Best players to manage in the major leagues
 

I read that Albert Pujols is a top candidate to manage the Angels. If he gets the job, he would be the best former player to ever manage at the big league level. Second best is Frank Robinson. Not sure who would be 3, 4 and 5. Thoughts?

Ted Williams - Not very successful but pretty much four full seasons.
Edit: I was gonna go through all the 20s and 30s player managers but thankfully you mentioned “former” player,

Yogi Berra, Pete Rose, Joe Torre, Bill Terry, Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Nap Lajoie, Christy Mathewson, Mel Ott, George Sisler, Tris Speaker, Honus Wagner, Cy Young. There tends to be recency bias in baseball.

Walter Johnson

Schoendienst, Hodges, and Bob Lemon were all HOF players.

John McGraw

A tentative list of best former players to manage,
#1 Ted Williams
#2 Walter Johnson
#3 Albert Pujols ... IF ...
#4 Frank Robinson
#5 Yogi Berra
#5A Pete Rose if no Pujols

Had to look it up but Rogers Hornsby came back and managed after his playing days in 1952 and 1953

To be honest, it didn't even occur to me to think about the pre-integration players, much less the pre-war players. Recency bias indeed.

Lou Boudreau

Cap Anson, King Kelly

1 Honus Wagner
2 Ty Cobb
3 Ted Williams
4 Rogers Hornsby
5 Walter Johnson
.
.
.
Albert Pujols

Eddie Collins, who I'd call the overall #1 2B all time, managed for a couple years.

Otherwise the absolute best few have been named already, but Al Spalding managed for a couple years. His career was brief but he led the league in Wins in every season he pitched more than 11 innings, and posted a 132 ERA+ in an era with low ERA's where it was difficult to beat the league by a wide margin. Spalding was a fantastic pitcher whose on-field performance has been almost entirely forgotten.

3 Finger Brown managed briefly. Mickey Cochrane did, so did Roger Connor. Hugh Duffy, Kid Nichols, Ed Walsh. A lot of the best players just got made managers or filled in after a manager was fired and the team didn't really have one picked out to replace them during the first half century or so of the majors.

Frank Chance and Fred Clarke are probably pretty high up the list if one balanced and awarded both player performance and being an actually good manager. Many of the best players who managed were not very good at it. John Mcgraw might be #1 by this method.

Well, comparing players across eras is like comparing religions. But I'll take Albert Pujols over all those guys. 3 MVPs, 700 HRs, batting title. Low strikeout rate. 2 rings. And played in an era when baseball was played by properly trained professional athletes from all racial backgrounds and from all over the world.

My top 5, including the guys that no one's father has seen play:

Pujols (if he gets the job)
Ty Cobb
Ted Williams
Frank Robinson
Walter Johnson

You must have missed his 10 seasons in Anaheim when he hit .256/.311/.447 OPS+ 106 and collected 240 million dollars to give the Angels 12.5 WAR. I preferred the eras when players played to win instead of to get a huge contract and then coast for the rest of their career.

Cobb lost three World Series before he was 23 years old and never played in another one. Ted played in one World Series and hit 200.

Not sure they were winning anything either.

It tells you how amazing Pujols' 12 years at STL were when you consider that when he was with the Angels he was only 6 percent above league average (as RATS60 points out above).

(His stats over 12 years in STL: 88.7 WAR, .326/.417/.614, OPS+169)

Amazing players rarely make great Managers.

There are a lot of theories behind it but it does appear to be a thing.

In a very extreme example…Rogers Hornsby was so reviled by his players they actually presented Bill Veeck a 24 inch trophy when he finally fired him as their Manager in 1952.

I wouldn't have high expectations for Pujols as a manager, but the Angels are such a dumpster fire of a franchise that I can't fault them for wanting to try it.

It's an odd argument in support of a player to say, "Look how great he was over part of his career, to offset how average he was over the rest of it."

Wagner won 8 batting titles instead of just one, won a World Series, led in stolen bases numerous times, and was the best of his time, by far, at a far more difficult position than Pujols ever played. And Wagner would've had more home runs, obviously, had the ball in his day not been made of mush. And his lifetime batting average tops even Pujols' peak years at St. Louis.

