First of all, although this is a baseball blog, I have to give a shoutout to the Boston Celtics, who came this close to taking home championship number 18.  I won’t pretend to be a diehard fan but I watch them casually throughout the season and try not to miss the playoff games, so thanks guys for another great year.  Next year starts tonight with the NBA draft, so good luck to the Celtics front office with that one.

On to the point of this post, Marlins skipper Fredi Gonzalez was fired yesterday amid some confusion from the fans.  

I guess this was because usually mid-season managerial firings are from teams that are really struggling, and the Marlins don’t really fall into that category.  They were 34-36 under Gonzalez, who accumulated a 276-279 record in his time there.  Nothing to write home about, but not usually grounds for a firing, especially with a lower profile team like the Marlins that doesn’t expect to bring home division titles every year.  He was generally regarded as a good manager too, finishing 7th in NL Manager of the Year voting in 2009 and 3rd in 2008.  So why the axe?  I figured I’d turn this into a “That’s What He Said” and let Marlins president Larry Beinfest explain:

I guess having a record hovering around .500 is the definition of being stuck in neutral.  As for their competitors, the Marlins currently sit in 4th place in the NL East, 6 games behind the division-leading Mets.  The NL East is one of the more competitive divisions right now, with even the last place Nationals looking more powerful every day with Stephen Strasburg throwing heat.  

But before we go praising the Marlins front office too much for shaking things up, let’s realize something.  The Florida Marlins have the lowest payroll in baseball, and if I’m not mistaken it’s by a fairly large margin.  Shouldn’t they be expected, then, to underperform most if not all other teams?  It seems rather hypocritical of Beinfest to be asking for his team to step on the accelerator.  It’s a two way street buddy- open up the wallet and your team will win more games.  And by the way, despite having a small fan base, the Marlins’ hesitancy to spend money allows them to be the most profitable franchise in baseball.  The Marlins have even been investigated by MLB more than once for spending taking too much profit and not reinvesting enough in the team.  

So instead of, you know, signing a good player or something, the Marlins opt to fire the manager.  It’s difficult to measure how well Gonzalez was doing, or how well any manager does outside of team wins and losses.  I took a look at managers and their success in an earlier post.  If for no other reason than to give me something to write about, let’s define a manager’s success by how much better a team’s win-loss record is compared to their statistics.  For example, if a team has the worst offensive numbers but has a .500 record, then the manager must be doing something right.  The Marlins currently rank 3rd in the NL with 4.80 runs scored per game, 5th with a .261 team batting average, and are above average in most other offensive categories including OBP, SLG, and home runs.  Most relevant pitching statistics are also above or at league average, including a 4.02 team ERA, 7.2 K/9 innings, 3.5 BB/9 innings, and a 1.37 WHIP.  They do, however, sport the league’s worst fielding percentage, at .977.  

Given this performance by his team, assuming an “average” manager would neither add nor subtract to his team’s success, an “average” manager should at least be fielding a league average team, probably slightly above average.  This would translate to a winning percentage of somewhere around .520.  When Gonzalez left they were slightly below average, with a .486 winning percentage.  So by these criteria, Gonzalez was in fact a below average manager, by about .035 percentage points.  Maybe this call did make sense, Larry Beinfest, but there’s still no denying that the real change that would get this team on the accelerator starts with you.  There’s nothing worse than management that cares more about turning a profit than they do about winning games.