Is Manager of the Year the dumbest award in baseball?
I think it is.
For starters, no one cares about it. I mean no one. Can you name a single winner of the Manager of the Year Award of the past 10 years? Don’t even think about lying to me, you obviously cannot. And that’s a good thing. Baseball is a player’s game. This isn’t college hoops, where the ego-puffing men performatively screaming on the sideline are bigger stars than the players themselves. Baseball managers aren’t stars at all. They’re
just kind of there. To belabor the sky metaphor, baseball managers are clouds, at best.
And because baseball is a player’s game — one that’s decided on the field instead of in the pages of a playbook — almost no one on the outside is even capable of evaluating the job a manager does. Managers don’t have elaborate styles of play they bring from one team to another. They don’t spend days designing defensive schemes that befuddle more talented teams. They’re job is mostly to keep the clubhouse happy and pull a pitcher at the right moment. That’s just about it.
And because the job is so hard to evaluate from the outside, voting usually follows a predictable pattern: voters just give it to the manager of the team that had a better season than anyone expected. They do this despite the fact that we all know that, every single season, there will be flukey teams who get a little magic fairy dust sprinkled on them and make a surprising playoff run. That’s just how baseball works and, more often than not, those teams go right on back to being mediocre-to-bad the next season. So, e.g., we give the 2023 NL Manager of the Year to Skip Schumaker. After all, the 2022 Marlins only won 69 games, so Schumaker guiding the same team to 84 wins the next season obviously means he did an amazing job, right? Of course — just please try to ignore the fact that he must have forgotten how to manage the next year, because the same team with the same manager subsequently went 62-100 the very next season.
All of this is to say: I don’t really care that Chad Tracy didn’t win the American League Manager of the Year last night. He finished third, behind winner Will Venable of the White Sox and runner-up Kevin Cash of the Rays. Did either Venable or Cash truly do a better job than Tracy? No one knows. What they do know is that the Red Sox were predicted to make the playoffs before the season started, while the White Sox and Rays were not. Ergo, those managers must have done a great job.
But does anyone actually think that either Veneble or Cash had a harder job than Tracy had on the day he reported to Fenway Camden Yards for the first time? Would literally any manager in baseball have traded places with Tracy that day, as he took over a team that appeared dead in the water and replaced a popular World Series-winning manager, knowing he was likely to be fired himself at the end of the season? And, as for Venable, would anyone be surprised if his White Sox finish under .500 again in 2027? And, if they do, will any of the voters who deemed him the best manager in the American League in 2026 perhaps wonder if they made the wrong call?
No, they will not. You know why? Because they won’t ever think about the 2026 Manager of the Year Award ever again, because, as we established up top, literally no one cares about this award. At all.
So, congrats to Will Venable. My condolences to Chad Tracy. Now please, for the love of god, can Craig Breslow do something interesting so we have something real to talk about?
