All managers are losers, they are the most expendable pieces of furniture on the face of the Earth."
— Ted Williams, right before he was named the Senators manager in 1969.

Ted Williams is not remembered as a great manager. Teddy Ballgame is the epitome of star player turned impatient, saturnine manager. The old aphorism goes that star players don't have the patience or understanding to pilot a team of mere mortals. They don't have the facility to train inferior players.

Williams' managerial career is actually more of a mixed bag than people tend to remember. He won the AL Manager of the Year award in his first season with the Senators. Overall, however, his record is far from sterling—273 wins against 364 losses for a .429 winning percentage. His teams got worse, considerably worse, each season after he won the manager award.

I thought of Williams when the Pirates passed the managerial baton from Lloyd McClendon to Pete Mackanin. That is, from one scrub to an even worse one. McClendon, a backup catcher in his playing days, at least had glimpses of offensive prowess. Mackanin was atrocious at the plate though he was able to start a few seasons in Montreal and Minnesota back in a pitcher's era in which second baseman apparently did not need to hit.

I wondered if that was a good omen for the Bucs. The current thinking seems to be that the worse a manager was as a player, the better he will be as a manager. Though the Pirates were breaking with the other trend of using backup catchers-cum-managers. No one's perfect.

Of course, the larger issue is if that mentality has any basis in reality. Remember that a number of Hall of Famers have had more than their share of success in the manager's role. From Cap Anson to Frank Robinson, some great players have made pretty good managers.

So what's the rule and what's the exception? Is it Williams or is it Anson and Robinson?

I ran the numbers for all managers. I looked at there wins, losses, and winning percentages as managers as compared to their Win Share totals as players. Here are how the best players fared as managers (all data through 2004):

Now, here are the career wins leaders among managers with their career Win Shares as players:

You might notice that both lists run the gamut. The best players can be very good managers or lousy managers. The best managers—at least based on wins—could have been very good players, scrubs, or even bush-leaguers who never made it to the bigs.

Maybe a closer look by groups of managers might help. I organized them by career Win Shares and then totaled each group's wins and losses, took the overall winning percentage, and the average winning percentage. I used 100-Win Share bands but also isolated those players without enough major-league experience to merit one Win Share. Finally, I added a group for the managers who were Hall of Fame players:

Again, I don't know if I can see any direct relationship between a good players and good managers. It seems to alternate within the groups.

Let's see if there's a correlation between the different data. I ran the numbers between total managerial wins and total Win Shares as a player. They correlated ever so slightly (.094 coefficient). Next, I used managerial winning percentage and Win Shares. They had even less of a correlation (.041 coefficient).

So where are we? Basically, nowhere. There is no real relationship between success as a player and success as a manager. All we have is anecdotal evidence from which we can pick and choose. It just seems more interesting to go with the Teddy Ballgame worldview.