Research Papers
Can a Stadium Full of Monkeys Playing Strat-o-Matic Outmanage Earl Weaver? An empirical Bayesian Estimator of Manager Value
Authors:
Dan M. Kahan
Abstract:
The impact of managers on team records is one of the final holdouts to the influence of the sports analytics revolution on professional baseball. This paper applies simulation and Bayesian methods to a sample of over 500 managers spanning the history of AL/NL seasons since 1900. It develops a manager estimator equivalent to player WAR and finds that a substantial fraction of managers (including current and recently active ones) have over their careers influenced team “winning percentages” ≥ ± 0.012, the equivalent of ± 2 wins per 162 games.