Johnson Time!

So apparently Davey Johnson is the best manager in the National league, according to a collection of sportswriters. 

Not Bruce Bochy, not Dusty Baker, not Bud Black. Davey Johnson.

It is not that I am surprised; just that I am extremely frustrated. Both Bochy and Dusty went further than Johnson into the postseason, the Giants manager won the World Series. Baker actually three Manager-of-the-Year awards (hereafter to be referred to as MOY awards, to save me the trouble of reaching up for the "-" key). So neither will be too upset with the decision, and I am not that worked, up, mostly because the MOY award is not that important. But I am irked. Here is why:

 Among all the major awards (CY Young, MVP, Rookie-of-the-year), it is the least legitimate. The MOY award is invariably given to a manager that led a previously pitiful team to respectability, meaning managing to a under-.500 record one year and over-.500 in the next. It doesn't matter to the voters how good the manager is or how good any other manager is. Manage a team to 100 loses three straight years? Great! No use all the high draft picks you've garnered and lull your division rivals into a false sense of security and take your revenue-sharing checks and put together a single winning season and the award is yours!

Here is the guy who should win: a good leader and strategist who leads a good team to good records consistently and, in a particularly banner year, shows his worth as captain to the ship. Here's who actually wins: A guy who either mismanages a team into the ground or takes over after someone else has done so, and improved the record, even marginally. 

There are 30 teams in Major League Baseball. Every year about half have winning records, and half have losing records. If the same 15 teams had above-.500 records every year and the same 15 teams had a under-.500 record every year, there would be no excitement and no bookies; and they wouldn't bother to show the bad 15 teams on TV. Now baseball is exiting, and there are bookies, and they show all 30 teams on TV. I have weighed the evidence for days and have come to the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, a team will occasionally fall from a winning record to a losing record, or vise versa. It does happen, every year. And yet each year the voters seem to think that the occasional, almost perfunctory, and very temporary change of fortunes means that whoever is at the helm of that teams is a baseball man at the level of John McGraw or Connie Mack, regardless of how bad they were in previous seasons. 

In other news, I have been busy and have many, many half-written blogs that are know probably throughly obsolete. I mean, in one that I wanted to post I used statistics from early 2010! I'll try to sort through them and update what I can. In one post I want to update with 2012 statics I graphed teams across an XY axis by runs scored and runs allowed and marked them by record. The conclusion is that the best recipe for success is middle to upper-middle pitching with torrid offense, not exactly the formula the Giants have used. I guess that makes it all the more impressive. 

Quotes by all-time great Walter Johnson:

"The beanball is one of the meanest things on Earth and no decent fellow would use it. The beanball is a potential murderer. If I were a batter and thought the pitcher really tried to bean me, I'd be inclined to wait for him outside the park with a baseball bat."

"I was the greenest rookie that ever was. One evening I was standing out on the sidewalk when a stranger approached and said, 'You're famous already kid. See, they've named a hotel for you.' I looked across the street and sure enough, there was a big illuminated sign that read 'Johnson Hotel.' Well, do you know that I was so green that I actually believed the man!"