With nothing, at all, going on in the baseball world right now, thank heavens for Melky Cabrera. No, Melky hasn’t signed or committed any crimes against humanity this week but he is certainly here to help the beleaguered bloggers and news editors of the world.
Awards for managers. What can you say? They certainly do get handed out, don’t they?
Arguing over the best manager in any given year is even more futile than the other awards that the Baseball Writers Association of America hand out at the end of the season. There’s an element of subjectivity in any opinion on what makes one player better than another, but at least those opinions can be backed up by statistics and reason.
Recognizing a manager’s contribution has no such metric on which to base an opinion on. Sure, you can say that the best team in baseball has the best manager because they collected the most wins, but you can also say that the sun and moon kill people because people around the world die every day both when the sun is out and when the moon is out.
It’s a funny correlation, but more often than not, it ends up that good managers have good players. And because baseball is a game in which getting out, or failing three fifths of the time is an extraordinary accomplishment, a manager’s sole responsibility is to put his players in the best position to succeed. And so, you could probably do worse than handing out the best manager awards to Kirk Gibson of the Arizona Diamondbacks and Joe Maddon of the Tampa Bay Rays for their efforts in 2011.
