Farrell on the hot seat
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fluke: unlikely chance occurrence, especially a surprising piece of luck.
(commence the endless litany of excuses for why this does not count)
I see we already have a taker.
There isn't a team in this league that ever won the World Series without a lot of luck. Not one. And there aren't very many teams in the league that don't have at least 40% of their fanbase convinced that everything good that happens happens in spite of the manager and everything bad happens because of the manager. The fact that Red Sox fans are also convinced of this is just yet another sign that we're all fools alike.
All "getting lucky" is is fishing for an excuse to reinforce a convenient narrative. nothing more than that.
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Actually, no, that's exactly what it is. Saying "no team has ever won without luck" is fishing for an excuse to not call a spade a spade.
Sorry, but I want more than confirmation bias and angry rantings of fans that hated the last manager, hate this manager and will probably hate the next 40,000 managers all in a row, as soon as something bad happens, before I call anything a spade. All I see in this thread is a lot of people gathered around in a massive circle praising themselves for calling an unidentified object a spade, and rejecting all criticism or contrary opinions simply because they go against the nararative. At that point all I'm really witnessing is a mob of people all losing credibility at a massive rate at the same time, and I'm going to want to example the object in question all the closer just to verify that it's even a gardening tool.
Quite frankly you guys have done more to convince me that John Farrell is an aardvark than tthat he's a bad manager.
And I'd like more than hyperbole and bullshit, but apparently neither of us are going home satisfied tonight.
Funny, that's effectively what I said, though in less words. Hyperbole and BS tend to be the domain of critics of managers, or at least that's usually been my experience.
Two things recently brought up:
- Change for the sake of change
- Team should have performed better (meaning the same team would have performed better under different management)
It's why these discussions break down into ridicule.
- Change for the sake of change
- Team should have performed better (meaning the same team would have performed better under different management)
It's why these discussions break down into ridicule.
I don't know, I thought the aardvark argument was pretty powerful. And the classic count-da-RINGZ! That's worth like four more years of Farrell or something. And two extra weeks for the use of "narrative."
You can have the cartoon aardvark back if you'd like, but I thought you looked better au naturel.
Having a little trouble reading your tone here, but of course you're aware that it also follows that the same team could have performed much worse under different management, or could have performed better under the same management. Small sample sizes are like that.
my take on Farrell is that he is exactly average. Competent, but far from brilliant. Too rigid to be a master tactician, but doesn't make an excessive number of mistakes or throw any more games away than any other manager does.
And the problem with exactly average managers is that unless you trust the front office to have an eye for managerial talent and think that hiring a manager is anything other than a pure roll of the dice (and whoooo boy, I don't) you have as much to lose from firing them as you have to gain.
The issues I see with the team over the last 3 years have been about the culture of the team and the upheaval in the front office in the wake of Epstein's departure (and the fact that Cherington wasn't up to the task of running a top 5 franchise and was trying to run the team like the Kansas City Royals).
I can't blame Farrell when my honest opinion is that the vast majority of the ridiculousness that has plagued this team has been sourced from the front office rather than the dugout.
No, it's that he's a world series winner and there isn't one out there who would take over. I don't understand the argument that we need to dismiss the world series win as a fluke, but take seriously the poor years as his fault. Which is it?
The question is who is best to manage this team this year. Or maybe the question is who is best to manage this team in May. Maybe there will be a question in the winter about who is best to lead this team in 2017, but that ain't this thread.
This is a good team with good players, which could be very good if the pitching comes around and two of the pitchers nursing injuries are as advertised. I'll take the guy that has won a world series over Manager X, who hasn't even been named in three pages. I don't think that's counting the rings.
Why are people making statements that suggest the next manager is a total crapshoot or could be like Bobby V? The next manager is the guy who went 28 -- 20 without David Price or Craig Kimbrel.
I'm pretty sure we could get Charlie Manuel and Ozzie Guillen on a plane within the hour.
The guy who people in this thread want to fire also went 28-20 in his first 48 games with the Red Sox.
