Monumental Differences Between Today's MLB Managers and Those of Yesteryear

Being a manager in Major League Baseball is, for the most part, a thankless job. These are a collection of people who will get very little credit when their teams win and all of the blame when they lose.

Yet the job, like the game itself, has changed so much over the years that it isn't as simple as saying that you are good when you win and bad when you lose. It doesn't always seem like things are very different in baseball now. After all, how do you change basic actions like pitching the ball, hitting the ball, and catching the ball?

That is where the intricacies of the manager go largely unnoticed, overlooked or outright dismissed in favor of giving praise to the players. And no one is going to argue that you need talent to win, but the right—or wrong—manager can be a difference-maker.

Here are the ways in which managers have been forced to adjust with the game as it has evolved over the years. 

Bullpen Help

Arguably the biggest shift in the game from the 1950s and 1960s to today is the advent of the bullpen and relief pitching. 

If you want to go back a long, long way, like to 1876, there weren't even pitching rotations being used in professional baseball. George Bradley of the St. Louis Brown Stockings started all 64 games that season and is credited with throwing the first no-hitter in National League history. 

The game was completely different at that time, with the mound being just 50 feet from home plate and walks requiring nine balls. 

But even going back just 50-60 years, the management of starting pitchers has changed. In 1963, Juan Marichal led all of baseball in innings pitched with 321.1 for the San Francisco Giants. He started 40 games and had 18 complete games with 25 wins. 

Take a look at how the leaders in innings pitched, in 20-year increments, have changed since Marichal: 

To provide an even more current example, Detroit's Justin Verlander led the league in innings pitched last season with 238.1. 

Managers today are tasked with trying to come up with the correct matchups late in games with relievers—be it from a left-handed specialist against the opposing team's big lefty slugger or what situation to use the closer. 

Rany Jazayerli of Baseball Prospectus did a decade-by-decade study of pitching in baseball back in 2004 where he looked at bullpen management and how many relievers were used per game. 

What Jazayerli found was that the percentage of complete games had dropped from 83.8 percent from 1893 to 1899 all the way down to 4.4 percent from 2000 to '03. (For the record, there were 128 complete games in 2012, or 2.6 percent.)

Nearly 34 percent of all innings pitched last season (approximately 14,730 of 43,350) came from the bullpen. If you factor that total into a game, that means starters are going nearly six innings and leaving three to the bullpen. 

On top of figuring which reliever to use, the manager also has to factor in how many consecutive days a pitcher has thrown. Teams have to micromanage their players, so if you throw more than three consecutive days, odds are good you won't pitch the next game. 

Pitch counts and the amount of work a pitcher does in an inning factor into every decision that a manager has to make when debating what to do on the mound.

The days are long gone when a manager could just throw a starter out there and let him go with no questions asked. I do think that the evolution of pitching, specifically the kinds of pitches that get thrown and torque on the shoulder/elbow, also make it so you have to pay closer attention to what a starter is doing. 

The Designated Hitter Strategy

Baseball purists—or as I like to call them, people who hate good baseball by letting teams give away outs with the pitcher batting—have argued against the designated hitter since it was implemented by the American League in 1973. 

In addition to changing the way that general managers were able to put together a team—with a spot available for someone whose defensive limitations were so vast it didn't justify the offense—lengthening lineups gave managers more options. 

However, if you really stop to think about it, there really isn't any more strategy used in the National League than the American League. NL managers know when they have to pinch hit for their starter based on the situation in the game. 

The AL manager takes a little more thought when to pull a starting pitcher because you don't have to deal with him hitting, so you are able to judge based on how the starter is throwing. 

But in the past, even National League managers didn't concern themselves as much with when to pull a starter. Going back to Jazayerli's piece, starters were still completing games at a 25.3 percent rate in the 1970s and 15.6 percent in the 1980s. 

The way that it helped change offense has undoubtedly helped lead to the expanded role that relievers play. 

Prior to the adoption of the DH, and even a few years after, AL teams were averaging roughly the same number of runs as an NL team. In 1974, AL clubs scored 4.10 runs per game; NL teams averaged 4.15. 

