Is It Time For Robot Managers?

Forget having robot umpires, today's Major League Baseball teams should be managed by robots.

MLB Manage-Bot V 2.0, let's call it; it could run from an app on your iPhone, and slightly less effectively from a similar app on Android. Replace all that archaic "gut feeling" and "baseball instinct" nonsense with sleek, sexy, obedient, and ultra-efficient code. In-game pitching match-ups will be figured out by regression, defensive shifts aligned by probability. Give that fucker some robo-hooks to flail wildly at umpires and a taser to keep Jonathan Papelbon in line, and you've effectively eliminated the manager position altogether.

Isn't that what today's GMs want? A manager's name stenciled across a neutered, roster-taping appliance that toes the company line, delivers repeatable results, and won't fuss about being scrapped for a newer model. It sure feels like it. If it wasn't, why the hell isn't Don Mattingly still managing the Dodgers?

In fact, why does any team fire a manager following a successful season in which the flock of multimillionaires he's been asked to babysit beshit themselves at a crucial moment, despite his every effort to help them succeed?

You know the answer. It's because someone has to be held responsible, whether they actually were responsible or not.

Managers, it seems, are the last remnants of baseball's traditional monarchic structure; they're relevant only in terms of symbolism, with the real power reserved for the stat-crunching front office types who graciously put these managers on the throne. Managerial decisions are dictated by contracts, player pain thresholds, and numerical advantage. Managers talk to the press, point to the bullpen, and if their team doesn't win, they get fired. Lather, rinse, get the fuck out of here.

Thank Moneyball for changing the dialogue about the game. Letting old baseball men use their gut instincts and feelings to decide who would get to become the next generation of old baseball men was a broken system. But it was no more broken than today's ridiculous insistence that all baseball outcomes should and must be an expressions of statistically derived reason.

To take a keystone role like team manager and trivialize it so much—to the heads-I-win/tails-you-lose point where the manager's role is primarily to be the scapegoat responsible for failed organizational strategy— is a joke. It's one nearly as funny as telling that sap that he has authority over superstars earning one hundred times what he makes.

The industry insists team leadership is crucial. Clubs habitually overspend on aging players with reputations for intangible leadership skills. GM's boast about how their new managers have "lots of dirt under their cleats." But if leadership is so crucial, why isn't baseball trying harder to develop it the same way it's pressing to develop every other skill set?

Yet, this is how on-the-field positions of power are determined: If you played, you can coach. If someone likes you, and you coach long enough, you can manage. Bonus points if you were a really good player, because players will listen to you more. That's a really shaky way to choose who will be at the helm of your $300 million dollar payroll—but it's the way baseball has alway done it. Players go from playing to coaching with no training in between; this offseason, ex-players turned front-office types have been hired as managers without any coaching experience at all. Leadership or teaching ability is often considered an intangible.

Ever wonder why Joe Maddon is one of the best modern managers? It's not because he's a statistical genius, or not just because he's a statistical genius. It's because he's one of the few managers to take a hands on approach to applying modern analytics in an industry driven by ego, money, and short-term results-oriented thinking.

Some people see his clubhouse stunts—like having bizarre dress codes for travel days—as gimmicks or stunts. But fostering team unity, shaping personal motivators, and reserving pools of money for spot bonuses and morale building events have been part of the naturalized workplace for years—and they work.

This is not the angry screed of a man who rejects the Sabermetrics community. Life needs more, and more intelligent, data-driven application. But I've also played. I know what it's like to belong to something unquantifiable. I know what it's like to belong to a group where players feel valued and respected. It instills a sense of obligation, a desire to push yourself beyond what you can do, because you don't want to disappoint the person who has given you a chance to succeed. In short, I know that a good manager can help you demand more and get more out of yourself as a person, which leads to getting more out of yourself as a player.

There is a leadership vacuum in baseball. While the metrics revolution can help teams draft and project better, it's not asking athletes to learn or contribute anything new. We just have a better understanding of who they are as players, and how they can be more effectively deployed as such, but not necessarily as people. And that last little bit—the human element, and the way that working as part of a unit helps players elevate their games—can make a huge difference, especially when you're talking about leadership positions such as managers and coaches.

In some ways it feels like a concession to the past that baseball still has a manager role. It's baseball's way of saying there are still mysteries in the universe it cannot yet explain and so teams keep one of the old Soothsayers around to interpret the will of the baseball gods. But the truth is that the hard-to-quantify stuff that some believe to be baseball pseudoscience—"momentum" or mojo or team chemistry—is actually the result of teachable, developable skills that baseball does a piss-poor job at spotting and developing.

When's the last time a player was drafted because he had the proper makeup to become a manager? Never. It's always an afterthought. But as time marches on and the science of Saber gets more precise, and baseball more predictable, the next big market inefficiency will be getting all these perfect puzzle pieces to fit, and work, together.