Well stated, especially the point about the fundamental disagreement. Aside from your well reasoned arguments and elegant prose, I don't think we could disagree more, though. The easiest point to refute is your misconceptions about fish rotting. Biologically, fish and all other dead organisms rot from the outside in and not vice versa. The reason the head starts rotting first is because the eyes, gills and mouth are there... Portals to the outside world, and therefore less covered by protective layers like skin and scales. Believe me when something is wrong in an organization look to leadership or the heads, and you're almost certainly going to be more right than wrong in understanding root causes.
WRT Shakeups, well after the epic meltdown in 2012 and the suck of 2014 and 2015 I think we can say that the Sox are not the dynasty any of us imagined including the FO, despite being one of the smartest and richest orgs in MLB. The 2013 team was competitive and a playoff team and that's a fact. Talk of rings, trophies and championships however, is not a valid argument since once in the playoffs there is a shit ton of luck needed to win it all. Add in Ortiz and you can see how one could logically give the org and Farrell credit for making the playoffs but no credit for the WS. Now, I work in a world where big bets are placed on the future and you lose a lot more than you win (Pharma R&D). It's easy to get complacent and think that you'll just science the shit out of every problem and get more wins. However, that doesn't work in and of itself, because there are people involved and chance. After a series of losses and a general malaise in such a high stakes and competitive environment, shakeups to put it simply, are one of the few tools left when sciencing the shit out of things ain't getting it done anymore.
I hope my points are clearer because they are based in real world experiences especially when it comes to biological decay mechanisms. The Sox have been a rotting fish for nearly half a decade (discounting a fluke which is a fish too, in 2013). Maybe firing Farrell isn't the answer but firing Cherington may not have been either. You can't fire the players or Henry and the status quo isn't palatable either. Roll the dice, do something dramatic and fire the meh manager and see what happens. Any better suggestions besides waiting to see if 2016 sucks too?
I'm not really sure what makes a manager "good", I hated Grady almost from the start, but his teams won 90+ games. In fact, other than Tito, the only other manager I liked from Johnson on was Ralph Houk. But what stands out to me about Farrell is between Toronto and Boston, the only year his managed teams have over achieved was 2013. Is it possible, that the horror of the marathon bombing pushed that team to that finish? With players like Gomes, Napoli, Sallty etc., that really seemed to be motivated by helping the city recover, I could see where that had more to do with the end results than the manager.
He had a bunch of hungry players. Players coming off bad years or injury with something to prove (Victorino, Lackey), players playing for a contract, incentives or option years to be picked up (Salty, Napoli, Papi, Lester, Drew, Ellsbury), and fair amount of luck if you consider the highest team BABIP for any team since 1930. There was also an enormous boost in morale from being free of the tryanny of Bobby V's regime. The Perfect Storm. The Marathon bombing story makes a good story, but thats all it is IMO
Although I'm not in the Farrell should be fired soon camp, I think the argument is easy to understand. He's managed for five years, one successful, three poor, and one average. 3>1. It's hard to look at his record and not think that 2013 is an outlier.
Good point. But there is a difference. That beginning was with a different team than the team Lovullo did it with.
Lovullo went 28-20 with the same exact team that JF managed to a considerably worse record. As a result, that comparison is more apples to apples.
That doesn't entirely deal with your basic point or eliminate the fact that those who want Lovullo are going on a reasonably small sample. It also doesn't eliminate the fact that the bench coach is supposed to play a heavy role in Xs and Os, which calls into question Torey's role in Farrell's in game deficiencies. But, still, I think that the in season contrast between Farrell and Lovullo is more meaningful than their equivalency in the first 48 games across seasons and rosters.
That depends on how good you think the roster was in 14 and 15 and how well the front office did at giving him the tools to compete. you know as well as I do that the rotation was a hot mess in both of those seasons, that makes it awful hard to blame the manager for every little thing.
No, the rotation started with exactly the same guys in 2014 as it ended in 2013.
They were good enough to win a World Series six months before, so calling them a hot mess is disingenuous.
They were good enough to win a World Series six months before, so calling them a hot mess is disingenuous.
