TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Thursday, August 12, 2004

Managing Catching Cliches

I tune into WGN to watch the Cubs when I feel like I'm rusty on my sports cliches. Chip Caray and Steve Stone have to be the world's source of the uttermost conventional wisdom about baseball, ranging from belief in the significance of the RBI as a stat to reminding people how important it is for a pitcher to qualify for a win with five innings pitched to a belief in the existence of "clutch" hitting. (We once took to calling Caray "V-Chip" because of the number of times his utterances on our TV made us swear at the tube.) The one that made my head spin again the other day was the utterance that "most" of the managers came up as catchers.

This is of course, absurd, but suppose we grant them a little leeway and assume they meant "many" current managers came up as catchers. This was also my subjective sense - but is it really significant? How many of the managers playing today were catchers?

I went through each of the current 30 major league managers' playing careers and identified the primary playing position of all 30. I also counted managers who had played catcher even once during the major league career, and compared it to the number of players who'd played even once at other positions (excluding slop/mo-up work as pitcher).

Position	DH	C	1B	2B	SS	3B	OF	P
Primary Position	1	6	1	2	5	3	8	0
Any ML game	13	10	16	9	8	15	14	n/a

Four of the current managers have no playing experience in the majors; of these, three were catchers, mostly, and only Buck Showalter, a minor league first-sacker, played mostly at another position. One -- Eric Wedge -- was primarily a catcher in the minors but a DH in the majors, catching only a handful of games.

I counted Joe Torre as a catcher, although he played many more games at first and third combined, the position he played most was catcher; he's a bit of an asterisk in that regard.

Obviously pitchers are not in favor as major league managers right now; once upon a time the major league dugouts were full of former pitchers, from Tommy Lasorda to Kid Gleason. Ray Miller, I think, was the last pitcher to manage in the bigs.

If we count our minor leaguers, one out of three major league managers was primarily a catcher. But nearly one of three was an outfielder, nearly one of three was a middle infielder. Corner men were scarcer, but if you look at time at any position, the corners dominate (maybe because that's where you stick a catcher with tired legs).

During my playing days, players were divided in practice into catchers, infielders, outfielders, and pitchers. By that count we don't have much of a split of dominance towards catching.

It's undeniable that a catcher sees far more of a game than any other player, and on paper that's probably better preparation for being a manager. Baserunning, pitching, hitting, all of these are the concern of the catcher. The catcher's the only guy who's in on every single play of the game. But it's hard to look at the current numbers and say that ex-catchers have a particular edge - a slight edge, yes, but that may be accounted for as much as a fashion (and similarly the paucity of ex-pitchers) as anything.

If there's a common theme among major league managers' playing careers, it's not playing at a given position - it's playing at multiple positions. Virtually all of the non-star players now managing in the majors spent chunks of time split among several positions. There are as many "utility infielders" managing as catchers.

One also hears the old saw that more managers come up as bad or untalented players who use their brains to get their position in the majors.

I also looked at the playing tenure in the majors of managers. One, Bob Melvin, was a back-up player long enough to qualify for a major league pension. Thirteen of thirty played as major league regulars. Of these, nine made all-star teams at least once and would be considered 'star' players. One, Frank Robinson, is a Hall of Famer based on his playing career and thus may be called a 'superstar'. As noted above, all but four of the current managers made the majors as players.

This is also apparently a trend in management - to get a guy the players will respect because he's performed, and performed well, on the major league level. That may also be why ex-pitchers are currently absent among major league managers: a pitcher's going to have less cred with the majority of the bench, and a pitching coach can be hired to manage the pitchers.

So, in any event, yes, there are a lot of ex-catchers represented, and intuitively one would like to believe this because of the way catchers are so involved mentally in the game, but it doesn't seem that significant if we look at the actual numbers.

I'd like to extend this someday to all major league managers, but that would take a couple of off-seasons. If anybody has more data, please post to the message board.

posted by The Crank 2:49 PM