Visits: 2
I walked into my kitchen one morning last week and caught baseball commissioner Rob Manfred holding forth on ESPN radio about the state of his sport. Almost as an afterthought the hosts asked the commissioner about a puzzlement.
For the first time in baseball history nonwhite men, Alex Cora and the Dave Roberts, were the managers of both World Series teams, the Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers. And 42 percent of major league players are black or Latino.
Yet just four of baseball’s 30 managers this season were black or Latino. What’s up with that?
“It’s become a very different interview process as the game has evolved,” Manfred replied. “Much more focused on analytics.”
I winced. I have heard Manfred lay down this riff before and his excuse-making is no more satisfying today than when he offered those words in 2015 and in 2016. Manfred suggests hiring goes in ebbs and flows and highs and lows. As baseball in 2015 had a single nonwhite manager, his invocation of metaphoric lows that year had a Death Valley quality.
I should note that Manfred, who declined through a spokesman to comment for this article, has drawn good marks from the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports, which issues annual report cards on baseball, for hiring blacks, Latinos and women within the office of the commissioner. . He puts much store, his aides say, in a program to develop a pipeline of black and Latino managerial candidates, and he has hired consultants to help them hone interview and presentation skills.
And this week brings a welcome exception as the Blue Jays plan to announce they are hiring Charlie Montoyo, a Puerto Rican-born baseball man who has managed up and down the Tampa Bay Rays’ minors leagues for two decades and compiled a .526 winning percentage. He twice was minor league manager of the year.
At age 53, Montoyo will get his big league shot.
More broadly however baseball has tumbled backward down a hill of its own making. As recently as 2009 it had 10 black or Latino managers.
Two explanations are offered by men around major league baseball for this desultory trend. As Ivy-League men predominate in front offices, they are said to seek managerial candidates conversant in the analytic revolution that has overrun baseball in the past decade.
Another theory, a cousin to the first, is that these bright and vastly white front office men seek managerial empty vessels into which they can pour their statistics and equations. Columnist Ken Rosenthal, now with The Athletic, wrote a thoughtful article critiquing this trend a few years back. To hire a baseball lifer, a man who has spent years getting the experience he was told was needed to become a managerial candidate, is to risk he might think an independent thought.
These conceits withstand no real interrogation.
I called Joey Cora, older brother to Alex whose Red Sox won the World Series in five games Sunday night.. Joey Cora, who was born in Puerto Rico, was a fine infielder and is a baseball coach of near two decades vintage. He has interviewed seven times for managerial openings and has yet to surmount that hurdle.
What of this argument that minority candidates lack grounding in analytic necessities?
He chuckled. Cora is in a mood to celebrate progress. But the notion that analytics is foreign territory to minority managerial candidates is comical. More than a decade ago Kenny Williams — then the White Sox’ general manager and still one of baseball’s few black front office decision makers — worked with the Latino manager Ozzie Guillen and Cora, who was a coach, on analytics grounded experiments including using a parade of relievers to finish a game.
“Everyone in baseball understands the importance of statistics and analysis; we’re saturated with that,” he said. “That’s no secret anymore. You also need to know baseball and how to lead men and how to combine all of that.
“Why wouldn’t we understand that?”
Good question.
None of the recently hired white managers hail from the M.I.T. professoriate. Aaron Boone was a baseball guest analyst on ESPN when the Yankees hired him. When Craig Counsell finished his playing career, the Milwaukee Brewers hired him straight away as a special assistant to the general manager, and he served a part-time color analyst on Brewers radio before becoming the team’s manager.
The Cincinnati Reds hired David Bell after he took a dutiful slog through minor league managing.
I put in a call to Curtis Granderson, a fine baseball player approaching the sunset of his career. He has a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, and he has a foundation and envisions a career in business. Managing holds not much attraction, but he cares deeply about diversifying a sport he loves.
He notes that the analytics revolution presents no less a challenge for white former players than black or Latino. “There aren’t that many coaches with 10 years in who do sabermetric analysis,” he said.
More to the point, near half of all coaches now are black or Latino, and that sharpens his question: Why aren’t they getting hired as managers? “The conversations we have are, ‘Oh man, you could have gotten that job, you checked all the boxes. So why didn’t it happen’?”
That question too hangs there.
Willie Randolph, the former Mets manager, offers another case in point. He managed the Mets for four years, reached the playoffs and had a cumulative winning percentage of .544. He was fired after the 2008 season, and he has not managed again. Clint Hurdle, a white man, got his first managing job with the Colorado Rockies, and he recorded losing records in seven of his first eight seasons. . He was fired, quickly rehired by the Pittsburgh Pirates, and his team has had a winning record in four out of its last six years.
No second shot has come Randolph’s way. Omar Minaya was the architect of those Met teams, and he hired Randolph and fired him too. That’s the way of baseball. You fail, learn your lessons and try again.
“I can’t imagine a better candidate for a job,” says Minaya, who works in the Mets front office. “I tell people all the time that he’s a winner. How can he not get a second chance?”
Cora recalls several of his seven interviews as serious affairs, with baseball executives examining his college transcript and exploring his strategic thinking. Other interviews were farcical.
“I had interviews where they did not know I attended Vanderbilt,” he said. “They didn’t know I managed winter ball or that I managed in the minors. I thought to myself, gosh, they are just checking a box so they can say they interviewed a Latino.”
Cora says he’s comfortable with the role he played in paving the way for other blacks or Latinos, not the least his own younger brother. “Maybe it wasn’t meant for me,” he said. “I live the dream through Alex. I just want to see faster progress.”
You want to put him on the phone with Manfred and the club owners and presidents who far too rarely hire the best of all ethnicities.