Good morning and welcome to episode 111 of Effectively Wild, the baseball

perspective daily podcast in New York, New York. I am Ben Lindbergh and in

Long Beach, California, you are similar. Good morning, Sam. Good morning, Ben. You

have a topic that someone asked you about or brought to your attention or

something last week maybe. Somebody let me know about a podcast by the

Freakonomics Radio, I guess, in which Joe Mann of Tampa Bay Rays was

interviewed in the topic of the show was leadership and the value of a boss.

And so we both listened to it and I think that the reason that I guess I want to

talk about it was not so much because of that podcast itself which I think I

took a couple things from and maybe you did as well but because it seems like

you and I both have a little bit of a longstanding fascination with the idea

of manager assessment and the ambiguity therein and you know it occurred to

me while thinking about this that we know how writers assess managers in the

course of a year. They say how many wins did I think that team was going to win?

How many did they win? Do the math and then there's your manager and it's sort of a

hysterically simple way of doing it but at least it is a method. I actually don't

really have any idea how people assess managers over a longer period of time and

the only thing I can think of is winning World Series. This is winning World Series

is this. Yeah, I think over a long period of time you can't really do the

expectations thing. I guess you kind of can if it's a manager of the Yankees or

something who have great teams every year but I think after a certain point you

just start adding up playoff appearances and deep player appearances

...