Article: So, What Exactly Makes Craig Counsell So Much Better Than David Ross?

[Andy]

Just now, Cuzi said:

You don't even have an argument. Think about that.

The argument that LA is the best team and they don't always win and that means Dave Roberts is not the best manager is absurd on its face. We already know how ridiculously random the baseball playoffs are for reasons that rarely have anything to do with the manager. Arizona just made the World freaking Series after winning 84 games. If Torey Lovullo is such a fantastic manager that he can take the 84-win DBacks past much better teams to the World Series, then why didn't he win more games against those teams in the regular season?

[Hairyducked Idiot]

1 minute ago, Cuzi said:

You don't even have an argument. Think about that.

I made a very clear and specific argument that you lack the understanding or ability to rebut.

Like I said, there's a certain amount of futility to this because you can't convince old boomer mentality that something isn't true if they gain an emotional boost from believing it's true.  Might as well be talking to a flat-earther.

[squally1313]

Andy Reid is such a funny example to cite because he made the playoffs 9 times with the Eagles and never won, lost 4 more times with Alex Smith as his QB, and then put in Mahomes and won 2 SBs (while losing in the playoffs 3 more times). Coincidentally, Andy Reid makes $12.5m and Pat Mahomes makes $56m. But yes, go Andy!

[Cuzi]

Just now, Hairyducked Idiot said:

I made a very clear and specific argument that you lack the understanding or ability to rebut.

Like I said, there's a certain amount of futility to this because you can't convince old boomer mentality that something isn't true if they gain an emotional boost from believing it's true.  Might as well be talking to a flat-earther.

You haven't made a clear argument for anything.

Your argument is Donald Trump leaning into the mic and saying, "Wrong." And you back it up with "I don't care. It doesn't matter."

[Cuzi]

Just now, squally1313 said:

Andy Reid is such a funny example to cite because he made the playoffs 9 times with the Eagles and never won, lost 4 more times with Alex Smith as his QB, and then put in Mahomes and won 2 SBs (while losing in the playoffs 3 more times). Coincidentally, Andy Reid makes $12.5m and Pat Mahomes makes $56m. But yes, go Andy!

Chiefs fans were flying banners and blacking out their stadium the year before Andy Reid came along and he took a reject 49ers QB and won 11 games with a team that was 2-14 the year before. Don't try and act like he's not a winning coach.

[squally1313]

Joe Torre managed the Mets, Braves, and Cardinals for 14 total years and won 0 playoff games, and then went to the Yankees and won immediately. Probably all due to him!

[Hairyducked Idiot]

4 minutes ago, Cuzi said:

You haven't made a clear argument for anything.

Your argument is Donald Trump leaning into the mic and saying, "Wrong." And you back it up with "I don't care. It doesn't matter."

I have made two extremely clear and specific arguments 

1) baseball teams have established a clear connection between spending and expected wins, and the amount they are willing to pay for managers implies an expected return of less than one marginal win per season.

2) it would be trivially easy to prove any of these things you want to attribute to managers is actually due to managers:  we just have to measure them and check if they persist year to year independent of other changes.  If managers have a special ability to make their teams outperform their war, we should be able to measure that fairly easily.   But they don't.

 

The difference between you and me is that if you can come up with such a correlation and it holds up mathematically, I *will* believe it.  But when it doesn't (and it doesn't), you're not going to change your beliefs. You're going to pivot to some new reason why you were never wrong.

 

You have neither addressed nor rebutted either of these arguments, and instead persisted in Gish galloping to equally bad logical assertions.

Edited November 8, 2023 by Hairyducked Idiot

[squally1313]

4 minutes ago, Cuzi said:

Chiefs fans were flying banners and blacking out their stadium the year before Andy Reid came along and he took a reject 49ers QB and won 11 games with a team that was 2-14 the year before. Don't try and act like he's not a winning coach.

And then lost in the playoffs, repeatedly, which was famously his reputation until he ended up getting the best player in football.

