Is It Really Worth Getting Upset With John Gibbons?
Last night's decision by John Gibbons to use Devon Travis as a pinch hitter gave his haters a ton of ammunition. Travis failed to cash the runner and the Blue Jays ended up losing the game. But was this really a bad decision on the part of the Blue Jays skipper? Yes, Donaldson is the far superior hitter, and yes Travis is struggling. However, there's more to it than that. Donaldson has been nursing a dead arm and for all we know he wasn't coming into the game under any circumstances. Gibbons is receiving criticism for not playing what may have been an injured player.
We can't just assume Donaldson would have got the job done, either. Yes, based on career stats Donaldson would have been more likely to succeed in that situation, but that doesn't mean the odds were in his favor to succeed. Statistically he was much more likely to fail in that situation. The best hitters fail to get a hit ~70% of the time. Despite Donaldson being a better hitter than Travis, the odds were still stacked against him succeeding and his odds of succeeding over Travis were minimal.
It seems to be a common belief among people who criticize managers. They act like if the manager had made a different decision the outcome is guaranteed to be different. "If only the manager had done what I wanted them to do in that one moment this team is guaranteed to have won!!!"
Confirmation bias seems to be common among baseball fans. When a fan thinks Gibbons should pull a pitcher and he doesn't and it costs the team a run, the fan will say "See, he should have pulled him." Well what about the times that fan thinks a pitcher should be pulled and Gibbons leaves him in and the pitcher gets out of the inning? Or what about the other way? Gibbons pulls a pitcher when he's cruising. If the reliever that comes in gives up a run it will confirm the fan's belief that he's bad at managing pitchers. Well, we don't know the alternate outcome because it didn't happen. Maybe if he leaves the pitcher in he would have also allowed those runs, or more runs.
Then there's the times a manager pulls a guy early and the relievers do their job. Will the fans give credit when they thought the manager was wrong? Most likely fans forget those times they were wrong, but surely they will always remember the times they were right. It's easy to question a manager's decision/indecision when you already know the outcome. Until we have access to alternate universes we'll never know how things would have went if a different decision had been made. I'm not sure where science is on this, but I'm pretty sure it's at least a few years away.
People who criticize the decisions of a manager are vastly overestimating the value of those decisions. Take Mike Trout and replace him with a replacement level players and it's about 10 wins over the entire season. Replace him for a single at bat and the difference is quite small. Yes, a manager's decisions make a difference, but how much of a difference is not exactly known. If you take two pitchers, one with a 3.00 ERA and one with a 4.00 ERA that works out to one earned run every 9 innings. A fan may not like it when the inferior pitcher is used, but they can't determine when that extra run will come any more than the manager can. 8 out of 9 times those two pitchers get the same results. The talent level between major league players isn't as large as some seem to believe. The differences between players shake themselves out over the entire 162 game season.
A common topic of discussion is batting orders. People love to talk about what the ideal batting order is, as if it has a major role on the outcome of the game. Research has shown that the effect is minimal. The Royals won the World Series with Alcides Escobar leading off, one of the worst players statistically to put at the top of the lineup. Gibbons could put the names in a hat and it wouldn't make much difference because there's no way of knowing which players will get hits that day and in which order those hits will happen. A lineup can obviously be optimized to give the greatest odds of success, but the effect is small.
A manager's job has much more to do with managing personalities than in-game decisions. The in-game decisions are the things we see and are easy to scrutinize, especially with the benefit of hindsight, but the majority of their job happens behind the scenes.
The reality is nobody knows how to effectively judge a manager. We can think we can judge them based on what we believe are the right in-game moves to make, but that is clouded by our own biases and are limited to only being able to see the reality that actually happens. We can pretend that if we were manager we'd make different decisions and they'd turn out much better, but there's no way to prove that. Almost every fanbase has a problem with their manager because their job is one that is so easy to second guess and there's no way to have our beliefs proven wrong. A manager's decisions likely have little effect on the outcome of the game and it's the players on the field who decide that. Most managers make similar decisions anyway. It really isn't worth getting upset about the job performance of a guy whose job we only see a fraction of. Personally, I'm not going to call
