Get Rid of the Manager!

By WALTER SHAPIRO

They put on a uniform -- one leg at a time -- before every game, yet they never play. They come in two basic shapes: potbellied pinups for prepackaged diet plans and tightly wound, taut-skinned, tanned Marlboro men. Their first names usually end with that boyish diminutive, the letter y, as in Casey, Whitey, Sparky, Tommy and Buddy. We are, of course, talking about big-league baseball managers, one of the strangest breeds in pro sports.

Managers talk funny, often spitting tobacco to punctuate their sentences. For public consumption, they lapse into the inspirational language of after- dinner speeches. Listen to Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, baseball's answer to George Jessel, rattle off run-on cliches about his mediocre team: "We got to keep going out there and battle. We've got to believe that we can win." But the most striking thing about managers is their preternatural awareness that they have less job security than the East German government. "Every manager's job is in jeopardy," says Houston Astros skipper Art Howe, who is in enough jeopardy to be a contestant on the TV game show. "Managers are hired to be fired."

These days, almost everyone else in the upper echelons of American life is cushioned from the consequences of failure. Congressmen bask in a 98% re- election rate, Donald Trump is rescued by a last-minute bank bailout, and CEOs almost never face executive outplacement after a few quarters of skimpy earnings. But there are no banked turns on the tenure track in baseball, where the typical dugout denizen lasts two years and a manager has been fired during every season since 1942.

Already this year three managers have been asked to seek challenges elsewhere in the private sector. And just last Friday master strategist Whitey Herzog suddenly quit after eleven years as skipper of the St. Louis Cardinals. Earlier in the season Davey Johnson, who led the New York Mets to a World Championship in 1986, was terminated despite a career winning percentage of .593. Bucky Dent was the latest casualty of the mercurial reign of New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who must believe that God loves Yankee managers since he made so many of them. And in Atlanta's answer to Watergate, Russ Nixon was fired to cover up the failure of Braves owner Ted Turner to field a competitive team. This gospel -- "When in doubt, fire the manager" -- is baseball's contribution to American business theory.

But -- the indefensible Steinbrenner aside -- is this a rational form of organizational behavior? Many in baseball defend the practice, more as a psychological tool to motivate multimillion-dollar egos than as a strategic gambit. "I can get you ten to 15 people who can sit in the dugout and know when to change pitchers," contends Mets general manager Frank Cashen. "But I can't get you ten to 15 people who can communicate with 25 ballplayers." Cashen looks like a genius for his decision to replace Johnson with third-base coach Buddy Harrelson. In the ensuing six weeks the Mets have gone from Bart Simpson underachievers to the Shea-hey kids, winning 70% of their games, including a streak of eleven in a row. "This is a real team now," Harrelson says with pride. "They think as a team and act as a team. It's not me, it's the whole situation." But would the talented Mets have turned their season around no matter who was in charge? Harrelson shrugs, "Who knows? That's passe."

The resurrection of the Mets is far from unique. When Joe Morgan was tapped as manager of the Boston Red Sox in July 1988, the supercharged team immediately won twelve straight games and the division crown. So too with last year's Toronto Blue Jays and fill-in manager Cito Gaston, who inherited an unmotivated team mired in sixth place and spurred it into the American League play-offs. Gaston modestly insists, "You can only do what you can with what you have in terms of talent." There is no way to precisely quantify managerial might-have-beens. But author Bill James, the game's most artful analyst of statistics, has concluded that over time "teams which change managers in midseason tend to exceed expectations by a tiny amount."

Make no mistake: not every freshly anointed manager is the second coming of Casey Stengel. In fact, Stengel had only one winning season in the 13 years he piloted a team other than the Yankees. Steinbrenner's Bronx Bumblers still + boast the worst record in baseball, despite new manager Stump Merrill, who says bravely, "I just hope I can survive and stay here." Atlanta managed at least briefly to climb out of last place under Bobby Cox, who swapped the general manager's office for a seat in the dugout. But as Lasorda, in his 15th year as Dodger manager, puts it, "The players win and lose games, not the manager."

The Dodgers are a testament to the virtues of stability; the team has needed just two managers since 1954, and Lasorda was rewarded with a new contract that will keep him bleeding Dodger blue until 1992. But baseball's other senior statesmen have found losing almost impossible to endure. Last season Detroit Tigers manager Sparky Anderson needed to take a month off to recover as his team plummeted to the basement. Herzog was admirably frank as he resigned from the last-place Cardinals: "I couldn't get them to play better. Anybody could have done better than me." Too bad the owners never seem to take the same rap for bad teams.