Well that's an interesting question. Are 2013 Buchholz and 2014 buchholz really the same person?
But this is where it gets complicated. Yes, it was the same exact roster. But the difference in performance, for many players, was so different that it's a bit misleading to call it the same team. Jackie Bradley Jr. had a .608 OPS before Lovullo took over and a .936 the rest of the way. Xander, .749/.833. Porcello's ERA, 5.81/3.13. Kelly's ERA, 5.96/2.21. Et cetera.
Now you can respond to this by saying, "see, this shows how much better Lovullo is--the players performed better for him." But this assumption about cause and effect is speculative. There is no way to conclusively parse out Lovullo's contribution to the turnaround. It might have been entirely random, or a temporary response to dramatic environmental change, or it might actually have been driven by specific, repeatable differences in the way the two guys handle people and situations, and therefore predictive. I don't see how any of us can do more than guess which is true.
I mean, does anybody really think Joe Morgan was significantly better at managing than John McNamara? Morgan's record with the Sox after that initial 18-1 stretch was 283-262 (.519). McNamara's record with the Sox was 297-273 (.521). That one three-week "magic" stretch is the total difference between them.
Lovullo wasn't really managing the same club, though, as was noted upthread {e.g., Napoli gone, Masterson gone, Hanley removed from LF, Porcello revamped}.
As for 2013 vs. 2014, I realize we all want to push it out of our memories, but what really distinguished the 2014 club up until it got dismantled was its high level of offensive ineptness. It displayed such poor offensive punch that it led the (desperate) FO to go after Sandoval and Ramirez as FAs, which in turn helped sink the 2015 season when those 2 players produced historically bad 1st-year performances among all MLB major FA signings.
As for 2013 vs. 2014, I realize we all want to push it out of our memories, but what really distinguished the 2014 club up until it got dismantled was its high level of offensive ineptness. It displayed such poor offensive punch that it led the (desperate) FO to go after Sandoval and Ramirez as FAs, which in turn helped sink the 2015 season when those 2 players produced historically bad 1st-year performances among all MLB major FA signings.
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The big question is: Would ten years be too long?
I think Farrell is pretty average as a manager. World Series wins happen sometimes despite a starter at a certain position or a manager. He has one Championship season, 2 seasons finishing second to last in his division, and 2 finishing in dead last. He's only been above .500 once. And this was while managing teams with quite a lot of money and high paid talent. Sure, high paid talent doesn't necessarily perform (Hi Panda!), and the teams had big flaws as well and it's very hard to say what exact impact he had on the final record. But apart from one season, he's left a lot of people disappointed. I still wouldn't fire him unless I knew there was someone better available. And I think Lovullo is at least as good as Farrell. But I also wouldn't fire him with a .500 record after 14 games. He has to pretty much crap the bed to force that move. Not a 4 game losing streak, but more like an extended 20 game malaise of sub .350 ball. They go 6-14, and yeah he's gone and I'm trying to save the season and get back to contending for a wildcard playoff spot. And that only means being .500 these days.
In addition to that, his two previous years with Toronto follow the same sort of (admittedly small) pattern - over performance in the first year, followed by significant underperformance.
I know Vegas isn't the best way to judge team performance, but they do a decent job of judging what the general perception of overall roster talent is
| Toronto | Vegas | Actual | Dif |
| 2011 | 77 | 81 | 4 |
| 2012 | 81.5 | 73 | -8.5 |
| Boston | |||
| 2013 | 79.5 | 97 | 17.5 |
| 2014 | 87.5 | 71 | -16.5 |
| 2015 | 86 | 78 | -8 |
Maybe hes not the problem, but I just have a hard time finding anything that makes me think Farrel is part of the solution.
Fair points, all. I still think that the comparison between two managers who managed the same players in the same year is inherently more meaningful and apples to apples than comparing guys who managed across different seasons. But your points are well taken.
In the end, I look forward to Farrell being fired at some point -- and I freely admit that if the sox go on a 2013-like tear, I will opportunistically want them to keep Farrell, and that I of course hope that happens -- because I think that he's a bad in game manager and I am mindful of his overall record. That Lovullo is the likely replacement is well behind those first two considerations.
