Idle old man,
That still would manage those authorities
That he hath given away!

—William "Author" Shakespeare, King Lear

Managing is getting paid for home runs someone else runs.

— Casey Stengel, inventor of Stengelese

I gave the baseball writers a hard time for the Rookie of the Year results, but I have to agree with their choices for Manger of the Year wholeheartedly (or MoY to save me typing). Tony Pena took a moribund franchise that had divested itself of all its veteran starting pitchers and made it a competitive, if ultimately unsuccessful, team. Jack Mckeon took a team that was 16-22 in fourth place in a five-team division (if you count the Mets as a major-league team) and won the whole shebang.

The only argument some had against McKeon was that Dusty Baker took a team, the Cubs, that had been almost 30 games under .500 the previous year and won his division in a tough three-team race. Joe Morgan in a recent chat session opined that Baker was the best candidate and mentioned Felipe Alou and Bobby Cox but failed to mention McKeon. Baker ended up a distant second in the NL vote.

That got me to thinking, which is a rare event. Evaluating managers is a quite subjective and highly mercurial task. Look at Grady Little. He ended up fourth in the AL vote, directly ahead of the Yankees' Joe Torre, but is out of a job. (By the way, how did Lou Piniella end up with four second-place votes with a team that logged a 63-99 record? It's true that the D Rays improved by 8 games in 2003 and had their best year since 2000, but if the team were piloted by Larry Rothschild or Hal McRae, they would not have garnered a single MoY vote.)

Is there an empirical means to select MoY? Perhaps the man whose team has the best winning percentage turnaround should get the award or at least there should be a strong correlation between winning the award and improving one's team winning percentage.

So I took a look at the past winners (I opted for the BBWAA winners even though that has only recently supplanted the TSN's MoY award because 1) it is the award of choice today and 2) it is conveniently located in the database from whence I was doing the research). Here's a list of the winners, the league's best team improvement in winning percentage over the previous season minus the manager's winning percentage improvement (Best - Mgr PCT), what that translates into as far as wins in a season (Dif in W), the manger's winning percentage improvement over the previous year (Mgr Diff), and what that translates into as far as wins in a season (Mgr Diff in W) [based on a 162-game season].

On average, the MoY improved his team by 15 games over the previous season. However, the average MoY was five games behind the best turnaround. The only MoY who failed to improve his team record over the previous season's was Jim Leyland, whose Pirates won the division in 1992 even though they won two fewer games than in '91. Leyland's Bucs had lost Bobby Bonilla and 20-game winner John Smiley to free agency though he retained Barry Bonds' services for one final MVP season in Pittsburgh. The team did fall apart the next season after Bonds left.

Let's say that the award had always been given to the manager who improved his team by the largest margin. Here's who the winners would have been (disregarding those who managed for a short period):

Both lists are interesting, but I think the second one does avoid some of the sentimental choices. Felipe Alou gets the nod over Jim Leyland in 1992 by the second list, by the way.