Today, AL teams average 4.37 runs per game compared to 4.03 in the NL. That forces AL managers to adopt a different strategy to score more runs while preventing the other team from lighting up the scoreboard. 

On the flip side, NL managers have a little more leeway to work with pitchers because offenses aren't as potent and need to get creative with their lineups to ensure they are scoring enough to win games. 

Spin City

The next two items we want to discuss aren't really quantifiable through numbers or science, which can be a bit intimidating when you can't put real facts and figures behind them. But that doesn't make them any less important to what a manager's job is. 

First, with today's media, there is more pressure on a manager to explain and analyze every minute detail of the game. They have to answer questions from local reporters, national writers, MLB.com writers and special media attendees who are looking for a story. 

Some markets are naturally going to have more media than others. New York is always going to attract a huge crowd of reporters because it is the biggest market in the country. 

It has become an integral part of the managerial position to talk to the media and make sure they are doing it in a fair way that allows them to do their job while also keeping things in house. 

That may sound easy, but you have to be careful not to provide some quote that can be spun into something negative being said about a player or the team as a whole because that will also lead to a series of questions, tweets, and Facebook and blog posts that will criticize what you say. 

Even though there has been a media presence around the game for as long as there have been reporters, today's media is completely different from what it used to be because information is collected and passed in such a rapid-fire way. 

Managers have to be cognizant of so much happening around them as much as they have to worry about winning or losing games. 

The Extraneous Activities of Athletes

On top of the media distractions, athletes today have a lot more going on outside of the sport they play. Peyton Manning is in virtually every commercial you see on television right now. 

Baseball players are no different. They have an entourage that is going to be around them on a near-constant basis, and they have to talk to the media and monitor what they are saying (or not, if they want to get some attention). 

Athletes are also trying to do what they can to get endorsement deals, meaning that they want to be recognized for what they do. I am not trying to belittle athletes, because they should take advantage of any opportunity to get money and cash in on fame whenever they can. 

But with everything being televised on ESPN or MLB Network or the Internet, athletes get placed under such a fine microscope that they can get themselves in trouble. 

Managing all these personalities today is vastly different from it was in the past. There was a time when baseball players had to work second jobs in the offseason to get by. 

Now, if an athlete isn't focused on his sport 24/7, 365, fans and the media are going to question his passion and dedication to the craft. How can you be focused on winning a championship if you are having dinner with your wife?!

Managers seemingly have to get closer to their players now than ever before. It is important to make sure that they have their head on straight, while at the same time making sure they don't get too up or down about anything on the field. 

The Burden of Information

The addition of deeper analysis to baseball has been fascinating and compelling, and has made the sport better because it only serves to broaden our understanding of this game that we love so much. 

But just imagine that you are sitting in the manager's chair for a game, with a Joe Girardi-esque binder of stats, splits, situational information, a hitter's average against a fastball in a 1-2 count, etc. 

So many numbers can actually drown a manager, because the feeling of playing to the situation is gone. If you use the sacrifice bunt in the wrong situation, questions will loom. If you don't pinch hit in an obvious situation, Twitter will blow up. 

No one is going to deny that information is good, but managers get so bogged down with it that there may not be any sense of pride because it was all there right from the beginning. 

In the past, managers just had to set their lineup and make decisions as the game went on without having to scour a big notebook of numbers. That could have made for a lot of bad managing, but there had to be a sense of relief at not having to be questioned by every sabermetrician in the world once the game was over for sacrificing an out to put runners in scoring position. (For the record, I hate bunting.)

In the End...

The duties and responsibilities for a manager, like any job, change over time. There are things you can get away with now that you wouldn't have been able to in the past, and vice versa. 

Given the amount of pressure on every single game, especially thanks to social media conversations and analysis, being a manager in 2013 can be a draining task. Those who aren't strong can feel drowned by it, but there are those who have adapted to what the job is today and found great success. 

If you want to talk baseball, feel free to hit me up on Twitter with questions or comments. 

Follow @adamwells1985