The Espada Hire Values Continuity. But No One Really Knows How to Identify the Qualities of Good Managers
The job of a manager is primarily to keep the vibes good in the clubhouse. Joe Espada knows the clubhouse better than any other candidate, but we don't know if that will work.
What is the job of a major league manager?
It is a topic that has been on the minds of baseball people in the wake of the 2023 postseason, and keeps coming up in the baseball newsletters to which I subscribe.
At The Defector, Ray Ratto praised the jobs that Bruce Bochy and Dusty Baker did this season because “they proved that managing matters a lot more than the people who run baseball want to think they do, and if imitation is the greatest form of flattery, the Chicago Cubs just flattered the living fertilizer out of the Astros and Rangers by stealing Craig Counsell from the Milwaukee Brewers…It arrests a decade-long campaign by owners and their associated suit creeps to depress managerial salaries by hiring inexperienced and often younger men who take orders from above and get paid like marketing directors who also are related to the owner.”
Ratto thinks the job of a manager is to run the team the way he sees fit, the front office be damned. And thus, experienced (and well-paid managers) do best because they can tell the front office to take a hike. That certainly works when we look at the success of Bochy and Baker, but not at the experience of Buck Showalter, Tony LaRussa, and Joe Maddon, all of which brought tons of experience to their most recent managerial job and all of which got fired.
Joe Posnanski thought about the the manager position and concluded that it “is the most mysterious of all coaching jobs in sports. It’s the only one of our major American sports where you don’t really design plays, and you can’t really set things up to put the game in the hands of your best players, and…as often as not, the less you do during the game, the better off your team will be. The things that separate the best baseball managers in 2023 are not easily observed or seen.”
Posnanski notes that the managerial star of the 2023 playoffs—Bruce Bochy—has a losing record over the course of his career. In 26 seasons, he has only guided his team to the playoffs nine times. And there, he has done very well, winning the World Series now four times. But if Bochy is a great, then why is it so hard for him to get to the World Series. Posnanski argues “This Bochy witchcraft, like so many of the managerial traits we’ve been talking about here, is not easy to explain.”
A different Joe—Sheehan—took a different tact on the issue of managers. He writes that there is “general agreement on how baseball games should be won. The ideas that early statheads, and my generation that came after them, put into the world are gospel today. No one’s batting a .295 OBP guy with speed in the leadoff spot. No one is bunting 20 times in the first inning with a scrappy #2 hitter. Everyone is trying to get their pitchers to miss bats, and building the entire staff, entire roster, to that end.”
When I was growing up in the ‘80s, there were clear managerial styles of play—Whiteyball with speed and switch hitting; Billyball with constant pressure and throwing only starters; Tony LaRussa figuring out how to deploy bullpen specialists. But as Sheehan argues, they have all fallen out of favor into three run homers and one-inning relievers, which was Earl Weaver’s style back in my childhood.1
But despite the consensus on how to play the game, Sheehan says there that “it’s shocking just how little consensus we have on who should manage a game.” And he points to the different types of managers hired this offseason—experienced veteran managers in Chicago and San Francisco; Cleveland hired a backup catcher with hardly any coaching experience; the Mets hired a young coach who had worked his way up the ranks; and the Angels hired an old guy who wanted another chance.
Astros Go For Continuity
Today, the Astros went away from each of those archetypes and hired an internal candidate—Joe Espada. At one level, hiring Espada is similar to the Mets hiring of Carlos Mendoza. Both had undistinguished playing careers as minor leaguers, shifted to coaching careers, and worked their way up from being minor league coaches to big league coaches, earning strong reputations along the way.
But Mendoza was hired by one team away from another. Espada has worked with the Astros since 2018 as the team’s bench coach, the #2 man in the Astros dugout. It is a hire about continuity. And as a team that has won its division three years in a row and has gone to six straight American League Championship Series,
It is also a veteran team whose players do a good job of motivating themselves and who have a long track record of hard work and self-discipline. In short, one can see why Dana Brown and the Astros front office do not want to shake things up in the clubhouse.
Espada has an advantage over any other managerial candidate—he knows the Astros clubhouse extremely well and has already earned the respect of the players in it. If there is anything that unites the different perspectives on what the job of a manager, it is that he is in charge of the vibes of his players.
Managing Personalities Is Difficult
When I wrote about Dusty Baker’s job as Astros manager, I wrote that “The most important job of a manager is to manage the men in his clubhouse. To sort through the personalities, quirks, and egos of the 26 men on his roster and to figure out how best to get all of them to focus on the team’s goals.”
Can Joe Espada do that? We don’t know. It is a difficult job for an obvious reason; it is hard for any of use to sort through the personalities, quirks, and egos of one other person, much less 26. Managers of all types—successful veterans, up-and-comers moving to the big chair, successful players with little experience, and wild cards out of the broadcast booth—have failed at this task. Each has succeeded.
Again, Sheehan’s point is that we do not have an archetype of a successful manager, and there is no formula for finding the right one.
Should we have confidence in the choice of Joe Espada? Absolutely. He has an excellent track record as a bench coach, a third base coach, and as a minor league coach. He has worked his way up on merit through the rungs of baseball, and is as qualified as any first-time manager can be. He has an excellent reputation with the men he will manage, and many of them called for him to be their manager. He is a native Spanish speaker who had learned unaccented English, which means he will be able to clearly communicate with speakers of both languages in his clubhouse.
And he has the confidence of his general manager. In a press conference last week at the General Managers meetings in Arizona, Brown said that Espada “has been doing a heck of a job as the bench coach. And he’s run our spring training and done a lot of good things here. He’s got a good relationship with the players. And he’s been, of course, a candidate outside the organization.” Espada was the only manager candidate Brown mentioned by name in that press conference.
Will those assets be enough to success? We do not know. As noted, managing is a difficult job. The Astros of course enter 2024 as a very good baseball team and should again be a strong playoff contender. Long term, the team needs to navigate an aging core, front office decisions on a number of soon-to-be-free agents, and the need to develop young regulars despite a poorly ranked farm system.
There is every reason to think that Espada is up to the task.
Sheehan also writes that resistance to the modern way of playing baseball is “aesthetic rather than substantive.” I think that is a great point. No one argues that modern teams are playing in a suboptimal way. Instead, the argument is that playing in a suboptimal way is less entertaining. Your mileage may vary, but since I see sports as a contest of trying to win, I have no objection to modern baseball.