Lots and lots of managerial things are happening around baseball right now, but two things in particular caught my attention. One, I read some stuff musing whether or not four-time World Series champion Bruce Bochy is, in fact, the greatest manager ever. Two, the ultimate Milwaukee guy, Craig Counsell, left the Brewers for a $40 million windfall with the Chicago Cubs, making him, by far, the highest-paid manager ever.
I’m not sure these two things are related, but for some reason, they connected in my mind. Here’s why: I’ve come to believe that the baseball manager job is the most mysterious of all coaching jobs in sports. It’s the only one of our major American sports where you don’t really design plays, and you can’t really set things up to put the game in the hands of your best players, and timeouts don’t play an important role in the game’s action, and, as often as not, the less you do during the game, the better off your team will be.
Andy Reid or Gregg Popovich or Jon Cooper or Jurgen Klopp can transform their teams, game by game, have them play different styles depending on the opponent. Bruce Bochy or Craig Counsell, mostly, cannot. They are, in so many ways, prisoners of the moment, dependent on how their starting pitcher pitches, how the bottom of their lineup fares, how reliable the bullpen happens to be on a given day, how well the ball happens to be carrying, the dice-rolling randomness of their best hitters coming up at exactly the right times.
I’m speaking a bit more definitively here than I feel in order to make the point: The things that separate the best baseball managers in 2023 are not easily observed or seen. Sure, every now and again, a hit-and-run will work perfectly or a pitching change will backfire or a lineup shift will seem to spark the whole team.
Still, for the most part, baseball managers these days follow the same game principles. Torey Lovullo’s Diamondbacks bunted a little bit more than some other teams, and Terry Francona’s Guardians intentionally walked a few more batters than some others, and David Bell’s Reds stole a few more bases than some others, and Gabe Kapler’s Giants had one more complete game (4!) than any other team … but all of this is on the margins.
You could recognize a Marty Schottenheimer football team.
You can recognize an Erik Spoelstra basketball team.
I don’t know that you could watch any team in baseball play and recognize the particular style of that team’s manager.
Joe Posnanski has been called "contemporary sports writing's biggest star." For more stories from Joe, subscribe to his Joe Blogs Substack newsletter at joeposnanski.com, where he writes about sports, pop culture, life, and all manner of nonsense.
This is not to downplay the importance of baseball managers, but to say, instead, that it isn’t easy to understand what makes them succeed or fail. Almost exactly one year ago, Buck Showalter won Manager of the Year and was the toast of New York. Today, Buck Showalter doesn’t have a job and would probably have to buy his own beer in New York.
What I’m saying is:
I could not tell you what makes Craig Counsell worthy or unworthy of the biggest managerial contract ever. I have never once watched the Milwaukee Brewers play and thought: “Now, THAT is a Craig Counsell move right there.” I take it on faith that he’s very good at running a clubhouse, dealing with internal issues, projecting calm and fire when those are needed, injecting confidence in his players while always letting them know he has their backs. The Brewers have had high-level starting pitching, so I think he must be very good in handling starters. He’s pretty anti-sacrifice bunt and intentional walk, so I like that. And you will hear players talk about his “winning attitude.”
There have also been repeated playoff failures. I’ll get back to those in a minute.
Add it all up and … well, I’m not sure what it means. I think Counsell is a fine manager. The Cubs were willing to make the big bet because, well, they tried this once before, and it worked beautifully. In 2014, the Cubs felt they were on the cusp of something special. And at the end of that season, they rather cold-heartedly dumped loyal manager Rick Renteria when Joe Maddon came on the market. Theo Epstein has told me that was hard, but he felt like the team had one chance, and only one chance, to hire a manager as dynamic as Maddon, and they couldn’t miss the opportunity. Maddon immediately guided the Cubs to the NLCS, and the next year they won the World Series. So that worked.
Now, the Cubs might again feel on the cusp of something; by all logic, they should have breezed into the playoffs this year, as they outscored opponents by 96 runs. And Craig Counsell was there to be wooed, so they dumped loyal manager David Ross and gave Counsell the record-breaking deal, and they’re hoping it pays off big again. It might. It might not.* As I say, I have no idea.
