Will new Twins manager Molitor make a difference on the field?

Jack Morris played for Sparky Anderson, one of the greatest managers in baseball history, for 12 years of his 18-year pitching career. He watched Anderson, who won three World Series and whose 2,194 victories ranked third all-time when he retired in 1995, up close, and one day learned the secret to baseball success from the master himself.

"I'm smiling at the [memory]," Morris said, "because Sparky always said: You win because of the players."

Simple enough. But if that's the case, it's worth asking in the wake of the Twins' hiring of Paul Molitor on Wednesday: So what? Does the identity of the manager, does the change from Ron Gardenhire to the Hall of Fame hitter, make any difference?

"Quite a bit," General Manager Terry Ryan said after handing a team that has averaged 96 losses for the past four years over to the St. Paul native. "Quite a bit. Culture, direction, [being on the] same page, relationships — all that stuff, a manager has the ability to affect."

Certainly the man who is paying Molitor to turn the Twins around expects him to make a major impact, and not just in the won-lost record.

"I do expect to see a lot of change, and I would say it will be noticeable to the average fan. I would expect that with virtually any new manager," Twins owner Jim Pohlad said. "Paul was an exciting, smart, aggressive player, and I think he can bring a lot of those aspects to the way the teams plays on the field."

Of course, he'll have to do it with a group of players who, no shame in this, don't have the natural gifts, don't have the batting eye and explosive batting stroke that he had. Molitor is known as a patient teacher and an insightful observer, skills that Ryan believes will matter next season.

"Whether or not he can put a guy up there to pinch hit and have him come through. The preparation, putting a guy in position to succeed — those are decisions that a manager makes on a daily basis," Ryan said. "I believe he can make a huge dent in our success or failure" though those decisions.

There are plenty to make during a game. Managers differ in how they use their bench, in how frequently they bunt, in when they play the infield in and when they shift the defense and when they go to the bullpen. But how much do those tactics affect the won-lost record?

"Sabermetrics tells us that most dugout decisions barely have any effect on the outcome of a game," statistician and writer Neil Paine wrote for the website fivethirtyeight.com earlier this season. "Perhaps realizing this, modern managers appear to have begun limiting their in-game calls. Steal attempts, a longtime bane on stat-heads, are now lower than they've been since the early 1970s, and the bunt, a similar bugaboo, has never been used less than it is today."

Making a difference

That's true for the Twins as well; their 25 sacrifice bunts last season were the fewest of Gardenhire's tenure. Yet some managerial influences are on the rise; radical defensive shifts, which Molitor helped design for Gardenhire last year, have greatly increased in the past two years. And as pitch counts are more closely monitored and bullpen usage increases, surely the decisions of the manager become more decisive.

"A manager has more influence than you might think. Once you study it, it's clear. It's not just luck, there's something else going on here," said sabremetrician Chris Jaffe, who undertook that study five years ago for his book, "Evaluating Baseball's Managers: A History and Analysis of Performance in the Major Leagues." Players' performance means more, obviously, "but managers matter," Jaffe said. "Even as in-game strategy becomes more pro-forma, you still see traits that follow particular managers."

For instance, the Twins tended to strike out much less under former manager Tom Kelly than an average team during his tenure. Similarly, Gardenhire's success with developing effective relief pitchers, especially during a season like their 2006 division championship, remained relatively constant.

Jaffe used two different methods to evaluate managers throughout history, most notably comparing how players performed under certain managers against their expected production. He was able to demonstrate that managers affect the won-loss record of their teams. But by how much?

"That's the holy grail of this research. The closest I can say is this: A good manager can give you three to five more wins a season, and a bad one might lose three to five," Jaffe estimated, although acknowledging that the majority of managers make less impact. "Maybe that doesn't sound like much, but it's a lot. Not many players can affect a team that much, maybe only a couple per position every year. But even still, there's a feeling that part of it is accounted for by chemistry, which is really hard to quantify. It's a word we hate in sabremetrics."

Making a connection

But chemistry is a word that managers, and especially players, love. Ask any ballplayer what the most important role of a manager is, and rarely will one cite in-game tactics.

"You want a manager to set the tone, to make it clear what he expects and how we're going to go about our business. You want him to support the players and help us get better," said second baseman Brian Dozier. "Molly's great at that. He's a quiet guy, but when he steps between those lines, he's all business. He's got a great personality, he jokes around a lot more than you see, but he demands that you play the right way."

Even pitchers can gain a sense of direction from a manager who never stood on a mound. Kyle Gibson, for instance, said he rarely talked about the mechanics of his job with Gardenhire, but "Gardy was always clear about the approach he wanted us to take: Attack hitters. Don't be afraid to throw strikes. He set a tone we tried to follow," Gibson said.

For all the attention to the dugout, though, a manager's biggest impact probably comes in the clubhouse.

"You've got guys like Buck Showalter who are good at giving a team a kick, or Frank Robinson, who was able to get the most out of a player like Alfonso Soriano when others weren't," Jaffe said. "There are a lot of decisions to be made, but ultimately, the job is to be leaders of men."

That might be Molitor's strength, said a fellow manager who knows him well.

"He'll make a difference on the field, but today, managing in the 21st century, with multi-cultures, blending those young men together in the clubhouse, getting them all on the same page, trusting and respecting one another and being able to get on the same side of the rope and pull — that's a hard job today," said John Anderson, the University of Minnesota's longtime baseball coach. "He's got a special gift in being able to connect with people, build relationships, generate trust. I've heard it from guys he's worked with in the minor leagues — he has the ability to make that connection in a special way."