Comments on: Cleveland Hires Manny Acta

By: Will

Will — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:18:29 +0000

Agreed. The Nats haven’t ever had little or no talent, as many have argued. They have never put together a good team, but they’re by no means a 100 loss team. In 2008, PECOTA projected they’d finish 72-90. They finished 59-102. In 2009, they were projected to finish 78-84. They finished 59-103. Acta finished with a record of 85-163 – 29 games worse than the 114-135 record PECOTA predicted.

I’m not familiar if there have been any articles examining managers that are successful at outperforming expectations, but Manny Acta certainly isn’t a manager who gets the most out of his teams.

By: neuter_your_dogma

neuter_your_dogma — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:46:58 +0000

Best case scenario is that Manny (and his staff) is the type of manager who teaches and helps develop players to reach their peak potential.

By: neuter_your_dogma

neuter_your_dogma — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:44:26 +0000

Sometimes you just get bored of losing.

By: Matt B.

Matt B. — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:43:57 +0000

Hey, without the Nats, we would have no way to quantify “replacement” level players!

By: neuter_your_dogma

neuter_your_dogma — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:43:07 +0000

No NL team or AL team with a restricted payroll will win with Adam Dunn.

By: Pete

Pete — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:40:36 +0000

Neil

Are we talking about pure mental mistakes or simply bad baseball played by bad players?

By: Chip

Chip — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:04:28 +0000

Did the Indians really lose that many more wins to injuries than other teams, or is that a comment out of your ass? They had issues with pitching from day 1. Even if you give that team Jake Westbrook back, they still lose 90 games. Where is this advanced analysis when it comes to the bullpen?

By: Nestor Chylak

Nestor Chylak — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:58:22 +0000

No NL team with Adam Dunn on its roster will ever win anything.

By: Nestor Chylak

Nestor Chylak — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:56:15 +0000

What is it about Manny Acta that makes players want to play like shit?

Or, what is it about Jim Riggleman (…) that makes players want to play well?

By: Chip

Chip — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:54:41 +0000

Actually there is no statistical significance between those two win percentages over that number of games played. But the PECOTA projection is an interesting point. I feel we could learn a lot from projections that turn out wrong.