FanPost

A Comment on Mike Matheny's Efficiency as a Manager


I read Bernie Miklasz's 6 December article at 101sports.com today, and was intrigued by his comment that the 2016 Cardinals "would have cleared 90 victories had Mike Matheny done a more effective job of utilizing his personnel." What is the metric that Bernie used to get the 4+ incremental victories assertion, since we don't have well developed metrics for measuring managerial performance, as we do for players, such as WAR? I did a little searching in the literature on measurements of managerial performance. It turns out that Jebediah C. Clarke wrote his BA economics thesis this year at Skidmore College on Analyzing Managerial Efficiency in Major League Baseball: A Sabermetric Approach. Jebediah used a stochastic frontier analysis and data from the 2008-2015 seasons to estimate managerial efficiency. His results will surely interest you all. Of the 26 managers with at least 4 years of experience that he measured, Mike Matheny was the most efficient manager during the time period with a mean efficiency of 0.977, and the most consistent, with a standard deviation of only 0.005. For comparison, Tony LaRussa's slash line was 0.95/.005, Terry Francona was .935/.037, while Joe Maddon was ,938/.036. So here is quantitative evidence that perhaps Mike is not as bad as he is made out to be, although you will have to judge for yourself my assessing the variables used in Jebediah's model. An interesting study, at least to me. I would be interested to hear about other quantitative measures of managerial performance, other than the studies cited by Clark in his thesis. I thought that Bill James had developed such a measure, but I don't have access to his various publications, and don't see anything after a cursory web search.