It's a good thing they put managers in the Hall of Fame.
You know, since it's so hard for even the "best" managers to win Manager of the Year Awards.
After all, it's practically assumed that the manager of any postseason team must have done a great job, and then there are also the managers of the teams that didn't quite make it, but played better than everybody expected.
So now we're talking about six managers in the American League this season, and five in the National League (or six if you count Chip Hale). How do you decide, then? From Jayson Stark's latest:
"It's the ultimate narrative award," said one exec I bounced this theory off of recently. "It's an award that goes every year to the manager of a team that everyone decides exceeds its expectations. So I kind of feel sorry for Mike Matheny. He's doomed by the Cardinals. Doomed by their success and doomed by their expectations. And that really isn't fair."
You know what? I'd bet that's about to happen to him again. Because the narrative of the Cubs' season is the stuff manager-of-the-year awards are woven out of. And if that's how it plays out when this award gets handed out in November, well ... uh-oh.
But are the expectations so high for the Cardinals because of Mike Matheny ... or because he's part of a tremendous organization?
Of course the answer's somewhere in the middle, and it's hard to argue that Matheny hasn't done a particularly good job -- or that the Cardinals haven't been surprisingly good, anyway -- considering all the injuries.
But of COURSE Maddon's going to win the thing. Even after the Cardinals lost Adam Wainwright, they were still co-favorites to win another division title. Meanwhile, the Cubs were supposed to maybe clear .500 but not much else. The narrative favors Maddon, just as it favors Paul Molitor and A. J. Hinch and especially Jeff Banister in the other league, even though you can obviously make good cases for Ned Yost and Joe Girardi and John Gibbons.
I think someone somewhere made a case for Terry Collins, purely for his adroit handling of the Matt Harvey Situation. Well, for one thing, I'm not sure how adroit it's been handled. And for another, the Mets didn't take off until the front office traded for a bunch of new hitters.
I'm not saying Collins hasn't done an admirable job, and I actually think "crisis management" could be a more interesting way to evaluate managers. I just don't think Collins' work can be said to trump Maddon's this season. Especially not in the minds of the voters.
It's interesting stuff, though. More interesting than the player awards, I would argue, because there are more candidates and more intangibles in play.