This is setting aside the obvious: Andy Reed designs and chooses from hundreds of different plays a hundred times a game. Baseball managers make like 4 decisions a day. 

[Brock Beauchamp]

1 hour ago, Hairyducked Idiot said:

This is 100% wishful thinking.  If managers had a large impact it would be trivially easy to measure.

Pull up every manager who switched teams, see if their new team performs closer to their old team or closer to the new team's previous standard.  We have enough of a sample throughout history that if there's a meaningful impact, it would show up.

How?

Honest question. There are so many variables in a team year over year that the data is noisy. What part of it is the manager? What part the front office? The players themselves?

Craig Counsell has a long history of beating the team pythag, yet people question whether that's a skill he has or just the team around him. Seems like if it was that easy to measure, we'd see lengthy studies proving or disproving it. I certainly haven't ever seen a study that's conclusive in any way but if you have, please share it.

[Rcal10]

1 hour ago, squally1313 said:

It's a fun story and a team as big as the Cubs should have one of the widely considered best managers out there on a yearly basis, so definitely not against the move. But like, the title of the thread is 'so what exactly makes Craig Counsell so much better than David Ross'. And the supposed 'naysayers' here are just saying: there isn't anything exactly, because he's not. 

The issue is there is nothing anyone can show the other side to make them thjnk differently. As I have said before, IMO, Ross was ok. I don’t blame the collapse all on him. And I realize a lot of his criticism was result bias. I also know that will happen with Counsell too. Probably by the guys who feel this was a no big deal move. As far as proving Counsell is the best you can look to his rosters the last $ years and the success he had with basically average players, to below average. To me that shows he does something right. To me that shows he wins with little and get the most out of what he is given. I can respect others not seeing it that way. But if I was asked who I would rather be managing my team, Ross or Counsell, I would pick Counsell because I think he gets more out of guys for some reason. For those who see no difference, I am fine with that. 

[Soul]

4 minutes ago, Rcal10 said:

The issue is there is nothing anyone can show the other side to make them thjnk differently. As I have said before, IMO, Ross was ok. I don’t blame the collapse all on him. And I realize a lot of his criticism was result bias. I also know that will happen with Counsell too. Probably by the guys who feel this was a no big deal move. As far as proving Counsell is the best you can look to his rosters the last $ years and the success he had with basically average players, to below average. To me that shows he does something right. To me that shows he wins with little and get the most out of what he is given. I can respect others not seeing it that way. But if I was asked who I would rather be managing my team, Ross or Counsell, I would pick Counsell because I think he gets more out of guys for some reason. For those who see no difference, I am fine with that. 

Yes. I'm with you but not really against anyone to the contrary.  We'll just have to see.  What do I like most about this move?  It's out of character for how the Cubs have been doing things and it feels like the Maddon move in that the Cubs followed it up with better personnel moves.

But Jed is no Theo.  That gives me pause for sure.

I came up with the Bochy example.  Obviously it's not a slam dunk.  I want this to work out but who knows, 5 years from now I might be saying I was stupid for thinking it was a good move.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

1 minute ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

How?

Honest question. There are so many variables in a team year over year that the data is noisy. What part of it is the manager? What part the front office? The players themselves?

Craig Counsell has a long history of beating the team pythag, yet people question whether that's a skill he has or just the team around him. Seems like if it was that easy to measure, we'd see lengthy studies proving or disproving it. I certainly haven't ever seen a study that's conclusive in any way but if you have, please share it.

Running correlations to see if there's any effect is pretty trivial. Identify an area you think a manager *might* make a difference.  Split the managers into two groups for year N, the ones who appear to be good at it and the ones who appear to be bad at it.  If there's a real effect at work, the first group will outperform the second on average in year N+1.   

A minute ago you said measuring managers' impact was fuzzy and difficult. Now you're asserting that it's easy and we just have to look pyth variance.  

Which brings us back to: if it's that easy, why didn't MLB franchises notice and pay accordingly?

