What inspired the research on baseball managers?
I’ll be honest – the best way to answer this is to cut’n’paste what I say in this site’s launch article: The idea for this book first popped in my head when I saw Phil Birnbaum give a presentation at the annual SABR convention in 2006. He created a database to determine how much teams under/overachieved in a given season. He termed the disparity luck. However, while luck is certainly one factor that explains why a team would do better or worse than one might expect, it’s not the only reason. For example, looking at the results it was amazing how “lucky” teams managed by Earl Weaver always were, or how “unlucky” Don Baylor’s squads were. Two elements of Birnbaum’s database really caught my attention. He created two algorithms – one for hitters and the other for pitchers – to determine if a player did better or worse in a given season based on how he performed in the two previous and two succeeding seasons. These algorithms (based on Runs Created and Component ERA respectively) appeared