I'm on the fence about whether a managerial change is needed or would even be helpful right now. But for those who think it's crazy to consider firing Farrell at this point, what exactly has to happen for a manager to deserve losing his job? We have extreme examples like Bobby V, Grady, etc. Farrell clearly isn't in that group. When you have a big market, high payroll team finish in last place two years in a row is that not a warning sign, even after winning a WS?
If SF finished in last place in 2013 and 2014 and got off to a slow start in 2015 and Bochy was fired would people think he got screwed?
If SF finished in last place in 2013 and 2014 and got off to a slow start in 2015 and Bochy was fired would people think he got screwed?
However, that fits with the narrative that's been building since Farrell first started managing the Jays: he has more than the usual trouble helping prospects become MLB contributors, and young players do not appear to perform well consistently under his oversight, regardless of prospect status or minor-league predictive indicators.
The Sox are still a young team, with <3 year AST players expected to perform relatively key roles as pitchers (Smith, Rodriguez, Wright, Owens) and especially as hitters (Betts, Bogaerts, Bradley, Shaw, Holt, Vazquez, Swihart). And the Sox NEED to remain a relatively young team going forward, because the team looks forward to 7 players combining to eat over $125MM in salary (Price, Ramirez, Porcello, Price, Kimbrel, Pedroia, and Castillo) in each of the next 3 years. Hopefully, five of these will remain solid contributors or better.
Which means for the Sox to be competitive for the next 3 years, the other 18-22 players on the active roster -- most of them young players already in the organization -- will need to do better collectively at taking their next steps than they did taking their first steps under Farrell, and also better than the Jays top young players did under Farrell (Arencibia, Rasmus, Snider, Lawrie, d'Arnaud, Drabek, Morrow, Cecil, etc.).
From 2011-2012, the Jays busted on their top-10 MLB prospects, top-25 MLB prospects, hitting prospects, catching prospects, and pitching prospects. Now, lots of prospects don't make it in MLB, but the extent of the futility perhaps this should be taken as something of a cautionary tale regardless, given how the Sox young players have collectively tended to underperform expectations. And especially given how much better Stroman, Sanchez, and Osuna have looked than Morrow, Drabek, and Cecil ever did pitching for Farrell.
So yeah, regardless of x's and o's or media management skills, I do think it's notable that the Red Sox' young players have generally played better baseball, with markedly more enthusiasm, under Lovullo's brief tenure during garbage time, than they have under Farrell while still in contention.
It isn't about getting screwed to me. It's about what's best for the team. I would think it would be wrong to fire Bochy in the circumstance you describe, unless you could point to something concrete. Like that the game had changed in a way he couldn't keep up with or that he had become ambivalent. Because otherwise your conclusion as GM would simply have to be that a light switch was flicked and a great manager had become a terrible manager. Which makes no sense. Yes, sometimes it's time for a change, because someone gets too comfortable or because they have a fundamental disagreement about something, but I would be extremely skeptical that a team that Bochy cannot get to perform well is going to get good with someone not Bochy.
The question for me with Farrell is whether making a change now would get this team into the playoffs, where it won't if Farrell is still at the helm. That is literally the only question that matters to me if the question truly is, as the thread seems to suggest, should be be replaced now. And I think that the answer to that one is obviously no. This team looks like it has some major pieces, two hopefully good pitchers are coming back, it's 7-7 after a difficult schedule. I think the question is actually insane. Might another manager come in and be the difference between 89 and 93 wins and get the wild card? It's a shot in the dark and the chance that it does far more harm than good seem pretty high to me.
One of the interesting parts of this thread is the "last place finish" stuff, which to me is a red herring. I don't care whether the team wins 72 or 82 games. Doesn't matter. Maybe a bit at the margins, because it dictates whether I will be engaged in late August and September, but really it's not that important to me. If anything, it makes the question of manager less important. If this is an 82 win team with a replacement level manager, then this entire discussion is moot. To urge a change now, the premise needs to be this is a 90 win with a replacement level manager, that Farrell is below replacement level, and that some new manager is out there who would be a plus 4 or so, and that the change of manager mid-season would have zero negative impact. I am skeptical.
