First, sorry, I haven't been feeling up for posting lately, partly because I've been a little sick, partly because the play of the Giants have been making me sick, particularly that 3 game lay down to the D-gers when we could have stuck it to them.
Goodbye, Mr. Alou
About Alou's, ahem, amicable parting, I have a number of feelings about this and Lefty, in this post, captures them pretty well, so I'm just going to go with that. He will have his faults, but people forget that no manager will be exactly what they would want, they have to look at the overall picture, and overall I think Felipe was a good manager and, more importantly, better than the manager before.
Instead, here is an interesting statistics about Alou: Felipe has won more games than the Pythagorean Expected Wins calculates, based on runs scored and runs given up, each year he was with the Giants, except for this one. I agree with others that there are flaws with using this, but given that there are not many indicators we can refer to, I thought it could be at least illustrative, though not conclusive.
Career, he has a had a positive effect on his teams based on actual wins vs. Pythagorean wins, with an overall total of +23 out of 2,054 games, which boosted him to an over .500 record of 1,033-1,021 vs. an expected 1,010-1,044. This total is suppose to move to the mean of zero on the aggregate, but using his full career stats and hypothesis testing, I calculate that there is at least 95% chance that his differential mean is above zero, that is, he has had a positive effect on his teams, using just this metric, meaning he has a statistically significant positive effect on the team he managed.
I had checked the difference for a number of managers over the past 20 years or so (after Alou was hired) and found that there are some managers who show a positive effect over their career and those who have had a negative effect. Generally, managers who have long careers tend to have positive effect, though there was exceptions, like Tommy Lasorda, who, despite his 20 year career, had a negative total. And most with short careers tended to have negative totals. The only anomaly I ran across was Joe Torre, who was horrible with his previous teams but has been good with the Yankees and perhaps Jim Leyland, who most acknowledge as a good manager, but because of a horrible first season plus his inability to go much above that during the rest of his managing career, I think he has a negative total.
While this is not a great and conclusive method for evaluating a manager, taking over a team mid-season does help show how good a manager is, at least relative to who was managing before. And that is what happened in Felipe's first season as a manager, he replaced an underperforming manager. In Felipe's first season as manager, the guy he replaced had a -2 differential: went 17-20 and his expected was 19-18. Whereas Felipe had a 0, a slight improvement, but went 70-55, a huge improvement overall but the differential does not show that. As Lefty noted in his blog, we need a parallel universe to run what would have happened to get at the truth of the matter.
I still like Alou and would not have minded him staying on to guide the Giants for a couple more years. I understand the rationale that the management wanted to change to a manager who will be with the team over the next 4-6 years because they are planning on building a team with players they are planning to keep on the team over the next 4-6 years. But I'm OK with saying good-bye to him now and hoping that he continues on with the team and help guide the team into the future and, hopefully, help the team with recruiting bonus babies in Latin America.
Good luck Felipe, I hope the fish is biting!
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