I like to skim the comments here at Redleg Nation. Even when I’m not actively participating, I’m around. Make of that what you will.
Anyway, there’s a contingent on here who insists that now former manager David Bell was costing the team LOTS of wins every year and that newly hired manager Terry Francona is going to give them a lot more wins.
Manager is a position that is notoriously difficult to measure, but I guarantee you teams are measuring it, whether it’s publicly available or not. Our best publicly available analysis says that the difference between the absolute best manager and the absolute worst manager is not more than four wins.
Did David Bell cost the team 10 wins with bullpen management? No. Of course not. Did the team under perform in 2024 under his management? Yes. Did they over perform under his management in 2023? Also yes.
Remember Dusty Baker? Remember how we all (yes, me too) thought he was a terrible manager? And yet his teams nearly always over performed and players loved playing for him. That kind of thing matters and it’s hard to measure. Players reportedly liked playing for Bell. They also seem to like playing for Francona. Unless you’re in the clubhouse, we don’t know more than that.
But listen, ultimately, all of this comes down to the players. If managers really made a difference of more than a handful of wins, they would get paid a lot differently. And the bad ones would not stick around at all.
I think Francona is a good hire. I think he’s going to do a good job. But I also think there is a tendency to pile on a manager as an easy scapegoat. This team had a ton of injuries last year. That’s not David Bell’s fault. Guys who hit really well under Bell in 2023 did not hit really well under him in 2024. I don’t know where you place the blame there, but it’s hard to find a rational way to blame Bell.
This team probably needed a new manager just to shake things up a bit. But what they really need is a corner outfielder who can hit and a corner infielder who can hit. Counting on five or six different players to bounce back – especially when several of them aren’t really established big leaguers – is fool’s gold. Managers aren’t magician’s and right now, no manager is taking this roster to the playoffs without a ton of luck.
Francona is great, but unless he can DH and hit 30 homers, hiring him is not going to fix the primary problems with the Reds.
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