I noted the other day that the Toronto Blue Jays' disappointing season, despite J.P. Ricciardi's efforts that have been applauded by the sabermetrics community, threatens to turn that team into the center of the "Moneyball" wars.

David Pinto comments on yesterday's firing of manager Carlos Tosca and anticipates one justified line of criticism:

[W]hat I want to know is why Moneyball GM's do such a poor job of hiring managers?

...Why do they go for teachers like Tosca, or player's managers like Francona, or people with a presence like Art Howe? Why don't they go for someone like Earl Weaver or Whitey Herzog or Davey Johnson, who basically agree with their philosophy of running a baseball team without being obvious about it? Are these GMs afraid to share the limelight with a strong manager?

Pinto makes a very good point: the managers of the "Moneyball" teams generally range from the mediocre, to the uninspired, to Grady Little. The only such manager I can think of that inspires any respect around the game is Bruce Bochy of the Padres, and that's only if you (a) count the Padres as a "Moneyball" team and (b) assume that the respect granted to Bochy is justified; I'm somewhat skeptical as to both.

I think there are a few factors at work here:

1) There almost certainly is a control-freak aspect at work; insofar as the "Moneyball" GMs feel they need to create a revolution against the entrenched interests in the organization, they feel a manager with any experience at all carries an unacceptable risk of becoming an independent power source. Sandy Alderson was quoted in damning detail on this point in Moneyball with respect to Art Howe. Though the sentiments are never put in Beane's mouth in such explicit fashion, the attitude one gets from reading Moneyball is that Beane feels that the best he can expect from a manager is a Hippocratic goal of "do no harm."

I don't agree with that attitude, assuming it exists. If you are in fact trying to overturn an organization's culture, proclaiming the changes from the top down is only one step towards that goal: you need agents of your program at many different levels making sure that the changes get carried out on every level. Billy Beane understands that; the A's are a model of implementing unified organizational strategy throughout the minor leagues. Why not have an agent of Beane-ball as manager, instead of settling for a cipher like Art Howe? I tried making this point - albeit not very well - some time ago in suggesting that Bobby Valentine might be a good match to manage a Billy Beane team. Justly criticized by David Pinto, my point was that a manager as smart, confident and open-minded as Valentine (or someone like him, with better people skills) would be capable of buying into the analytic program and pushing it forward in a way that an empty uniform like Art Howe could never do.

Incidentally, the team that seems to have best integrated their manager into the organizational philosophy is the Cleveland Indians, with Eric Wedge. I can understand that it would work best with a young, rebuilding team like the Indians, but if any Red Sox fans can explain how Francona helps advance the front office's agenda, I'd like to hear about it.

2) Generally, there are no managers in the game today with the self-confident desire to put their own stamp on the game (or, if you prefer, "egotistical enough to consider themselves strategic geniuses"). There are no Gene Mauchs, Earl Weavers or Whitey Herzogs managing today. Perhaps that fact feeds the feeling of Beane and his ilk that the most they can hope for out of a manager is an innocuous apparatchnik.

The last manager I can think of who really changed the game was Tony LaRussa, who bequeathed us the hyper-specialized, overloaded bullpen. Why aren't there any more like him? I can think of a few reasons (all of which are pure speculation):
a) There were never that many managerial geniuses in the old days either; the "old boys'" network was even more prevalent then.
b) The continuous increase of the media and national exposure for every game and team has increased the costs of dissenting from the conventional wisdom (i.e., a unique managerial strategy might be the lead story on Sportscenter every night).
c) The sabermetric revolution might have had some indirect effect, in that baseball people are now aware of outside sources of knowledge that go by the term "expertise." While they may not actually know what such expertise consists of, they understand that they can't go by their whims and call it expertise any longer.

UPDATE: Thinking about it more this morning, I realzed that the above omits one of the biggest reasons for the lack of larger-than-life managers today: evolution. The late Stephen Jay Gould's articles on evolutionary processes and the extinction of the .400 hitter are much loved by baseball analysts everywhere: to oversimplify into one sentence, his point is that the competitive pressures of the sport have, over time, reduced the differences between the best and worst players, making it that much more difficult to perform extraordinarily disproportionate feats like hitting .400. (I'm sure someone will tell me if I'm wrong. And as a digression, I think there's a good argument to be made that the last decade has seen some reversal of the Gould-identified phenomenon - there seems to be an increase in the extremes between the best and worst players and performances. But that's for another time, preferably reinforced by some real math.)

Red Sox fans might have trouble accepting this after last year's Game 7 debacle, but I think there's a good argument that today's worst managers are better than the worst managers of the past. There will always be those who can't handle the pressure or get along with people, but today's managers are unlikely to let their prize pitching prospect go for 175 pitches to build his toughness, or even do so with their grizzled rotation ace in order to save the bullpen. Nor will they bat the guy with the .290 OBP leadoff just because he has good speed, or sacrifice 130 times a year. And they probably won't see their primary job as teaching the youngsters how to "pound that Bud" either (though if it's Selig, it might not be a bad idea). Even the smart managers of today did some stupid things back then: not until his team defeated the Yankees in the 2003 World Series did certain sabermetrically-oriented Kansas City Royals fans forgive Jack McKeon for blowing out Steve Busby's arm (by having him throw about 9,000 pitches in a game when Busby was supposedly telling McKeon that his arm didn't feel right).

A final unscientific illustration of the point: Up to a couple of decades ago, a prevailing attitude among many managers went along the lines of "real men don't look at stats." (The last such manager, I think, was Dallas Green. A mutated version of this mindset survives among some recent managers who seem to confuse bunting with machismo, such as Don Baylor and Bob Brenly.) Today, the more common problem is managers who look at stats but don't know what to do with them - as in "I played Player A instead of Player B because Player A has good numbers against this pitcher; he's 2 for 3." (Yankee fans with memories for the ridiculously trivial may remember that Joe Torre used precisely this argument in playing Darryl Strawberry over Cecil Fielder in Game 1 of the 1996 ALDS. He's wized up since then.) I think that's progress.