I just stumbled across this interesting Wall Street Journal piece via BBTF…

All told, this article is a lot more about asking the question and combing through some information than it’s about giving a decisive answer; of course, we don’t have anything approaching a decisive answer at this early stage in understanding managerial impact.

I like the quote that ends the article:

“I think managers are a bit overrated in terms of the impact that they have on their players,” says J.C. Bradbury, an economist and associate professor at Kennesaw State University and author of “The Baseball Economist.” To make a team better, he says, “get better players.”

It’s obviously true that the Number One Way to improve a baseball team is to get better players. The problem–and this is especially acute in the Dodgers’ case–is that a lot of the people that run major league baseball teams don’t really understand what makes baseball players good. I disagree with Bradbury on his first point; I don’t think managers are overrated in terms of impact on players. I think managers have a great deal of impact on their players, just not in the ways most people think.

Managers do not have nearly as much direct influence on the outcome of baseball games as is generally believed; I think that’s Bradbury’s point, and I agree with that. n a purely on-field-performance basis, no manager is worth the kind of money Torre’s getting paid, because managers just don’t have a lot to do with that, try as they might (unless they’re Clint Hurdle and determined to kill rallies with an endless string of sacrifice bunts).

How much a manager like Joe Torre is worth depends on how much you think positive press relations are worth, and how much of a positive impact you think a skilled manager can have in the clubhouse (and, by extension, how important clubhouse relationships are to on-field performance.)

Based on that, I’m inclined to think that, to the Dodgers, Torre is worth the money. The Dodgers’ problem is that their general manager has absolutely no idea how baseball games are won and lost, in fact has exactly the wrong idea about it and forcefully believes the Wrong Thing.