Managers Making Their Team's Worse

This off-season, Tony La Russa will enter into negotiations with the Cardinals regarding his future status with the club. He is also rumored to be considering retirement. This would be in the best interest of the Cardinals, financially and for the club's future success.

TLR has an amazing managerial pedigree. He is third on the all-time managerial wins list with 2,552. He's second in Major League games managed with 4,773. Of all the managers currently in the game, La Russa is certainly the most storied and accomplished manager. In 2007, La Russa signed a 2-year deal worth $8.5million through 2009. That's $4.25 million dollars that the team isn't spending on talent. There is no way he is providing the team with four million dollars worth of wins If the Cards didn't have TLR they could've gotten Bobby Abreu, who would provide a great deal of value to any offense last off-season. Instead, they were weighed down by the manager's contract.

It's not even like TLR is that good a manager. He often hurts the team. He hates to give rookies playing time, even if they're better than the veterans. He manages his bullpen in an extremely inefficient way, bringing in relievers to just face one batter before swapping them out even though it has been shown that the marginal gain is practically zero. He also trusts his closers and uses predefined roles for his relievers too much. Ryan Franklin should've been lifted after the Holliday error and they should've brought in Smoltz or any other reliever, who could have gotten one out without allowing four baserunners. Another mistake he made was not pinch hitting for Carpenter when they were down a run in Game 1, top of the 5th, two outs, and a runner at second. Carp of course struck out. When you're losing, you need offense, not your ace pitcher sticking around making sure that making sure you don't lose by too much.

Joe Torre also does really dumb stuff that costs teams wins, yet he still holds a three-year 13 million dollar contract. He batted his best batter 7th (Matt Kemp and his .850 OPS) for most of the early part of the season. He sent a good number of Dodger relievers to the DL through overwork. He essentially threw Game 3 of the NLCS by starting Kuroda, who hadn't pitched in over a month and had just recovered from a spine injury. Would the Dodgers have also lost if they used Billingsley? Probably, but it would've been much less-risky and embarrassing than using Kuroda.

With Managers regularly executing idiotic moves, how can they justify their salaries? Their jobs should be to manage the players and follow the strategies that allow for maximum success, not to cling to ideas that have been proven ineffective. I have trouble understanding the logic of paying an individual so much money to hurt their team's chance of winning a game.