It’s time for the End of the Year Awards. This is one of my favorite articles to write
each year. It’s also a mandatory article
per my affiliation with the Baseball Bloggers Alliance. However, it’s not a problem as I love writing
these and always hope my vote helps pick the individuals I deem as the correct
recipients of each individual reward. So
let’s start with the….
NL
1.
Bruce Bochy
2.
Matt Williams
3.
Mike Redmond
For the National League Connie Mack Award, I think that
there is another clear winner, though perhaps one not as deserving as the
others who finished on my list in the AL.
I don’t mean to make light of any of the men on this list, but many had
good teams that just needed to get healthy or take the final step to make the
playoffs. While all had good years, if I
had to make a list of the 3 best managers from both leagues, perhaps none of
these three make my list. But I
digress. I considered 5 individuals for
this award.
The two who didn’t make my list were Mike Matheny and Clint
Hurdle. Both had good seasons with
mid-market teams and made late pushes to get into the playoffs. But both also had playoff teams last year,
and perhaps both were also responsible for their teams needing to make a late playoff push, seeing as how Milwaukee and
Cincinnati hung around in the NL Central and Wildcard races for so long. So while both had good years, neither made
the list.
Number 3 on my list almost won it all. I eventually decided that the Marlins late season
swoon and the fact that the other two teams’ managers skippered playoff clubs
was enough to knock him from first to third.
I usually ignore whether a team made the playoffs for individual player
awards, because we know empirically that individual baseball players have less
to do with their team’s successes than any other athlete from any other
sport. Obviously it helps, but you need
lots of good players to make the playoffs in baseball. But with a manager, you are measured by your
teams’ success. So playoffs mean more in
this race, and it’s why Mike Redmond is only third on this list as the Marlins
finished well out of the playoff race.
In fact, they only finished fourth in what ended up being a fairly weak
NL East. But he gets notice for taking a
team that many thought could be the worst in baseball and leading them to
respectability. 77 wins isn’t something
that usually gets people excited, but in this case it was a 15-win improvement. And it came with an injury-shortened season
from Giancarlo Stanton and almost no help from Jose Fernandez, who got hurt
early.
Matt Williams was a rookie manager who took over a talented
Nationals team that had a wealth of expectations heaped upon them. That’s not easy to deal with. But he did and helped this team improve their
win total by 10 and their run differential by over 100. That’s a big improvement and it all came
while dealing with beating the expectations of many others. And it led to the best record in the NL. That performance made him my runner up on
this list.
But the winner of the NL Connie Mack Award has to be Bruce
Bochy. Redmond took a bad team and made
them better. But they weren’t a playoff
factor. Williams took a good team and
helped them play to their potential and a little beyond. Bochy took a team that looked okay on paper
and helped guide them to the final playoff berth in a tough division where the
richest team in baseball generally had its way with those below it. This team won 12 more games this year without
any major free agent additions and despite losing Marco Scutaro, Matt Cain and
losing Brandon Belt for the majority of the year. And at the end of the year Bochy helped the
team weather the loss of Angel Pagan and Michael Morse. This team has never been healthy. In the past it always won with dynamite
starting pitching built around Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum. Well Cain struggled before getting hurt and
Lincecum was bad enough to be banished to the bullpen for the stretch run. But even with those losses, Bochy saw his team
improve their run differential from -62 last year to positive 57 in 2014. That’s an impressive job of getting the most
out of your players. Especially when most
of your players aren’t All Stars. For
that reason, Bochy is my Connie Mack Award winner.
Okay that’s it for the Connie Mack Award. Next up will be the Willie Mays Award, which
is comparable to the Rookie of the Year.
No comments:
Post a Comment