It’s worth remembering that before Major League Baseball starting filling managerial openings last fall, and before more jobs suddenly opened up after the Commissioner’s report about illegal sign-stealing in Houston, the sport was potentially looking at the greatest free-agent class of managers in history.
It didn’t mean that Bruce Bochy, who won three World Series with the Giants and took the Padres to another, was looking to get back into the game so soon after retiring; by all accounts, he’s not. Or that Mike Scioscia, who managed the Angels for 19 years -- including in 2002, when the Halos won the Fall Classic -- was aggressively looking to do the same.
But the point is that they were at least untethered. So was Joe Maddon, who ended up with the Angels; Joe Girardi, now with the Phillies; Buck Showalter; and a proud old baseball man named Dusty Baker.
Now, because AJ Hinch, Alex Cora and Carlos Beltrán have been dismissed from the Astros, Red Sox and Mets, respectively, and jobs in three big baseball cities are suddenly open this close to Spring Training, Showalter's name is popping up in Houston, and Baker's name is being attached to the Mets and Astros. It means that maybe everything old, because of the historic events of the past week, is about to be new again in baseball.
It doesn't mean that Showalter will get the Astros job, even though he’d be a great fit. Or that Baker, at 70, will get one more shot after having already won more than 1,800 games (15th all time) with the Giants, Cubs, Reds and Nats. But they might. It’s worth rooting for both of them. Even in a world in which clubs have become much more comfortable hiring managers who haven’t led a team from a big league dugout before, it’s worth remembering how much managers -- and experience -- still matter in baseball.
“I’ll use any information that will help me win,” former Mets, Braves, Cardinals, Yankess and Dodgers manager Joe Torre said once. “But we can’t ever lose sight of how much the human element matters in our game.”
This may be the law of unintended consequences because of what happened over the past week in Houston, Boston and New York, but ask fans of the Astros, Red Sox and Mets if they think just anybody can take a seat in their dugouts, scan the data and then just go play the season. Houston fans I’ve talked to are happy that Showalter is at least being considered. New York fans are just as happy that the Mets may take a real look at Baker and what he brings to the dugout and the sport, now that New York has parted company with Beltrán.
Of course, no one could have anticipated, even a couple of months ago, that we’d be where we are in baseball. But here we are. In what usually is such a quiet time in the sport, while the NFL's season is wrapping up and MLB Spring Training is about to begin, things are pretty loud -- and pretty interesting, in Houston, Boston and New York, as fans try to make their voices heard about who they want to be managing their teams when pitchers and catchers report to Florida and Arizona.
This isn’t to diminish the candidacies of potentially worthy guys who are looking for their first managing job. Looking back at the past 30 years in baseball, there have been some first-time managers who won, like Cora and Dave Martinez, whose Nationals claimed a World Series championship in his second season as their skipper. And science and math have changed baseball, too, especially over the past decade.
But it doesn’t mean we should ignore the managers who have won, sometimes more than once: Bobby Cox (one World Series championship), Jim Leyland (one), Torre (four), Terry Francona (two), Tony La Russa (three), Bochy (three), Maddon (one), Girardi (one) and even old Jack McKeon with the Marlins in 2003, when he was older than Baker is now. Even Hinch had managed the D-backs before he got to the Astros.
One time, I was standing with former Reds and Tigers skipper Sparky Anderson (three World Series wins) behind the hotel in Lakeland, Fla., where he used to stay during Spring Training when he managed Detroit. It was the early '90s, his baseball day was over, he had a little bag of golf balls with him and he was practicing his chipping as a way to unwind. But still talking.
I asked Anderson what was the best part of managing, for him, at that stage of his wonderful career.
He smiled and said, “I know how to do it now.”
It would have been different for him in this world, of course, of launch angles, shifts, spin rates and the like. But in the end, it still would have been Anderson's job to manage his players, the clubhouse and everything that would happen starting in the top of the first inning.
Torre was right. The human element still matters, and so does experience. There are a lot of guys still out there who know how to do it. It's not such a bad thing that some owners are taking a second look at them.