*I can’t help thinking that, well, I don’t know if Maddon was a BETTER manager than Counsell—I’m not sure such comparisons are even useful—but I do think Joe Maddon cut a much larger persona than Craig Counsell. I mean, Joe is a big personality, someone out of the old-school of managers, the kind of guy you might see kibitzing with celebrities, the kind of guy who brings elephants on the field to loosen things up, a jokester and a stir-things-up sort, a direct descendant of the bigger-than-life managers like Tommy Lasorda and Sparky Anderson and Whitey Herzog. I don’t get any of that from Counsell. He does get thrown out of his fair share of games; though David Ross seemed to have that covered in Chicago.
Counsell’s postseason troubles are well-known in Milwaukee:
2018: Swept the Rockies in the NLDS but lost to the Dodgers in seven games in the NLCS.
2019: Blew a 3-0, early-inning lead and lost the wild-card game to the Nationals.
2020: Swept by the Dodgers in a best-of-three wild-card series.
2021: Won Game 1 of the NLDS, but then lost three straight to Atlanta, twice getting shut out.
2023: Blew two multi-run leads and got swept by Arizona in the wild-card series.
Now, can you make anything out of that? Hard to say. The Nationals, Dodgers and Braves all went on to win the World Series and were, it can be reasonably said, the superior teams. The Diamondbacks’ loss this year was more surprising and harder to explain away, but, hey, it was just two games, plus Arizona just had some magic and kept on going all the way to the World Series.
But … well, this is where we come back to Bruce Bochy. It seems way off to call Bruce Bochy the greatest manager in baseball history or anything close. He has a losing regular-season record, for crying out loud. He has never managed a team that won 100 games in a season and only once has managed a team to 95 wins. Here’s something crazy: He has never managed a single team to the best record in the league. Heck, in two of his four World Series seasons, his team didn’t even win the division.
That said: None of those regular-season things mean what they used to mean. It’s true that Bochy in 26 years of managing has never won what you might call a “natural pennant”—finishing with the league’s best record—but what matters now, pretty much to the exclusion of everything else, is October, and Bochy’s record in October is beyond remarkable.
- In San Diego, yes, his teams went 8-16 in the postseason but did go to the World Series in 1998.
- In San Francisco, his teams were a remarkable 36-17 in October, winning three World Series.
- In Texas, as you know, his team set a record for consecutive road wins, went 13-4, and won the franchise’s first World Series.
Add it all up, that’s a 57-37 postseason record, five pennants, four World Series, all this with teams that never went into the playoffs as a favorite.
This Bochy witchcraft, like so many of the managerial traits we’ve been talking about here, is not easy to explain. Bochy’s presence inspires confidence, and he seems more or less unshakeable, and he doesn’t seem unduly tied to tradition or blind loyalty or anything else that might prevent him from winning TODAY’S game. And, I mean, you just like the guy, which can’t hurt.
But does he run wild like Whitey’s teams did? No. Does he preach the gospel of great defense, starting pitching and the three-run homer as Earl did? No. Does he mix and match and experiment and follow his gut and entertain the sportswriters like Casey did? No. Does he work over his bullpen so much that people call him “Captain Hook” the way they did with Sparky? No.
Maybe you can describe the baseball philosophy of Bruce Bochy in that sort of pithy way. I find it hard to do.
But there’s something happening with Bochy, something that every team in baseball wants now. If a franchise could hire a steady manager who will squeeze the most of out of a team’s talents over the regular season, or a mercurial manager who will give them the best chance to win in October, I imagine most teams right now would choose the second. That is, if teams could identify such things.
I don’t think they can. I’m very happy that Craig Counsell has reset the market for managers; by baseball standards I think they were underpaid. I’m very happy that Bruce Bochy put himself among the elite managers by winning his fourth World Series. And I’m not sure I understand any of it. That might not be a bad thing, though. Baseball is a wonderful mystery, after all.
Joe Posnanski has been named the best sportswriter in America by five different organizations, including the Sports Media Hall of Fame and the Associated Press Sports Editors. He has also won two Sports Emmy Awards. He is the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of six books, and he co-hosts the PosCast with television writer and creator Michael Schur.
