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Lou Pinellia always talked about how he like to "put the game in motion" (have his players steal bases, execute hit-and-runs, lay down sacrifice bunts). Casey Stengel loved to platoon his players. Earl Weaver played for the three-run homer. Pinellia's career record was 1,835-1,713, .517; Stengel's, 1,905-1,842, .508; Weaver's, 1,480-1060, .583. Did their overall strategy and pitch-by-pitch tactics make any difference in the number of games they won? I doubt it.
The Arizona Diamondbacks have had three managers in the past two seasons: Bob Melvin, a "players' manager"; A.J. Hinch, a member of the new breed devoted to sabremetrics; and Kirk Gibson, an "old school " guy full of passion. Their records in that span? Melvin, 12-17, .414; Hinch, 89-123, .420; Gibson, 34-49, .410. Obviously, as far as wins and losses go, who the manager was did not matter. But Gibson was recently offered a contract extension because management likes his passion and the players have accepted him. And that--the acceptance--is really all that counts. Whether he's a nice guy, a bad ass, or somewhere in between, the manager has to convince the players that he knows what he's doing. If the players have confidence in the manager and play hard for him, then the team's overall record will depend on how talented the players are and how well their skills complement each other's, not on whether the manager ordered a hit-and-run in the fourth innning of a game on July 18 or pulled his starter in the sixth inning of a game on September 12. Most managerial decisions are made "by the book": managers tend to do basically the same things in most situations, and when they don't my guess is that the "hunches" they play ultimately succeed about the same percentage of the time for each manager. Even the most celebrated managers win less than 60 % of their games (which is decidedly not true of the greatest football and basketball coaches). Bobby Cox finished his career at 2,504-2,001, .556. Whitey Herzog ended at 1,281-1,125, .532. Tony La Russa sits at .535. John McGraw, Leo Durocher, Joe Torre, and Walter Alston wound up at .591, .540, .536, and .558, respectively. The career record of Connie Mack, who won nine pennants and five World Series? 3,731-3,984, .486.
Eric Wedge, freshly hired as the Seattle Mariner skipper, has gone 561-573, .495 for far in his career. How will he do with the M's next year? That depends on Jack Zduriencik, general manager. Get him some good players, Jack, and he'll do fine, provided that he's able to keep them focussed and motivated. Force him to make do with castoffs and rookies and, no matter how sharp the team's focus, his won-loss percentage will sink like a boat full of incompetent mariners attempting to navigate a sea full of icebergs.
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First Amendment freedom of speech issues keep popping up in the news--and that's a good thing. I believe that it's good for our society to have disagreements about what it is permissible to say. Tension about speech rights keeps us from accepting simple, pat answers to complex problems.
Members of a church in Topeka, KS, assembled at the funeral of a U.S. soldier who died in Iraq and promulgated their view that such deaths are God's punishment for America's immoral tolerance of homosexuality and abortion. Is such speech permissible? I think it is. What the church members did is reprehensible but legal. They may express their opinions about homosexuality and abortion without regard to the feelings of the mourners, unless they actively disrupt the service itself. Similarly, those opposed to the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan may appear near the site of a service for a soldier killed in war and express their disapproval of the war, even to the extent of saying that the soldier died in vain.
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New analyst Juan Williams, employed by both Fox News and National Public Radio, was recently fired by NPR for saying, on a Fox TV program, that, while he is "not a bigot," he nevertheless "gets nervous" when he's on an airplane with people in Muslim dress. Was he wrongfully terminated? From a narrowly legal point of view, I think not. NPR asserted that Williams had violated its code of ethics, which prohibits its journalists from participating in media "that encourage punditry and speculation rather than fact-based analysis," and no doubt Williams was aware of that prohibition and had signed a memorandum or contract acknowledging his awareness. NPR certainly has its biases, and the line between analyzing the news and offering an opinion is sometimes blurred, but its intent is to be impartial and objective and it has the right to insist that its employees abide by its standards. (NPR is also forbidding its reporters from attending the upcoming John Stewart-Steven Colbert Million Moderate March, lest they appear biased.) However, what Williams said he felt is something I'm sure a vast majority of Americans (including Muslim Americans) have felt, and he did precede and follow his remarks with statements acknowledging the dangers of sterotyping. Williams was only trying to suggest that we are all irrational at times, and I believe that he should have been simply reprimanded and made to apologize for his remarks. NPR was within its rights in firing him, though.
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