How come some great baseball managers have sub-.500 win percentages?
Posted by John T. Reed on
SF Giants manager is about to retire. He ranks high in a lot of career records but the local media is marveling at the fact that his career winning percentage is below .500.
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If they had read my book Coaching Youth Baseball, they would not be surprised. Baseball is a rather uncoachable sport. Perhaps the best evidence is the career leading win percentage in baseball versus football, a highly coachable sport.
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The best ever MLB win percentage is .615 by Yankee Joe McCarthy. But there was not enough parity then. I suspect he is getting credit for front office wins. In other words, the raw material his team handed him was significantly better than average.
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The best ever win percentage in NFL is .784 by Guy Chamberlin. John Madden is second with .759 and Vince Lombardi with .738. I think there was parity in the Madden/Lombardi era. I don't know about Chamberlin (1922-7]. Although he coached three different teams.
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My CYB book lists several expert opinions on how many wins per season a top MLB manager causes to happen. It is tiny as I recall, like 10 or 15 in a 162-game regular season. Baseball, by definition is not a very coachable sport. It also involves a lot of Zen and that means slumps. Pitchers and hitters go into slumps.
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Ever hear of a football player having a slump? Such people briefly go to the bench then to the CFL. In baseball experts note that the game effort level is typically 85%. That is a bat swing or a throw is about 85% as hard as possible. In football, except for touch passes and kicks, the effort level approaches 100%.
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