterans/backups isn't really a new thing, many prospects already skip it for that reason

that's not exactly new or unique, really. perhaps not quite to that extent, tho

Who are the veteran guys who were in AAA for Norfolk and then came up and did a good job? I haven't been following the Orioles much.

obv AAA is filled with old vets but norfolk was a retirement home next to the other 29 teams

yes i am still trying to argue that this is a good strategy

mostly mclouth, tho lew ford has done some good, bill hall is on the roster

duquette worked it so they could opt out if they weren't in the majors by a certain date, which happened with a few of them. mclouth almost reached that point but was selected last minute.

oh yea vlad was in aaa for a while too, forgot that

before this Balt stint, McLouth had one great half-season!

I guess it's unique to call those guys up from AAA instead of the independent leagues or like Mexico.

i guess my point is where is the line set for what a GM should get credit for

it's pretty common for front office people to make a low-cost pickup and say "we saw something we think we could fix, he's still got the right tools," etc and many times that shit comes out wrong. why shouldn't a GM be credited for making the low-cost struggling player pickup that works. it's not all some shot in the dark

basically how do we judge any of this at all

arbitrarily

Of the top 9 Orioles in RBI, only Betemit was acquired by Duquette, right? Seems like most of the guys on the roster are McPhail's guys.

yes true, and no one's going to deny that macphail was responsible for a lot of the team

but of those top 9: reynolds and davis were not guaranteed starting jobs all year and have only solidified their positions under the new regime. betemit and andino aren't really positives... the former was only set to injury-replace markakis before he got injured and andino has been a problem all year. so they, along with markakis, have had their time replaced with duquette adds mclouth, quintanilla, flaherty, endy chavez (a positive in the field, at least). machado and bundy were brought up long before macphail would have.

anyway look at the pitching staff and you see duquette's work. strop, o'day, gonzalez, chen, hammel, ayala, lindstrom and then saunders.

sorry for turning this into an orioles thread guys booooo i suck

Nobody's complaining, I don't think! I wish I paid more attention to the Orioles tbqh

someone on SBN makes point that at end of June, A's were 3 behind CLE

i was there the last time the orioles won a playoff series

http://www.ourhonordefend.com/wp-content/uploads/the_more_you_know.jpg

the norfolk tides used 75 different players this season, an international league record

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

perhaps today produced a shift in clarity

yeah, seattle's win was incredible, voting eric wedge

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

No Valentine, no credibility