Managers of the year!
Award talk! Let’s start with the stupid one. Okay, the stupidest one.
Okay, fine, the Gold Glove is the stupidest one. But I ain’t taking anything like the time to run through all the damn Gold Gloves. You know, until afterward, just like last year. First, let’s talk about who will win the Manager of the Year. It will be:
AL: Ron Washington
NL: Dusty Baker-Stupid
Now let’s talk about why that’s wrong. Ron Washington isn’t a terrible choice; he is (wrongly) perceived as having led the Rangers to a stunning upset, when it was clear to like absolutely fucking everybody before the season began that the Rangers were going to be good and the Angels were going to be bad. But the real reason Washington’s going to win it is because he did cocaine and then said he was sorry, and that kind of makes this season look like a big "redemption" story like sportswriters are total suckers for.
If I were giving out the AL Manager of the Year, I’d probably give it to Joe Maddon again, and not just because he’s the world’s oldest twenty-something hipster. Insofar as a manager has impact on a team’s performance — and, really, it’s way way way less than the players no matter how you slice it — you could probably lay the team’s overperformance or underperformance on him. And the Rays have done some pretty good overperforming this year, not just busting into the playoffs, but also swiping a division title away from the Yankees (a better team). I think it’s just — just! — possible that good management makes enough of a difference in tight spots that he could reasonably get credit for that. Besides, he’s a big damn hipster and that’s funny.
As for the NL, well, did you know that Johnnie B Badd already has three Manager of the Year awards? It’s true. Sad, but true. He’s probably the worst manager in all of baseball, too, given his utter disdain for men reaching base and his habit of slaughtering young pitchers left and right. Did you know that Edinson Volquez only lasted 1.2 innings tonight? And that he’s only 26 years old and has already had Tommy John surgery? Oh, and that Dusty Baker chose a 26-year-old rehabbing Tommy John patient who only threw 62 innings this year — and those rather badly — to start game 1 of the NLDS? Arf. Anyway, Dusty’s going to win because the Fatinals were supposed to be awesome and the Reds came out of nowhere and kicked their asses, even though that had almost nothing to do with Dusty Baker and almost everything to do with Joey Votto.
If I were to hand out the NL Manager of the Year award, I might be totally perverse and give it to Brad Mills. Who’s that, you ask? Fucking nobody, I reply. He’s the manager of the utterly awful Houston Astros. Why would I do such a thing? Because the Houston Astros — even though they were terrible, mind — overperformed their third-order expectation by ten games. That’s a shitload. They finished 76-86, and should, by all rights, have been 66-96. That’s amazing.
If I had to give it to a manager of a team that didn’t suck, I’d pick Bud Black, because the Padres were way better than they had any right to be. See a pattern? Yeah.
