The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers From 1870 to Today By Bill James Scribner, 1997 Who was the greatest manager of all time? The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers doesn’t attempt to answer that question -- not really anyway -- but it does try to give the reader the tools with which to make that determination. “What I have done in this book, in the main, is not try to say who was a good manager and who was not, but to focus on how one manager was different from another,” James write in the introduction. “Having thought about the issue for much of my professional life, and having organized my own thinking about managers to some limited extent, I have written this book in the hope that I can help other people to think a little more clearly about baseball managers.”

Thus we learn that Walter Alston liked to issue intentional walks a good deal early in his career while Earl Weaver would do so “whenever there was a blizzard in hell.” Joe McCarthy liked an offense based on power, while Bill McKechnie “liked .300 hitters [and] speed more than power.”

Multiply about 20 such topics by about 20 of the greatest managers in history and you’ve got an idea about what’s at the heart of The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers. For each decade of Major League history, James presents capsule Q&A biographies of one or two of that decade’s most successful managers -- from Harry Wright to Tommy Lasorda. The questions are organized into several broad categories: what he brought to a ball club; how he used his personnel; game managing and use of strategies; and handling the pitching staff.

By answering these questions, James helps paint a picture of what were the strengths and weaknesses of baseball’s most famous and winningest field generals.

The book is framed in much the same way as James’ classic Historical Baseball Abstract (in fact, it’s graphically almost identical). In addition to the Q&A bios, each chapter includes a decade snapshot and several essays on managers and managerial topics of the day. Among the most interesting is an article on Fred Haney, whose 1959 managerial job for the Braves is judged by James as the worst in history.

And of course no Bill James book would be complete without the introduction of a new sabermetric formula. In this case, James devises a system to rank managers relative to one another objectively. “Is Sparky Anderson a good manager, or a lucky stiff who came along in the right organization at the right time? Everybody’s got an opinion, and there’s no way to prove one or the other. But either way, Sparky Anderson enjoyed a considerable amount of success as the manager of the Cincinnati Reds. All I’m trying to do here is fix that objective observation in a number.”

The system awards a manager four points for winning the World Series, three points for winning the pennant but not the World Series, two for a divisional title and one for each season with a record above .500. In addition, a manager gets one point for guiding his team to 20 games above .500 and a second point for winning 100 games. Under the system, the most successful managers of all time are:

1. John McGraw
2. Connie Mack
3. Joe McCarthy
4. Casey Stengel
5. Walter Alston

The book also includes the usual James humor. About Vern Rapp, who briefly managed the Cardinals in 1977-78, James writes: “Here is a man who worked thirty years to get to the majors, and then had a major league career with the approximate duration and enjoyment of a proctologist appointment.”

The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers does not have the overall appeal of the Historical Abstract. Nor is it quite as interesting as The Politics of Glory, James’ book on the Hall of Fame. But for a serious student of baseball history, the book provides a solid understanding of how the role of the manager has evolved over the decades. And the book ultimately meets James’ goal of helping the average fan “think a little more clearly about baseball managers.”

The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers may be available for purchase on the net at one of these sites.

--Justin, June 16, 1999