Firing the coach feels good, but does it help?

After the 2014 baseball season Matt Williams was the toast of baseball.  He led the Washington Nationals to a 96 win season in his first year as manager, winning the Manager of the Year award in the process.  12 months later Matt Williams was an obvious incompetent who single-handedly blew the National’s chance to win a World Series. So he was fired.

That’ll teach him.

Did Matt Williams deserve to be fired?  Probably not, in any rational universe.  The Nationals finished with a winning record, suffered a few significant injuries, and had players underperform for reasons that had nothing to do with Matt Williams’ ability to move Xs and Os.  After only two years one cannot claim he wore out his welcome or lost the clubhouse after years of ineffectiveness.  Logic had nothing to do with his firing.

But sometimes logic takes a backseat to perception.  More than any other baseball position, expectations determine how managers are perceived.  The manager with the best record rarely wins Manager of the Year; it is usually the manager of the team that exceeded expectations.  After all, good teams usually have good players, so anyone could manage the, let’s say 1999 Yankees, to a pennant.  But Ted Williams manages the pathetic Washington Senators to 86 wins (23 games behind the division winning Orioles) and he wins the Manager of the Year award instead of Earl Weaver.

The Nationals were expected to win it all, and featured the incredible year Bryce Harper had, a year so brilliant he is almost assured of winning the MVP award despite playing for a team that didn’t win anything.  They had a pitcher throw two no hitters and just missed a third.  They scored the third most runs in the National League.

They also had a staff ace with a delicate elbow that was always the source of anxiety.  Maybe because of the difficulty of dealing with Stephen Strasburg Williams became rigid in his approach to pitching.  When his set up man blew a 4 run lead in the eighth inning and Williams was asked why he hadn’t brought in his closer, he basically said that in the eighth inning he used his eighth inning man and he only used his closer in the ninth, as if losing the game in the eighth was better than putting his closer in for four outs instead of three.

The team’s season was exemplified by the late season incident in the game after they were eliminated from the playoffs, when closer Jonathan Papelbon physically assaulted Bryce Harper for not showing enough effort.  Of course Papelbon played for 23 innings in 22 games and Harper had played in 153 games, so Papelbon questioning Harper’s work ethic is ludicrous.  But then Williams doubled down on stupid by sending Papelbon out to the mound to pitch in the ninth, instead of immediately sending his to the showers.  When asked why he sent him back out, Williams said he hadn’t noticed his best player being grabbed by the throat by a journeyman reliever, and no one told him about it.  Maybe Williams had been busy pondering where to send his resume, because at that point everyone knew he was a goner at the end of the season.

The old saying goes that teams fire managers because you can’t fire the entire team.  That is probably the case in Miami, where the coach was fired after starting the season 1-3.  Lots of teams have started seasons 1-3, but for some reason Miami decided they were Super Bowl bound and Joe Philbin was in the way.  The new coach says he’ll turn the team around by being tougher, which sounds great for a team just coming off Bully-gate.

The team probably most in need of a coaching change is the 1-3 49ers.  The owner brought in a new coach, first timer Jim Tomsula, and virtually promised a championship in the first year by comparing Tomsula to the NBA’s Steve Kerr.  The owner said he wanted to change the culture of the team.

Mission accomplished; under previous coach Jim Harbaugh the Niners were winners who went to three consecutive NFC Championship games and a Super Bowl, while under Tomsula they are 1-3.  Losing is a different culture than winning.

Of course the problem in San Francisco isn’t the coach; it’s the owner who decided Jim Harbaugh was incompetent and Jim Tomsula was better than Lombardi.  But you can’t fire the owner.