(Incidentally, counsell's career average pyth difference as a manager is +1.4 and he's been within 2 wins in 75% of his seasons. Hardly a convincing margin).

 

[squally1313]

7 minutes ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

 

Craig Counsell has a long history of beating the team pythag, yet people question whether that's a skill he has or just the team around him. 

Craig Counsell, per ESPN EXWL, which I'm 99% sure is just pythag, has been a cumulative 3 games above their pythag in the last 4 years. Most people cite his record in 1 one games, which has been proven pretty definitively to not be predictive.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

9 minutes ago, Rcal10 said:

The issue is there is nothing anyone can show the other side to make them thjnk differently. 

Yes, there is.  I would absolutely think differently if given convincing evidence that managers have a strong impact.

All I need is two things:

1) a repeatable measure of managerial impact that shows year to year correlation.

You know how I know (mathematically, not intuitively) hitting home runs is a skill?  Because if I split players into two groups, "good at hrs this year" and "bad at hrs this year", then historically it is overwhelmingly likely that the "good" group will be good at it next year.  Even if they switch home parks or managers or get older, the skill persists.

You wanna assert that a manager is responsible for the difference between his team's war and their records? Sure, that's a hypothesis.  And it's one that's *really* easy to test.  Split the managers up into good/bad groups each year throughout history and see if the good/bad groups persist.

This isn't some incredibly esoteric and hard to measure voodoo. Sabr mastered this horsefeathers 50 years ago.

Once you have that correlation, you've gone most of the way to changing my mind.  All you need now is 

2) a compelling, logical reason why the highly analytic, extremely dollar-efficiency obsessed world of modern front offices isn't taking advantage of this gigantic market inefficiency.  A marginal win still costs about $10m on the open market last I checked. A 10-win swing should be a $100m value going for a marginal investment of a few million dollars per year.  

 

If those two things existed, I would *absolutely* believe that managers have a large impact.  

 

[Brock Beauchamp]

18 minutes ago, Hairyducked Idiot said:

A minute ago you said measuring managers' impact was fuzzy and difficult. Now you're asserting that it's easy and we just have to look pyth variance.  

I wasn't trying to say that at all, only pointing out that one of the few indicators we have that MIGHT be correlated to the manager is discarded by many. Personally, I'm skeptical of what pythag means over the long run and am not ready to wholly attribute it to the manager.

[Brock Beauchamp]

22 minutes ago, squally1313 said:

Craig Counsell, per ESPN EXWL, which I'm 99% sure is just pythag, has been a cumulative 3 games above their pythag in the last 4 years. Most people cite his record in 1 one games, which has been proven pretty definitively to not be predictive.

I ignore one-run games, I just don't see any way to parse that into anything meaningful.

As I mentioned above, I think tying pythag too closely to the manager has its own problems, I was only trying to point out it's one of the few metrics we have that might have ANYTHING to do with the manager in a way we can measure.

[Jason Ross]

I'm a very "analytical" person when it comes to baseball and I love using data every chance we get. I do think managers have some impact, but I don't think it's really that possible to attribute. For example, comparing the Cubs 2023 to the Cubs in 2024 seems unfair: if the Cubs get, say Shohei Ohtani and are significantly better because they added a hitter who had a 180 wRC+ last year...well that's not because of Craig Counsell. If Craig Counsell puts Luke Little into a game in the 7th, it's impossible to say if David Ross will or not. It's also really hard mid-season. Did a manager make a hitter get hot? Probably not. So when Mike Schlidt and the Cardinals got hot a few years ago, how much of that was simply...regression to the mean? How much was because Schlidt? There's so many impossible things to track, chart and note. We can't know many things. Especially as fans.

What I'll say is this: I trust that the Cubs think Craig Counsell is an upgrade and will make a difference. It doesn't have to make a huge difference, but any difference is good. The Cubs know how David Ross' brain works better than any of us, if they think Counsell is more in step with what they want, that's something we can't track or have data on. MLB teams, as well, are learning new things and how they matter constantly. It may not be a revolution, but good teams win on the margins where and when they can.

