Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY ROB TRINGALI / GETTY
Farhan Zaidi, a thirty-nine-year-old who was born in Canada to Pakistani parents and grew up mostly in the Philippines, holds a Ph.D. in behavioral economics from the University of California at Berkeley. While he was working on that degree, he read Michael Lewis’s book “Moneyball,” published in 2003, about the Oakland A’s and their maverick general manager, Billy Beane, and his use of statistical analysis. Zaidi decided to apply for a job with the franchise. He eventually became an assistant to Beane, who, in 2011, told me he was proud that a baseball team could attract that kind of brain power. Zaidi “could just as easily be creating his own startup or working for Google or working for Apple,” Beane said then. “Instead, he chooses to work here.” In 2014, Zaidi was hired away by the Los Angeles Dodgers—a franchise, like the A’s, known for its commitment to sophisticated analytics—who made him their G.M.
But when, last November, Zaidi and the Dodgers had to hire a new head coach, they made a surprising choice: the former player Dave Roberts, who had never held such a position before. The decision was made under considerable pressure: the Dodgers have the highest payroll in baseball, and stack up on paper as a leading World Series contender, boasting otherworldly ace Clayton Kershaw and a potent lineup. That was also the case last season, when they came unravelled in the playoffs against a young, overachieving Mets team. In one stunning sequence during that series, the outfielder Andre Ethier openly challenged Don Mattingly, then the manager, in the dugout, drawing amazed stares from teammates. “Just shut up and manage, Donnie,” Ethier appeared to have shouted, judging from the (many) replays. Ethier and Mattingly downplayed the incident in the press. A week later, Mattingly was out as manager, with one year remaining on his contract. (Both Mattingly and the team described the decision as mutual.)
Roberts’s name had not come up much in sports-page speculation about who might fill the position. Many observers figured the team would opt to hire its farm director, numbers-savvy Gabe Kapler, once Roberts’s teammate on the Boston Red Sox. (Roberts is still probably most famous for stealing a base in Game 4 of the 2004 American League Championship Series against the New York Yankees, when the Red Sox were down three games to none, thus helping to spark an unprecedented comeback that led to Boston’s first World Series title in eighty-six years.) The choice to hire Roberts seemed to represent a trend back toward old-style player-oriented field managers. And it may. But it also reflects the evolution of analytical ideas about the precise nature of the job—an evolution that, to be fair, does involve some rather old-school thinking.
The battle lines of twenty years ago, between baseball traditionalists and number-crunching analysts, have, by this point, shifted nearly beyond recognition. Sandy Alderson’s famous assertion in “Moneyball” that field managers are mere “middle managers” was widely influential; it was also, Alderson told me recently, misinterpreted. “Middle managers are important,” he said. His point then was not that a field manager’s authority and autonomy should be completely knocked out from under him, he explained, but that an organization should hold a consistent philosophy that does not change every time it hires a new manager. The field manager’s role, he added, remains pivotal in an era of exploding data; today, high-resolution video can track ball rotation and velocity off the bat and confirm old baseball wisdom as quantifiable fact. The contemporary manager has to process reams of information and back up decisions with an informed thought process he can explain both to his players and his bosses. That last part—explanation—is key: above all, a manager needs to be able to communicate ideas to the men on the field. (Whatever happened between Mattingly and Ethier, it certainly looked like a breakdown in communication.)
In interviews for the managerial job, Roberts impressed Zaidi and the rest of the Dodgers brain trust with his replies to their requests for detailed explanations of how he’d handle given game situations. He demonstrated, everyone said, an agile mind. But I was also told that it was his warmth and “energy” that landed him the job. “He has incredible empathy for guys,” Zaidi said. “If something is a tough situation, he won’t have trouble saying that’s tough, as opposed to a kind of robotic attempt to always put a positive spin on things, which guys don’t like. I think that empathy makes the difference.” The Dodgers’ third baseman, Justin Turner, a former Met, told me that when Roberts was a first-base coach with the San Diego Padres, he would ask him questions that went well beyond the perfunctory. “He’s just a guy who genuinely cares about you, and not just as a baseball player,” Turner said. “He cares about you as a person.” For Zaidi, this quality is clearly paramount. “Good baseball strategy is good baseball strategy,” he said. “I think somebody can bring a lot more positive impact by getting players wanting to play for him and wanting to play for the team, and keeping guys . . . on the same page.”
“I love serving people,” Roberts told me on a typically bright morning at the Dodgers’ palm-tree-lined spring-training complex, in Glendale, Arizona. “I’m an intrinsically positive person.” He has a sunny notion of what makes for good baseball, too. If you help your players become “better men,” he said, “in turn they’ll become better baseball players.” This seems ambitious, but Roberts’s explanation of the idea was straightforward. “I think that a lot of times in baseball there is a thought that if everybody plays individually well then collectively we’ll have success,” he said. “But for me it’s more a thinking the team-first mind-set, mentality, and all the other individual statistics and things will take care of themselves.” He meant things like giving up an at-bat to move a runner over, or taking a walk when that’s the right move, but also knowing how to bunt and go the other way. It was about winning baseball games, but he conveyed it as almost a moral imperative. “It’s a philosophy that he’s been talking about since day one, and he’s getting everyone to buy into it,” Turner said. “So far, everyone is really intrigued.”
