Free The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed by J.C. Bradbury Page A

the end, nothing is gained from the effort expended. Put Questec in every major-league ballpark to keep managers focused on the winning the game through baseball strategy rather than trying to
manipulate the enforcement of the rules within the game. Maybe some fans will miss the elaborate tantrums of grumpy old men out there on the field, but I sure won’t.

Part Two
    ALMOST OFF THE FIELD

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    How Good Is Leo Mazzone?
    Great pitchers make for good pitching coaches, and good pitching coaches don’t mess up great pitchers.
    —LEO MAZZONE 23
    DURING THE 2004 OFF-SEASON the Braves said good-bye to resurrected pitching ace Jaret Wright, after he signed a large free agent deal with the New York Yankees. Many Braves fans were not worried. “Leo Mazzone can fix anyone,” they said. “Bologna,” I responded. “He’s just been lucky, and we’re focusing on the success stories and ignoring the failures. What we need is a study of all the players Leo has coached, and then we’ll see he isn’t so great.” I soon found out how wrong I was.
    Coaches and managers don’t just throw tantrums on the field. Through coaching and training they help the players improve skills and give their best in the most important games. But how much do they help really? Assigning individual responsibility for success and failure is never simple in a team game. This is true not just in sports, but in all group activities. Is the success of a Fortune 500 company due to a brilliant CEO, an efficient workforce, or just dumb luck?
    We like to celebrate not just the players on the field, but the managerial brains that organize and coach players to succeed. The question is, how much does the off-the-field part of the organization contribute? Everyone knows the famous managers—Connie Mack, Sparky Anderson, Leo Durocher, and Casey Stengel, just to name a few—maybe even a coach or two. But how good are they really? Unfortunately, win-loss records of coaches don’t have much to say on the subject. Some coaches have the good fortune to coach several exceptionally talented athletes, while others are left to oversee near-minor-league teams. Determining the influence of any coach would require an experiment with coaches being randomly assigned players. Then we could compare the success of the coaches with different players. If one coach was better than the others, he should get more out of players when they are with him.
    However, such an experiment isn’t feasible. Major League Baseball isn’t going to allow some young economist to shuffle coaches from team to team over the course of several seasons just to see which coaches are better than others. But we don’t have to give up the quest to disentangle coaching and player contributions. What we can do is look at how individual players perform as they move from coach to coach. The frequent movement of players from team to team over their careers makes this possible. Using the right statistical tools, we can adjust for other factors that influence achievement, to see how players perform with and without a particular coach.
    Specifically, I’m interested in charting the success of one man who has never even managed a major-league team: Leo Mazzone. The current pitching coach of the Baltimore Orioles made his name in baseball with my beloved Atlanta Braves during the mid-1990-through-2005 seasons. Though he never got higher than Double-A in the minor leagues as a pitcher, he was able to become a big-league pitching coach. Mazzone had the good fortune, as he sees it, to hook up with the legendary Johnny Sain.
    Sain was a very good major-league pitcher who was the subject of a baseball poem about the 1948 Boston Braves:
    First we’ll use Spahn, then we’ll use Sain.
Then an off day, followed by rain.
Back will come Spahn, followed by Sain.
And followed, we hope, of two days of rain. 24
    After finishing his successful eleven-year career as a player, he became a well-traveled pitching coach. Although his