But to answer the question directly, yes, if Farrell has another poor season and there is a suitable candidate, I would certainly be willing to listen to arguments.
I think Matt Williams 2015 is a perfect example. He had a stacked team picked to win the World Series and not only did they fail to reach the playoffs one of his players choked out their star player.
High payroll means jack shit if a good portion of that money is tied to albatrosses. You have to look at the talent level and Farrell just hasn't had that. Even 2013 was a bunch of wily veterans putting together a cinderella season.
If the SF FO had told Bochy not to worry about the W's and divested assets in the latter stages of each season that the team finished last, then yes a firing for a slow start would look a bit unfair.
Bochy probably isn't the best example since he had a very good track record even before 2012. I only picked him because they were the most recent WS winner before 2013. What if it was a guy with only a couple of years of mediocre performance who then won a WS, and then proceeded to manage two last place teams that, in the opinion of most, under-performed expectations? Maybe the 2014 and 2015 teams weren't championship caliber but I don't think anyone picked them to finish last both years.
Now see here's the thing, I'm not prepared to base my evaluation of a manager on preseason expectations. Expectations that are based about 99.99999999999% on speculation and trying to predict the future based on past performance. I think it's much more likely for those expectations to deviate from the true performance level of the team under an average manager, and deviate farther, than a manager's own performance would deviate.
I think before you ever DARE to judge a manager by preseason expectations you have to elimate the possibility that those expectations were unreasonable.
Also if the team doesn't win a playoff spot I really don't care where they sit in the standings. Especially in an American League East that's as competitive as I ever remember it being. When either 4, or all 5, of the teams in the division have at least a sporting chance of winning the whole enchilada and at least 3 of them are in the top 10 teams in major league baseball by payroll and market strength, standings in the division are less than meaningful. The Red Sox did not come close to finishing last in the entire league either year, despite the brutal home schedule our division asks of us. They just finished last in easily the single toughest division in baseball, and with rosters that were well compensated but not well built for the most part. that should be borne in mind when evaluating the manager
I feel like the only real factor that's a legit criticism of the manager based on common stats is W-L v pythag. That's the number that tells you what the differential between runs actually scored and runs actually allowed vs the actual win loss record says about whether the team actually underperformed tactically in a large enough sample size to eliminate most X factors.
And by that benchmark Farrell was exactly 1 win behind pythag in 2014 and 3 games behind pythag in 2015. Average to perhaps slightly below average but nothing particularly significant, worth replacing if you think you can do better in the offseason or when his contract expires, but probably not wirth canning in the middle of the season unless you see a major reason to do so.
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PECOTA projections over time are generally within about 2.5 wins (RMSE=8.5) of the final season outcome. It's entirely possible to evaluate how good those projections are, and there's slightly more than 0.00000000001% empirical evidence being brought to the projections.
You conflated Farrell's Pythag with Lovullo's. Of course, partial season Pythagorean records are more or less garbage, but Farrell was exactly at his Pythagorean expectations in 2015, while Lovullo underperformed by 2 games. It's pretty obvious why, though. For all of the people saying Lovullo was playing with a better team, it's weird nobody's bringing up Koji. 8 of the 20 losses under Lovullo were attributed to the bullpen. One wonders what would have happened to that 2015 team if they had Ue and Kimbrel.
Kudos on an interesting post, much of which (regarding Farrell) I either agree with or at least put in the legitimate question category. Still, what's really hurt performance has been this organization's weaknesses in evaluating major league talent and developing MLB starting pitchers in house. Both of these issues have been present since before Farrell became the manager.
Regarding more enthusiasm under Lovullo last year, I think the team this season under Farrell has looked very engaged and animated, and sharp in the field and on the bases. The offense has shown good signs of battling back in games. Yes, Smyly bedazzled them the other day, but he also struck out 11 batters in his previous start. Pitching has been somewhat spotty, but if just one of E. Rodriguez or C. Smith had been available, the team would have a couple more W's despite a tough schedule to date.
