Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The by Bill James Read Free Book Online

was due to the fact that the independent old man would not accept a pension, in default of which no position could be created that he could fill satisfactorily owing to his disposition which was self-opinionated and brooked neither advice or order.”
    Now that should have been on his tombstone.
    (This is an edited version of a much longer article by the author which was originally published several years ago. Sources for this article, in addition to Anson’s autobiography, include Anson’s obituaries in the 1923 Reach and Spalding Guides, Robert Smith’s books Baseball and The Hall of Fame , Ira Smith’s Baseball’s Famous First Basemen, The Strange Career of Jim Crow , by C. Vann Woodward, and They Gave Us Baseball , by John M. Rosenberg, as well as many other articles, histories, and newspaper articles.)

Decade Snapshot: 1890s
    Most Successful Managers:
    1. Frank Selee
    2. Ned Hanlon
    3. Patsy Tebeau
    Most Controversial Manager: Patsy Tebeau. Tebeau, given less talent than Hanlon, tried to outrowdy him. He had some success, keeping Cleveland over .500 from 1892 to 1898. In 1900 he managed McGraw and Wilbert Robinson in St. Louis. They hated him.
    Others of Note:
    Buck Ewing
    Arthur Irwin
    King Kelly
    Bill McGunnigle
    Monte Ward
    Stunts: Chris Von der Ahe, the eccentric owner of the St. Louis Cardinals, also managed them for one game in 1895, two games in 1896, and fourteen games in 1897.
    Typical Manager Was: The typical 1890s manager was finished by the time he was forty. More than 80% of the managers of the 1890s were in their thirties. There were a few guys in their late twenties, and a handful in their early forties, although most of them quit or were fired by that age. No one who managed in the 1890s was fifty years old, except for Harry Wright, who was still managing in the early part of the decade, and a few guys who filled in for part of a season.
    Percentage of Playing Managers: 51%
    Player Rebellions: The Chicago Cubs, by 1897, had had it up to here with Cap Anson. See “ The Marshalltown Enfant Terrible .”
    Evolutions in Strategy: Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, baseball’s rules changed so much that it would have been difficult for strategies to become strongly entrenched.
    The concept of strategy began to gain traction in the late 1890s. The sacrifice bunt became an accepted part of the game, and managers began occasionally to use pinch hitters, or even to bring in a new pitcher when the starting pitcher faded.
    Evolution in the Role of the Manager: Baseball in the 1890s was atavistic, meaning that it was evolving backward. After two decades of expanding markets, exciting races, and rapidly increasing incomes, baseball in the 1890s went through a bitter retrenchment. The pennant races were undermined by syndicate ownership arrangements which knifed one team in the back to feed another. Baseball on the field became a crude, violent game dominated as much by intimidation as by skillful play, granting that strategies and “scientific baseball” did continue to evolve through this phase.
    This atavism also infected baseball managers. Twenty years earlier, Harry Wright had chosen “baseball manager” as his profession, just as Tony LaRussa and Gene Mauch and Bobby Cox would do in the late twentieth century. The managers of the 1890s were, in the main, not professional managers. They were mature players, in their late thirties, who shepherded herds of ruffians from one hotel to the next. None of the prominent managers of the 1890s were still managing in 1910, when almost all of them would have been about fifty years old.

Hanlon and Selee
    Ned Hanlon and Frank Selee were exact contemporaries. Hanlon was born in 1857 and managed in the major leagues from 1889 to 1907. Selee was born in 1859 and managed in the major leagues from 1890 to 1905. Teams managed by one of them or the other won the National League pennant every year from 1891 to 1900—five pennants for Hanlon, five for Selee, granting that it