WHAT AN EXPERIENCED MANAGER CAN BRING

 

If you haven't read Tim Keown's piece on Texas Rangers manager Bruce Bochy yet, let me bring you a taste of it. This paragraph encapsulates all you need to know about the man, but more to that, all you need to know about what a manager for a major league baseball team should be:

"BRUCE BOCHY SPEAKS in a low rumble, walks like his shoes are three sizes too small and prefers to talk about anything but himself. He manages a baseball game as if there are actual human beings on the field and not just a collection of numbers designed to dictate all outcomes, big and small. He is 68 years old and back for another run at glory that, if successful, he will refuse to accept credit for helping to create."

A brilliant description, but all those words are just another way to saying this one word to describe Bruce Bochy... CONFIDENT.  

When you're confident, losses hurt, but will roll off, a restructuring of a lineup will take place, but you never panic, you never coddle... you still continue to play hard-nosed baseball. It's a gut thing many times, because you're confident. This is what I have been missing on the New York Yankees this year.  This is why I want a guy like Aaron Boone to be removed as the Yankees manager.  He lacks confidence, he doesn't command a room, he cannot lead in good times and definitely not in bad.  

Boone uses charts and books and numbers and match-ups only.  The idea of using instincts is foreign to him. That's a major issue. And if you think about it, all truly great managers before Boone have been successful winners because they don't try too hard. Again, typically is a gut thing, a feel thing. Boone's got this thing where he's probably overthinking his players on the field and not going with instincts, but instead matchups... matchups that might have worked in one scenario a week ago, but it's not a computer.... so no doubt the outcome will be different this time around. And to be honest? That's the problem here.  

There's this too, to really hammer home what I'm talking about comparing a champion manager like Bochy to Boone.  Rangers' outfielder Travis Jankowski:

"He obviously appreciates analytics and uses analytics," Jankowski says, "but he's trusting his gut and his baseball instincts. We're not computers. We're human beings, and I know guys appreciate and thrive on being treated like one."

The gut check.  The players are human beings.  Instead of having a computer run your team, have an actual FEEL for the game.  When you don't do that, it's called inexperience.  

It's something the Yankees cannot seem to understand and surely Boone does not.  If Boone comes back next year... it will just be the same movie... a movie I hate.

Who knows if Bruce Bochy and the Rangers will win the World Series this year... but there's one thing I do know... I'd bet on it that they do.  If the Yanks were there... I would never, ever make that same bet. Why? Poor leadership... that's why.