Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike D
If you want to pick apart Maddon's strategy more effectively, I'd suggest you shy away from quoting me to prove your points. 
Bottom line though, I have a lot of faith in what Maddon does because he varies his strategy so much and succeeds more often than not. Which was 92 times in the regular season, and then the elimination of the Texas Rangers (91-72), the Cleveland Indians (92-70) from playoff contention (both on the road by the way) and then only in the Red Sox 3-1 ALDS elimination did the Rays finally falter. And the game where you are picking Maddon apart was lost 3-1 and the true failure was the Rays offense rather than the pitching....and had the Rays offense managed 4 or 5 runs, then Game #5 would've seen a "well rested" David Price. The one thing that could've easily put the Rays over the top in the entire series. But we'll never know....but not because of Joe Maddon. |
I think manager's are overrated and for the most part pitching (particularly starting pitching in the regular season) wins games. When the Red Sox collapsed in September 2011 it was because our pitchers all were injured or fell apart, and for all the stuff Valentine did wrong, nobody was going to make the playoffs with the year our starting pitchers had (you can plausibly argue they'd would've pitched better under Farrell, but we still had Aaron Cook, Daisuke and Daniel Bard starting 40 games for us). This year the top 7 AL clubs in ERA were KC, Oakland, Detroit, Texas, TB, Boston, Cleveland. The top 5 in the NL were Atlanta, LA, Pittsburgh, Cincy and St. Louis.
Unless I'm mistaken, TB was the only team that had 4 starters with at least 20 starts and ERA's under 3.50, and they had 5 relievers with 60+ innings and ERA's between 3.09 and 4.14 (with a 6th - Alex Torres being marginally better at 1.79). I'm of the belief that any "old-school" manager could've let his starters pitch until they were getting tired, then thrown in any of the 6 relievers for one inning each at a time and won about 92 games. I don't think Maddon's a bad manager, but I also don't think he's any better than Bob Melvin, Terry Francona, John Farrell or Jim Leyland, and he gets the genius label from much of the media just because he does more things than the other 4 (and has a personality). Most of those things do work out, but it's not because of some smart plan, it's because he's replacing one solid pitcher with another solid pitcher. Then, when the manager makes 6 moves and the team wins, he gets the credit, while if a manager leaves one non-star player in (say, Breslow in Game 4) and he gets the job done, the credit goes to the player.
(I would say let's see how he does next year without Price, but knowing Friedman's track record I expect him to convince the Twins to trade him Buxton and Sano or the D'Backs to trade Skaggs and Bradley for him.
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