Thoughts on AL manager of the year

The AL manager of the year award went to Banister.  I have nothing against Banister and I'm sure he did a fine job. I just think, of all awards, the MOY award is the most subjective.  I mean....how do you measure the impact of a manager?  Certainly not by wins and losses, or otherwise Yost and Gibbons would have been in the top 3.

It really looks like the baseball writers vote for managers of teams that over-performed vs expectations.  It's a good narrative that the manager is the intangible thing that made these teams do better than anyone thought.  You never know if that is actually true though.  And even if it is true, it's impossible to know to what extent one manager had on his club vs another.

Too many people think they know the answer to that.  I saw quite a few tweets last night from the Gibby haters who like to blame every close game loss on the manager.  The thing is though, most people over-estimate the impact of a manager.  When the team wins, it's all about the players.  When a team loses, we see lots of blame on the manager.  There are many fans that need to assign blame when things don't go well.  Most of the criticism I saw on Gibby were from those that are managing with 20/20 hindsight.  Or from those that don't understand that the same relief pitcher can't pitch every night.

Bullpen management is an important role for the manager.  And that means getting the right guys in the right spots as much as possible without blowing out their arms.  I thought Gibby did a great job of that.

I also look to the respect that the players have for the manager.  That's certainly in part on the players.  If you have a bad egg in the clubhouse who never respects authority, then there will be clashes.  But we saw some odd things this year with other teams.  We saw players yelling at Mattingly openly in the dugout.  We saw Max Scherzer freak out on Williams for trying to take him out of a game.  We saw some crazy inner fighting in Detroit and Washington.  These things may not be entirely the manager's fault, but it doesn't look good when the players disrespect their manager.  We never saw anything close to that in Toronto this year.  If stuff happened, it happened in private where it should be.

There's also lots of situations where a MOY subsequently has a terrible year with largely the same team in place.  So that speaks to the randomness of baseball that we all try to quantify with reason.

@bluejaystwit