Steve Sailer writes: General managers have gotten smarter over the decades, in part due to the moneyball trend, so they hire smarter managers.
In general, baseball statistics have become a kind of Safe Space for White Guys.
It seems like more white talent is going into baseball in recent decades. Huge fast guys like Mike Trout and Bryce Harper would have been football linebackers a generation ago, but now they are tutored from childhood to be baseball stars. Or consider Giancarlo Stanton, an immense mixed race guy from the suburbs. I saw him play high school football at Notre Dame of Sherman Oaks, and I don’t doubt he’d be an NFL defensive end today if he’d stuck with football. But he has a $300 million contract to hit home runs. He gets seriously injured just about every year in MLB, so he’d probably be crippled for life already if he’d gone with football.
COMMENTS TO STEVE SAILER:
* The Texas Rangers overlooked Ron Washington’s cocaine use and it cost them 2 World Series titles. Certainly against the Cardinals when he left Nelson Cruz in on defense in the 9th and tried to let journeyman middle reliever Darren Oliver close out game 7.
He had to set black managers back 10 years.
* Does winning matter more in Baseball than in other sports? I would imagine that it does — the lucrative regional cable channel deals like the Dodgers are only sustainable IF the Dodgers get to the Series, and win a few, like the Yankees did in the 1990s and early 2000s. What are the Dodgers getting from Time-Warner? Something like 200 million every year for five years? Isn’t that roughly the SportsNet LA deal?
With revenue streams like that at stake, and its worth noting that Guggenheim Partners, not Jerry Jones, owns the Dodgers, no wonder few Black managers can be seen anymore. Its not like the NFL.
There, socialism among Oligarchs rules. The Bills, Tampa Bay, Miami, Kansas City, the RAIDERS, they haven’t been competitive for decades. But who cares? Each team by my understanding, gets a roughly equal share of the TV deals, and the League does not allow the sort of exclusive cable nets that Baseball allows. On the up side, the NFL *IS* America’s Game. Being on free, NATIONAL TV for decades has clearly grown the game’s audience in the US, with only ESPN (and that only recently) having nationally televised games on pay TV. Heck even CBS has Thursday Night Football now for half the season.
The NFL, being centrally run, can afford a Lovee Smith at Tampa Bay, or Jim Caldwell at Detroit. Who cares if they win? The owners get paid anyway. The same goes for Pittburgh’s Mike Tomlin. The Steelers don’t have an incentive to produce winners in a five year time-span the way the Dodgers do.
Can you imagine Time Warner re-upping the deal if the Dodgers don’t win a series soon? All that money to the corporate owners? Poof! Meanwhile the Rooney family will continue to rake in the dough even if Coach Tomlin again gets booted in the first round of the playoffs. He’s no Bill Belichick, that’s for sure.
I wonder if the Pac-12 deal and similar stuff in College Football will create a Whiteness space, if conferences NEED to produce winning teams, and coaching time is short, with limited resources you’re looking at more Chris Petersons or Kyle Wittinghams, not Lovee Smiths.
* Baseball attendance traditionally correlated with winning. Dodger Stadium, opened in 1962, has an annual capacity of 5.5 million tickets sold, which they never come close to selling out, which gives teams a lot of incentive to put a winner on the field. In recent decades franchises have building smaller capacity parks where they can charge more per seat and have more sellouts.
* No, it wasn’t James idea that managers were useless, it was Beans opinion, especially of his own manager.
And Casey Stengel was using sabermetrics before Bill James invented them. Stengel firsts: five man rotation, shun the sacrifice bunt, platoons.
The Braves badly wanted to make an executive out of Henry Aaron, but they finally discovered he was the dumbest man in baseball. The new GM’s are pretty obviously IQ 130 plus, and that likely means in practical terms that they need to deal with managers if 115 plus. That leaves out 86% of white men and 98% of black men.
* I remember Felipe Alou, long time hispanic manager saying a big problem was retired hispanics preferring to retire like kings back in the Caribbean rather than go in to coaching and management.
* Nobody in NYC gives a shizz about the “Murphy is a homophobe,” although the twittersphere tried to push this. His awesome performance has made him a hero. Even the coverage in the NY Times hasn’t mentioned this. NPR is, well, NPR.
The whole team is a case of Moneyball. They have only one AA, Curtis Granderson, in the starting lineup. He’s a nice, intelligent guy, excellent ballplayer, who I think is secretly happy he plays in an environment where the tone is set by middle-class white boys.
