THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

>>“Everybody thinks put the right-hander up against the lefty,” Baker said. “I remember Pedro Guerrero hated lefties. There’d be a lefty, and then they’d bring in this tough right-hander throwing sinkers and he’d say, ‘Thank you.’”<<

Just had to look up Guerrero’s career platoon splits:

vs. R: .301/.368/.482
vs. L: .297/.374/.476

Dead even.

As far as Dusty’s quote goes the more relevant data would be the data from when they were teammates.

Through 1983:

vs. R: .305/.372/.501
vs. L: .292/.355/.557

One caveat is that starting in 1981 he started hitting righties a lot better than lefties.

vs. R: .307/.379/.518
vs. L: .269/.343/.514

I highly doubt that Dusty has any idea what he is doing with respect to “platooning” these guys…

I don’t know if Dusty’s ego would permit it, but I don’t know why the Reds don’t hire someone with a modicum of strategic knowledge to be the bench coach (maybe Chris Speier is this guy; I don’t know). Then you let the bench coach make all of the in-game strategic and tactical decisions (set the lineup, pitcher usage, call steals, etc.).

Now, I have very little or no knowledge of the inner workings of the Reds’ clubhouse, but Dusty seems to excel at keeping people happy. Scott Rolen and others have mentioned how well Dusty gets along with players, relates to players, etc. I’m not claiming that this adds wins, but I still think it’s important to keep players happy. I don’t really hear anything about LaRussa v. Rasmus type feuds from any of the Reds beat reporters or bloggers. Perhaps this sort of management has value in attracting free agents? Once again, I have no evidence of this. I feel that workplace morale is important in other professions so I feel that it would be somewhat important in the world of sports.

If Dusty really does excel at the people management aspects of being a major league manager, then why don’t teams give him an assistant coach/manager who can guide him in the right direction in terms of on-the-field issues?

It may work out fine in football to have offensive and defensive coordinators, but I presume those people are highly paid, and are going to be the fall-guys if need be. 

As long as the team manager makes over 50% of the entire coaching budget, (and so, bears the brunt of responsibility) there’s no way that important control is going to go to a bench coach to handle some pivotal in-game aspects. 

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I remember someone talking about hockey officials.  They have the referee and they have linesman.  And you do have career linesmen. That person basically characterized the linesman as a referee without b-lls.

I don’t know how true that is.  But in a game, it’s the referee that’s going to get almost all the blame if the game gets out of control.  The linesmen are pretty well shielded.

Now, referees do make more than linesmen, but not as much as the above characterization would imply.  It was something like 30 to 50% more salary for the referee, which certainly seems out of balance (if all the above is true).

Would the assistant need to be more highly paid than the bench coach already is? You would have to ensure he worked closely with the analytics department. Assemble few binders of data, give him the Book and some decision-making charts, and I think he could handle it. The tricky part is finding a bench coach with enough old school baseball cred to convince the manager.