Pujols is probably the best example of how there can be a conflict between metrics and counting stats. Consider 2016 -- 31 HR, 119 RBI, WAR 1.5 Better yet, 2017 -- 23 HR, 101 RBI, WAR..... wait for it..... NEGATIVE 2.0.

I think with 700 HR and very little steroid noise Pujols' legacy will be very favorable despite his AL years being crummy by the metrics.

Agree. But not above Wagner, Cobb, Walter, etc.

Agree, although we of a certain generation need to be mindful of our nostalgia bias.

I love debates where there can be no winner! So here it goes!

What was the average four seamer speed in the 1920s? Would it be fast enough for a Division 3 starting pitcher today? Looking at the 100 yard and 100 meter dash records from that time, I can say with almost absolute certainty that no one playing baseball in the 1920s was objectively fast. Sure, Hornsby gets credit for being the equivalent of the prematurely big and fast kid in fourth grade PE class.

It would be hard to convince me that Hornsby competed against the same type of athleticism and professionalism that Pujols did. Even more so since baseball was neither integrated nor global at the time. It's just a different caliber of athlete playing a totally different game. And Pujols was dominant against that level of competition for 12 years and was still above average (using less forgiving modern metrics -- thanks Peter) for his last 10.

The best comp for Pujols' career is that of Hank Aaron. And Pujols has two more MVPs and one more World Series ring than Aaron does. And, at least for me, Hank Aaron is miles ahead of anyone -- anyone -- who played in the 1920s.

That's the argument that says you can dismiss Jim Thorpe and all other athletes of the 20th century, because Olympic records show clearly that athletes of the past 25 years are stronger, faster, etc. Thorpe wouldn't even qualify for the USA track team today.

And 50 years from now we can likewise dismiss Pujols and his peers for the same reason.

Andrew DeGrasse was the Bronze Medalist at the 2016 Olympics. In 2017 he ran the 100 meters under the same conditions as Jesse Owens did, 30's era spikes, dirt track, no starting blocks. DeGrasse ran 11.0, .8 slower than Owens world record. His time wouldn't even have qualified him for the finals of the 1936 Olympics. Yes the players were fast. Humans haven't evolved in the last 100 years. Technology, training, diet, etc. yes, but not physical bodies.

Walter Johnson threw mid to high nineties with terrible mechanics in the 1910s-1920s. Give him modern training and he is over 100 easy. Great athletes would be great in any generation.

There is no conflict. Pujols was the Angels DH those two years. His job was only to hit and he wasn't very good at it. In 2016 he had an OPS+ of 116. In 2017 he had an OPS+ of 80 that is why he had a negative WAR. If the Angels didn't owe him 140 million dollars, they would have released him and he would have been out of baseball.

Mark hit on the point I was making, Pujols was a good player, but not in the class of Wagner, Cobb, Johnson or Williams. Wagner had an 8.1 WAR season at age 38. Williams had a 9.7 WAR season at age 38. Cobb hit .378 with an OPS+ of 171 at age 38. Johnson won a pitching triple crown at age 36.

At age 37 Pujols was a full time DH with an OPS+ of 80 and WAR of minus 2. He would have OPS+ seasons of 91, 92, 79 and 66 before the Angels released in the final year of his contract. The next season when Pujols need to perform to get at bats, he was suddenly an OPS+ 153 hitter after coasting for a decade in Anaheim collecting 240 million dollars from the Angels.

I think you've got it just about right.

:)

I would agree that the metrics tell the real story but yes there's a conflict, because if you just look at the counting stats you might think he had a couple of pretty good seasons. I think we're saying the same thing just semantics. As we've discussed many times, the RBI totals are inflated because he was hitting behind a man with a truly scary on base percentage, Mike Trout.

All that said though, I think his legacy will be strong.

Frank Howard……Don’t care, he is my favorite player.

Butch

Is this the same Frank Howard that destroyed Mookie Wilson's shoulder by having the Mets practice throws with balls that had been waterlogged after a rainstorm? ;)