Baseball managers influence their team's outcome by as much as two wins per season regardless of player talent.
A new Bayesian estimator finally quantifies the holy grail of sports analytics by isolating a manager's impact from their roster. Most fans assume a manager's success is just a reflection of having the best athletes. The results show a specific subset of leaders consistently overperform or underperform their team's underlying ability. These two wins represent a massive financial and competitive swing for a professional franchise. Strategic decisions in the dugout matter just as much as the statistical output on the field.
mWAR: a Bayesian Estimator of Manager Value
SSRN · 5893423
For a sport that is approaching a state of analytic saturation, major league baseball is devoid of one seemingly critical metric: a manager value estimator. Whether managers have ever meaningfully influenced their teams’ performances and still do today are matters of significant dissensus. Without a manager-value estimator, that debate (critical, at a minimum, to informed front-office decisionmaking) cannot be convincingly resolved. Using a sample of over 500 managers spanning the history of AL/