You think that should Bobby Valentine have this job to be a much different looking spring training?

Well, this is the great thing about hiring him because you're going to get

slap in the face right off the bat, you know, and that's exactly what this team and this organization needs right now.

I mean long-term is long-term. I don't know what's going to happen long-term, but right now whack Bobby Valentine.

Good morning and welcome to episode 328 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from baseball

prospectus. I am Ben Lindbergh joined as always by Sam Miller. We have another guest today. His name is Chris

Jaffy. He is a writer for The Heartball Times. He is also going to be contributing to the BP annual

this year, which by the way is available for pre-order and which Sam is co-editing. He also wrote

the book, Evaluating Baseball's Managers, which came out in 2009 and was just a retrospective of

really the entire history of managing. I have written a bit about managing recently and he's

written about managing and there's been a lot of news about managing. I wanted to have him on and

ask him a few questions about it. I guess the basic one is how should we be evaluating baseball's

managers? It's a topic that I feel like Sam and I sort of avoid as much as possible when we have

to do a vote-on-manager the year at BP at the end of the season. We both had stay in usually. I

was on ClubhouseCount financial today, so I had to talk about it and just try to come up with

something to say, but I find it difficult. So how do you go about doing it?

Well, first off, I had agreed. It's definitely difficult. It's so much easier to evaluate players,

so we got them so much hard data. It's so much easier to analyze how many doubles and how many

triples they hit or whatever it might be. With managers, it's much more murky because there's

about two, let's say there's about two main aspects of managers. First part, the easy part,

the in-game strategy, the decisions they make. That's the part we can kind of quantify.

We'll understand what's intentional walks or sacrifice hits or how they handle a bullpen.

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