Maybe Lovullo really does have some special ability to get more out of the younger players, but as you noted Lovullo's tenure was garbage time. He had 2 advantages there: 1) given the stage of the season the development clock had proceeded further - guys like Swihart had a chunk of games played to find their footing a bit more in MLB, and 2) playing without the pressure of a pennant race and (probably more importantly for youngsters) knowing that you'll be regularly plugged into the lineup despite failures at the plate, in the field, or on the mound. Lovullo might well do a great job as manager, or maybe in the spotlight of contention he displays a Zimmer-esque meltdown as the skipper? We don't have a lot to go on right now in his case.
Not many managers have the opportunity to give a day off to a MVP (Pedroia) by inserting an All-Star (Holt), but Farrell managed to screw that up. There are definitely things he does that raise issues. The next manager will likely have their share too, so any move should have a high expected chance of making things better.
I don't want to harp on this because I find my personal assessment of Win/Loss impossible. Look at the 2015 Blue Jays:
April: 11-12
Bautista missed some games, and Reyes got injured. The ended the month poorly against the Rays and Red Sox
May: 12-17 (23-29)
Started poorly and then swept by Houston mid-month.
June: 18-9 (41-38)
Turned things around. Swept the Astors as payback. Had an 11-game win streak.
July: 12-13 (53-51)
End of month changes - Reyes gone, Tulowitzki and Price on board.
August: 21-6 (74-57)
Turned the corner in a big way. Month started with a beanball war against the Royals. Swept the Twins. Swept the Yankees. Another 11-game win streak. Price remarkable. Swept the Tigers.
September: 19-12 (93-69)
Tulo injured. Price gets his 7th Blue Jay win. Swept the Yankees at Season's end.
They won the pennant in June and August. Was that because Gibbons was a great manager those 2 months? Did he suck in April & May? Of course not. So you tell me, how does one assess managing based on won/loss?
April: 11-12
Bautista missed some games, and Reyes got injured. The ended the month poorly against the Rays and Red Sox
May: 12-17 (23-29)
Started poorly and then swept by Houston mid-month.
June: 18-9 (41-38)
Turned things around. Swept the Astors as payback. Had an 11-game win streak.
July: 12-13 (53-51)
End of month changes - Reyes gone, Tulowitzki and Price on board.
August: 21-6 (74-57)
Turned the corner in a big way. Month started with a beanball war against the Royals. Swept the Twins. Swept the Yankees. Another 11-game win streak. Price remarkable. Swept the Tigers.
September: 19-12 (93-69)
Tulo injured. Price gets his 7th Blue Jay win. Swept the Yankees at Season's end.
They won the pennant in June and August. Was that because Gibbons was a great manager those 2 months? Did he suck in April & May? Of course not. So you tell me, how does one assess managing based on won/loss?
I really don't think it's that difficult. You look at how many games the team won compared to how many games you think the team should've won. If the team is consistently winning fewer games than expected one can argue that the manager isn't getting the most out of his players.
And then you completely ignore the question of which is the more likely source of deviation -- the manager's poor performance or your overlofty expectations.
I think it's premature to call for Farrell's head at right now, but damn if today's bullpen usage won't ramp up the talk.
Bingo. When you stake the nominative ace to a 5-1 lead and he turns it into a three run deficit by the end of the fourth inning, the manager's subsequent bullpen usage is not the root cause of the loss.
This game was pretty much all on Price. They were forced to use their AAAA guys from the 4th inning.on with three of their guys still unavailable. Replacement level guys - 4 runs in 5 innings. David Price, 8 against the shittiest non-Braves lineup in baseball.
Not sure why Layne didn't come in, or Chris Young didn't hit for JBJ with the bases loaded against the lefty, but meh. That's not why they lost by 4.
Not sure why Layne didn't come in, or Chris Young didn't hit for JBJ with the bases loaded against the lefty, but meh. That's not why they lost by 4.
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