MLB Awards Preview: NL Manager of the Year

This guy might be the only person in the world who expected the Padres to contend for the playoffs in 2010.

While you can use statistics to support candidates for most the MLB end-of-season awards, that’s not quite the case for the Manager of the Year award. After all, managers don’t have batting averages. They don’t hit home runs. They don’t have ERAs, and they can’t blow saves.

In fact, the only stat you can use to even remotely measure a manager’s worth is wins.

And that’s what we do, really. The Manager of the Year award, most years, is given to the skipper of the club that has the most wins in their league. Since the award was first given out in 1983 (to Tommy Lasorda), its winners have averaged over 95 wins a year. Not too shabby.

So if we’re assuming that the award will go to the manager of the team with the most wins in the NL, that means we’re looking at a dead heat between Bobby Cox of the Atlanta Braves (currently 75-55), Dusty Baker of the Cincinnati Reds (also 75-55), and Bud Black of the San Diego Padres (currently 76-53). With just under a month left to play, anything could happen, but it looks likely that the award is Black’s to lose.

Except that’s not the only consideration we use, because the award isn’t always given to the team with the best record. A fair amount of the time, the award is given to the manager whose team that most outperformed their expectations. A perfect example would be Jim Tracy of the Colorado Rockies, who took over a team sitting at 18-28 and piloted them to a 74-42 finish, including winning 20 of his first 25 games. Considering that was a team picked to finish fourth in its division, it’s safe to say he overachieved.

So which NL teams have overachieved this year? Two of our division leaders (Black’s Padres and Baker’s Reds) still qualify, but Cox’s Braves were supposed to be good. Not this good, perhaps, but challenging for the divisional title, at least. We can probably scratch Cox off the list, even though winning the Manager of the Year award in his last season would certainly be poetic. He might be considered if his team gets to 100 wins (which would require an unthinkable 25-7 finish), but it’s probably safe to count him out.

So we’re really left to debate between Black and Baker. Baker has done a tremendous job with the Reds this year. Almost everyone picked the Cardinals to win the NL Central, yet as we head into August, the Reds lead the division by 5 games. Travis Wood came agonizingly close to a perfect game in July. Joey Votto has emerged as an MVP candidate (more on him on Friday). And all this from a team that wasn’t expected to do anything this year. Seems like Baker should be a lock, right?

Perhaps, but at least the Reds were expected to be mediocre. The Padres, on the other hand, were expected to be flat-out terrible. Virtually every analyst had them picked to finish dead last in the NL West. (A few brave pundits picked them to finish ahead of the Arizona Diamondbacks, but not many.) Instead, the Friars built on their torrid finish to 2009 and shot out of the gate. All throughout May, June, July, and August, people kept saying there was no way the Padres could keep this pace up. And all throughout those months, they’ve been proving people wrong. They currently hold the best record in the NL and the third-best in all of baseball (behind the twin terrors of the Yankees and Rays).

So Dusty Baker certainly helped the Reds to exceed their expectations, but Bud Black has completely obliterated them in San Diego. It doesn’t help that Baker has already won the award three times (1993, 1997, and 2000, all with the San Francisco Giants) while only one Padre has ever won the award (Bruce Bochy in 1996). I expect Black to win this award going away, and deservedly so. The Padres are one of the best stories of 2010 (just like the 2008 Rays), and it’s only fitting that he be recognized for it.