FanPost

Measuring Tito’s Performance Objectively

Managerial heads have begun to roll in unusually large numbers this year, and it looks like more are about to. Perhaps taking their cue from what is happening elsewhere, various people on this site are also calling for Tito’s head. So I thought this might be a good time to try to look at what sabermetricians said about the standard by which a manager should be judged so I could decide for myself how Tito has fared under this standard. .

Let me begin by saying that I don’t think it’s very helpful to think of someone as a good manager or managerial candidate simply because he is knowledgeable about analytics and says that he applies analytics in doing his job. Joe Maddon had the reputation of possessing those qualities, which led in part to his being put in charge of a big-market, high-payroll team. After five seasons he has just been shown the door. And when Dave Roberts was hired by the Dodgers before the 2016 season, the news coverage noted how analytics-savvy the Dodgers were and how they were marrying analytics to a player-oriented manager. My guess is that Roberts will be gone shortly after the season is over.

The lesson I have drawn from this is that marrying an analytics-savvy manager (e.g. Maddon) to a high-payroll team run by an analytics-oriented front office is not guaranteed – or even likely – to produce an acceptable level of performance on the field. So also with the marriage of a high-payroll, analytics-savvy team to a player-friendly manager (e.g. Roberts). I think a manager should be familiar with sabermetrics, but if he is to be successful he has to have a lot more ability than the ability to understand and apply data in managing the use of their skills by the human beings who play for his team. In fact, given the thousands of decisions a manager makes every year I think analytics probably has a much smaller role to play in a manager’s ability to do his job well than the role of what used to be called people skills.

So what is the standard I think it is most reasonable to use in deciding whether a manager is doing a good job? After reviewing the research, I come down on the side of the standard used by Neil Paine in his March 30, 2014 analysis for 538 of how to differentiate good managers from mediocre or bad managers. It can be found here. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-managers-are-headed-to-the-hall-of-mediocrity/.

After an exhaustive review of the performance of baseball managers, Paine’s conclusion was that "(S)abermetrics tells us that most dugout decisions barely have any effect on the outcome of the game. Furthermore, if we look at effects on player performance, it’s evident that hardly any manager can distinguish himself from his counterparts. Based on my analysis, 95 percent of all managers are worth somewhere between -2 and +2 wins per 162 games. Last year alone, 21 batters and seven pitchers were worth more to their teams than nearly every manager of the last 112 years."

In doing his analysis, Paine reviewed the performance of 172 managers over the previous thirty years and concluded that "Bobby Cox is one of only six managers since 1986 — Russ Nixon, Tony LaRussa, Davey Johnson, Billy Martin and Earl Weaver — who we can say with confidence actually affected the performance of the players he was managing more than the average manager."

What is interesting to me about Paine’s analysis is that Cox was considered among these elite managers because "over the course of his career, Cox’s teams outperformed expectations by 3.1 wins per 162 games on average, sometimes exceeding their projected talent level by as much as 10 wins." Also interesting in the analysis – and fair, in my opinion—is Paine’s insistence that, in order to minimize the effect of randomness on the outcome of games, a manager’s performance cannot be properly analyzed until he has managed at least 1000 games.

So where does that leave us with regard to measuring Tito objectively? In my view, Tito measures up pretty well. Remember that Paine wrote his article before the start of the 2014 season, so Tito’s performance from 2014-2019 was obviously excluded from the analysis. But when his performance as Tribe manager during the more than 1,000 Indians games he has managed from 2013-2019 is taken into account, Tito’s teams have actually outperformed expectations by 3.3 wins per season—which is to say by slightly more than the outperformance by 3.1 wins per season that Paine believed placed Cox among the six elite managers of the previous three decades.

Here is how the Tribe has performed against expectations since 2013. (Because they were the figures most accessible to me, I used the expected wins figure from Grantland for 2013 and 2014 and the expected wins figure from Bleacher Report for the rest of the seasons.) 2013: 81 expected wins versus 92 actual wins. 2014: 83 expected wins versus 85 actual wins. 2015: 86 expected wins versus 81 actual wins. 2016: 82 expected wins versus 94 actual wins. 2017: 92 expected wins versus 102 actual wins. 2018: 96 expected wins versus 92 actual wins. 2019: 95 expected wins versus 93 actual wins.

I know that some people will criticize Paine’s approach in general and/or my application of his approach to just the 2013-2019 seasons when in fact Tito also previously managed in both Philadelphia and Boston, so let me respond in advance.

In defense of Paine’s approach, it does have the advantage of trying to objectively focus on how teams have done against what sabermetrics said they were predicted to do over a long enough period of time to account for the effect of randomness. His approach also has the advantage of changing the focus of the analysis of the manager from his decisions about individual players or discrete tactical situations to a focus on the actual outcome of games he manages. In effect, it sweeps into the analysis the effect of all of a manager’s tactical decisions.

This makes sense to me because over the course of a season a manager makes thousands of tactical decisions – e.g. who should be in his starting rotation and in what order; how long to stick with a starting pitcher when he begins to lose effectiveness for an extended period or when he begins to lose effectiveness in any individual game; which reliever to choose after deciding whether a starter has lost his effectiveness in a game; and how long to stick with the reliever if the reliever has begun to give up a hit or two or walk a batter or two. And this just involves his decisions about pitching. These and many other tactical decisions (our obsession on this site revolves around whether to permit players to make their own decisions about bunting) are almost always subject to second guessing when a game or a season goes the wrong way. But what the players actually produce in the way of wins under a manager shows the net effect, if any, of all these individual management decisions over the course of a season or a managerial career on the manager’s ability to get a team to perform better than the total projected performance of each individual player on the team would otherwise call for.

In response to those who would argue that it is unfair to measure Tito only by his performance as the manager of the Indians, I would respond by saying that doing so has the advantage of taking into account the market size and payroll restrictions that are particularly applicable to managing the Cleveland baseball team. Incidentally, a more practical reason I didn’t include the expected wins of his Boston and Philadelphia teams is because I just could not find that information. It is possible that if his terms in Philadelphia and Boston were included, he would drop into the between -2 and +2 wins per year against expectations that, under Paine’s approach, is the definition of mediocre performance by a manager. Perhaps someone else can find this data and tell us what it shows. Even if it causes a decline in Tito’s +3.3-win performance number in Cleveland, I think the fact that he has managed for more than 1000 games here under genuine market-size and payroll limitations still should be taken heavily into account.

Applying this standard for measuring the kind of job Tito has done has one other virtue. It answers for me the question of why Antonetti and Chernoff, whose reputation depends on the team’s performance on the field and who are nothing if not analytics-savvy, have continued to stick with Tito when so many other teams have been so quick to make managerial changes. It sure looks to me like they have stuck with Tito because his teams have outperformed expectations.


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