Four and Twenty

You're absolutely right. However, that focuses on the tendency for individuals to be chiefly concerned with their own well-being. I'm referring to the concern of the manager for the well-being of the individual. I'm sure you have had both good and bad bosses. Ask yourself, under which did you perform best? The point is Maddon is a guy known being among the best at providing an environment that promotes the well being of the individual. There is real, near tangible value in that. Value that makes a difference. You can't put a number on it, but you can listen to the testimonials of his former players.

You basically just agreed with me while trying to disagree. Which is understandable, because you missed the point entirely by reading what was theoretical in absolute terms. People within an office also make different wages and some have more control over their futures than others. You can provide as many differences as you'd like. None of them change the fact that both are a collection of human beings with a designated leader working together toward a common goal. However, that wasn't the point. I wasn't claiming that baseball is like any other workplace. Rather, the role of the manager is the same regardless of the business. Managers of any profession manage people and their work environment with the goal of achieving the best possible results. In baseball, that goes for decisions made on and also off the field. The term for it is "clubhouse culture." Deny it all you want, but there is real value in having someone who can handle the myriad interpersonal dynamics within an organization. This is even more so in baseball for the very reasons you offered, among many others. Fans, especially those who are sabremetrically focused, tend to neglect this value because it cannot be quantified. Theo, someone who is often praised for his prowess in blending old fashioned scouting with modern analytics, understands this and presumably recognizes that value in Maddon.

I see this notion all over the place and it always fails to recognize the role of manager beyond game time decision making. If horrible managers can find themselves in the postseason, why bother trying to quantify the credit a manager deserves? Perhaps the only way to truly discern the good from the bad is recognizing their ability to manage people off the field. Think of a baseball team as any other work environment. While a manager isn't going to write a report for an employee, they will have an affect on the quality of their work. Employees respond to the atmosphere of the work environment their manager provides. The healthier and more positive the environment, the better the work produced. Conversely, the more dysfunctional and negative the environment, the poorer the work. Baseball is no different. By all accounts, this is an area Maddon excels in and what separates him from the rest of the pack.

Oh, hey, back on topic... Absolutely no word lately regarding the possible posting of Tanaka by the Golden Eagles? Matsuzaka was posted November 2nd, 2006, and bidding for Darvish ended on December 11th, 2011 (I didn't bother looking further than Wikipedia.org for this information, I must admit), so I suppose we still have somewhat of a wait ahead of us.

this should not go unappreciated Apparently, I have an innate affinity for the use of alliteration, as I hadn't noticed that line until after it was written. Though, regardless of the alliteration, I do believe it describes his writing style as succinctly as humanly possible. Well, "[expletive] crazed" may be more succinct, but not as descriptive.

Where is Purple Fanta shirt guy when you need him?

If you are going to continue to compose these long, rambling posts with tangential thoughts on an excess of erratically sequenced subjects, take the effort to add a space between your paragraphs. I don't find the nature of your often non sequitur thought process to be particularly irritating, but the lack of spacing is egregious to the point of causing my eyes to hurt. Please, it takes a minimal amount of effort. To illustrate, you pressed the buttons on your keyboard 2982 times to compose the quote above. I pressed the buttons on my keyboard 10 times to format it to be readable. I don't post often, though I am an intermittently frequent lurker and know at times you are ostracized. That is not my intent in writing this, but rather I think everyone here would agree that a slightly longer post is preferable to one that is hard to read.

hahaha Fixed. But maybe "Drops from Jupiter" is better. Yeah, it is.

Drops of Jupiter.

I really like all the CGI used for player pictures instead of, you know, real ones. Also, from the same site, did you guys know? Cool.

We down to 15% yet?

Adjust that burka.

Yes. Jed and Theo are operating in the entire spectrum. All we're seeing is red.

And MLB Trade Rumors misread that and reported that they didn't. rofl I was wondering if I saw that correctly. Definitely puzzled me briefly until I refreshed.

No Valentine? I know he was hard on Castro (as was Quade at times) during that game he was broadcasting, but I don't see that as necessarily a negative.