I’m not too sure how start this one off. I guess I’ll start this way.
Almost exactly a month ago, I used a daily question to have people weigh in on who they thought the next manager would be. I asked for confidence in the guesses, too, to enact my (fever) dream of having a commentariat Big Board for bragging rights.
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Though that post had 200+ comments, there were only 54 actual guesses (including some with no confidence level to which I assigned a midpoint value); some people made multiple guesses and I only took the first because otherwise it just became sort of chaotic, but don’t worry, no one was really hurt and many people were helped by all of these assumptions.
If you asked me, while comments on that post were live, who got the most guesses, I would not have guessed Walt Weiss. In fact, I entered the data in my sheet for Big Board tracking purposes, meaning I typed “Weiss” over a dozen times, and immediately after, I still wouldn’t have been able to tell you that Weiss was a “popular” choice. I have a mental block about Walt Weiss, is what I’m saying. And yet, not only was Weiss a “popular” choice, but he was the mode option (with an average-y average confidence of right around 3 on a 5-point scale), barely beating out David Ross. All in all, there were 18 different managerial names guessed, and six of those had multiple people selecting them — but of the 54, 18 were for Weiss and 16 were for Ross.
As a result, the current leaders on the Big Board are Catman64 and LoyalFan7, who slammed a full “5” of confidence on the Weiss pick, and were rewarded for their efforts. (By comparison, only one person expressed a “5” in confidence for Ross, and was summarily penalized.) A number of other people wrote something like, “I hope I’m wrong, but Weiss” or “I’ll be sad if it happens, but Weiss.” No one really said, “Boy, I really hope it’s Walt Weiss.” So it goes.
But, that’s not really the topic of this post. I just thought it was interesting and relevant. The thing to weigh on, well, it’s in the title. Let’s do another five-point scale, no point in hand-wringing gradations. 5 is the best hire ever, 1 is the worst hire ever, 3 is not really caring, you get the idea.
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I’m at a 2. It’s not literally the clown shoes equivalent of a manager, but it’s a problem. Trying to articulate why, I think, would be way too long for me to get into a daily question post when it’s already 8:54 am and it needs to go up at 9:00. But, fundamentally, it comes down to what Alex Anthopoulos loves to talk about: that one of his north stars is “How can we get better?”
Look, maybe Walt Weiss has learned new tricks, or he’s basically agreed to be a Front Office puppet in exchange for accepting this position, even if implementing a more aggressive tactical regime means he bears the brunt of the opprobrium from the players. If so, then sure, maybe the Braves will “get better,” at least tactically. But how likely do you think either of those things is? Would you say it’s more likely than the status quo of, “We just have generic old baseball guys do managerial functions because players are generally chill with that idea, and we are all about the chill here at the Atlanta Braves National League Baseball Club?” I can’t answer that for you, but if you think the status quo going forward is far more likely than… the Braves didn’t get better. They got… the same.
Did they incur an actual cost in staying the same? Nah. The season is far more likely to hinge on roster strength (and health, as it impacts active roster strength) than on managerial decisions. But there was an opportunity cost to having a decision and choosing the status quo in some alternative that wasn’t the status quo. Namely, I think the Braves missed an opportunity to find someone who: A) believed in better tactics enough to be more convincing to players about the need to implement them, and also, relatedly, B) had good enough soft skills to be able to guide the roster into those better tactics without ruining the chill vibe that is ostensibly so important to the organization. Again, maybe Weiss is that guy. But it seems unlikely.
I’d guess that 90 percent of the time, this opportunity cost doesn’t matter. But the Braves aren’t past the hump on the win curve, they badly need marginal wins. If most of that remaining 10 percent breaks against the Braves because they don’t want to implement better tactics because the players aren’t down with OPP (optimal playing process, what were you thinking?), then this move just kinda sucks. (Oh crap I missed the 9:00 am post time. Oh well.) So, yeah, in my estimation this just isn’t “getting better.”
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Going a bit beyond this, just one more point, and then I’ll let you go to go complain in the comments. I have two kids. Neither has much interest in watching baseball. I have various friends, the same applies to most of them. But both are at least somewhat interested, or at least humoring me, in discussing baseball here and there. And whenever the topic gets off “Hey Shohei Ohtani is super-good” into something more specific, I can pinpoint the moment their eyes glaze over: it’s when there’s the implication, any implication, that every team isn’t doing its utmost to win every game. The idea of a rebuild in a competitive game is incomprehensible to the outside observers I’ve interacted with. The idea that there’s a pretty strong evidentiary record about improved marginal outcomes from doing X, while teams and coaches and players insist on doing Y, is off-putting. The fundamental compact of a spectator sport, at least in my mind, is that you watch because you want to see everyone involved do whatever they can do to win. Giving up any sliver of that for other considerations, well, that seems to violate that compact. So when you go with Walt Weiss, I’m not sure any part of that is really within the compact. Maybe it is, I guess we’ll have to see.