Playoff baseball has not disappointed in the last forty-eight hours, and that is a good thing. It's been a pleasant distraction from focusing on the managerial search in minute detail. I feel as though the interview process for us as fans, is pretty useless. As Footer stated in a link I have below, "it is impossible for me to size up the candidates during a 10-minute media briefing and tell who was the most impressive during his 2 1/2 hour interview session with the club's decision-makers." For that reason alone, I've tried my best to remain aloof from it, but I haven't forsaken the process completely. Hopefully by mid-week I'll have my next contribution to better informing us about the candidates.
But on with the reason your reading this: links to stuff you can read while you watch a little pig skin (or obsessively watch your fantasy football tracker...).
- I'll start with Footer's link because I liked her insight the best and she always has pictures. Plus I quoted her above. Alyson throws out whom she feels has a leg up in the race.
- Richard Justice gives us Drayton McLane's mailing address and urges us to hire Garner (probably the most useful thing Justice will ever do for us). I feel like we can do a lot more productive things with this information...like mail him a giant petition urging him to sell the team, and bring in a new, fresh group willing to spend money and trust smart people to make smart decisions with it. But if you want to endorse Garner via snail mail, go for it. There's a lot about the article I'd like to pick apart, but I'll leave the fun and excitement for you.
- I'll be honest, there are a lot of these managerial candidates who I don't know from Adam's house cat. So when I came across this synopsis of Mackanin, I have to admit, I perked up a little bit:
Mackanin, the bench coach for the Philadelphia Phillies, is in his 41st season of professional baseball. He is searching for his first non-interim managerial position in the major leagues... He has run the gamut in baseball from scouting, to the minor leagues, to managing in Latin America to being a part of four major league coaching staffs since 1997.
Pretty much everything. Impressive. Final word about the managerial search.
- The Chronicle hosted a poll asking which of the ten candidates should be the next manager, the results shocked the [expletive deleted] of me.
(Ok, we're done with managerial talk.)
- A cool retrospective of Lance Berkman's career from Astros.com. There's a crazy photo of Lance in his early twenties as Rice Owl.
- Zach Levine remains above the managerial search fray and lets us know just exactly where all the Astros who are playing winter ball will be playing it.
- JC Bradbury takes a look at an attempt to rebunk wins. I used to read Bradbury all the time and then stopped for a year or so. I'm glad I got back on board, though.
- BtB's Daily Box Score asks, and attempts to answer, "What do the playoffs tell us?"
- Finally, a pretty incredible glossary and guide to understanding Japanese baseball (research provided by SABR).
For the heck of it, I comment on some of the links.
++Footer’s photos of the managerial candidates…Does anyone else find it odd that most of the candidates dressed so casually for the interviews? I’ve worn suits to every interview, and I don’t recall interviewing anybody who wasn’t wearing a tie, at least. I know baseball is a little different, because it is an outdoor sport, but it still surprised me. FWIW, Clark and Acta wore suits.
+Sure I agree that what you can learn from 10 minutes of comments to the press is very limited. However, I do find it interesting that we hear some divergence in what the candidates are willing to say about the state of the Astros. Yost seemed the most optimistic about the Astros’ talent level and ability to contend, followed by MacKanin who seemed to be judging the Astros based on their head to head games vs. the Phillies. Acta seemed the most willing to critique problems areas (“left side of the infield” and starting pitchers to help out Wandy and Roy O). Of course, some of this may just be telling us what they think we want to hear. It would be interesting to know whether interviewers prefer the optimistic Yost statements or not.
+ It seems like you have to go to Astros.com to get a balanced view of what the candidates said. JJO has a tendency to pick someone who impresses him on a given day and relegates the other candidates that day to minimal coverage.
+ I may have mentioned this before (can’t recall really), but Mackanin is a more interesting candidate than my initial reaction allowed (originally I thought he might be just part of Wade’s Philadelphia connection). Some of the commenters at BBTF who follow other teams say that they were impressed with Mackanin when he was an interim manager. And, since then, I began to recall that Mackanin had some support in Cincy and Pittsburgh from fans and players who wanted him made the permanent manager.
+ I agree totally with Bradbury’s article. I recall the DRaysBay article he is rebutting, and I was disappointed that someone would try to wrap pitcher W% in a sabermetric cloak. Bradbury does a good job of rebutting that view. I suspect you could correlate team W% with individual players’ offensive output. But would you use team W% to evaluate individual players’ offensive contribution?
clack - October 18, 2009
I've asked
Any blog manager who has had one of our candidates manager their team to give me their opinion. So far I have response for 5 of the 10 and Mackanin has the most glowing review of all. I’m waiting until I either have responses for all ten or until Wednesday to post what people said.
Stephen Higdon - October 18, 2009
The playoffs tell us....
who the best team in MLB is?
Oh, wait…I guess the BtB power rankings are supposed to supersede the playoffs for the ultimate source of who the best in baseball is. My bad.
Evan Hochschild - October 18, 2009
Ha! that's what I was thinking when I saw the link.
Did you look at the article, though? It’s like an essay in a political economy class. It actually tries to justify the playoffs, kind of. So dense and boring an article that I only skimmed it.
clack - October 18, 2009
i did the same as you
i figured it would be difficult to get through so i didn’t even bother
Evan Hochschild - October 18, 2009
I wish tommy manzella was on that list and he worked with who ever Bourn worked with last year…
Subber10 - October 18, 2009
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