Edited November 8, 2023 by 1908_Cubs

[WhyCantWeWin]

I think some of yall would take a bullet for Ross

[Rcal10]

56 minutes ago, WhyCantWeWin said:

I think some of yall would take a bullet for Ross

I think Ross was fine. I do think he got more heat here than he deserved. However, I do feel Counsell is a better manager. I also feel this gives the Cubs one less excuse if they falter next year. Which is why I think they will do more this off season to put a solid team on the field with Counsell as manager than they would if Ross was still in charge. 
I can’t put a number on it as to how many wins Counsell is worth. Frankly no one can. I just happen to think he wins with less talent on the field than the Cubs put on the field. To me that says he gets the most out of his players. 

[tenderdracula]

I'm surprised you guys were so pro Ross, I thought he was terrible.  My biggest concern was him playing rookies, the organization doesnt have any slam dunk college batting champions like Kris Bryant, its a huge collection of flawed guys who could be very valuable in the right spots.  I dont think Ross was the guy to figure that out.  

[Rcal10]

12 minutes ago, tenderdracula said:

I'm surprised you guys were so pro Ross, I thought he was terrible.  My biggest concern was him playing rookies, the organization doesnt have any slam dunk college batting champions like Kris Bryant, its a huge collection of flawed guys who could be very valuable in the right spots.  I dont think Ross was the guy to figure that out.  

I wouldn’t say I was pro Ross. I am saying he got a bad rap here at times. I think he was an ok manager. But I am happy they hired Counsell for the reasons I originally stayed. 

[ToolDRT]

Yeah, I’m with the group that doesn’t see this as much (if any) of a needle mover. It seems the area Ross took the most criticism was his bullpen usage. But that wasn’t a good bullpen and I don’t think any manager could have done substantially better with it. 
 

Also, while I know this move doesn’t impact payroll, the extra money spent on Counsell is coming from some portion of the baseball ops budget. Do we really want to be setting the record for managerial salaries when we have an owner willing to toss away Yu Darvish due to his salary? Just makes me nervous. 

[Stratos]

20 hours ago, Hairyducked Idiot said:

(Actually there's not a ton of correlation between bullpen quality and pyth differential. Good bullpens keep one-run losses from being multi-run losses, bad bullpen turn big wins into close wins.  It really is mostly luck)

Have a link?

Bad bullpens also turn close leads into losses.  We saw it directly last year in April, May, and Sept.  Relievers are used based on the score and leverage, so overall pen ERA isn't as relevant as how well your top 4 or so pen arms can hold leads.  Winning by 4-3 or 8-3 is irrelevant, just like losing by 8-6 or 8-1.

[JHBulls]

I don’t find it surprising that there are Cubs fans who are pro-Ross and would be upset by this. This is a guy who hit a franchise changing home run in Game 7 and went on to win the World Series in large part because of that home run. If that never happened, this sacking would just be seen as just a former player getting sacked. Instead of the sacking of a Chicago Cubs hero.

Edited November 9, 2023 by JHBulls

[Rcal10]

55 minutes ago, JHBulls said:

I don’t find it surprising that there are Cubs fans who are pro-Ross and would be upset by this. This is a guy who hit a franchise changing home run in Game 7 and went on to win the World Series in large part because of that home run. If that never happened, this sacking would just be seen as just a former player getting sacked. Instead of the sacking of a Chicago Cubs hero.

I think more than 1 thing can be true. People can love Ross for his Cubs history, think he was an ok manager and still like the move to Counsell. Basically that is where I am. I think he took too much heat for every move he made that didn’t work. But overall I thought he was fine. I just think Counsell is better. I also think his way of managing aligns more with Hoyer. I also feel by signing Counsell they have made a statement that 24’ matters. I think with Counsell as the manager they Cubs will be more aggressive in the off season.