Junior Management: Top Skippers of The Expansion Era Franchises |

There has been discussion here at HHS about the fact that even today, half a century after the first wave of major league franchise expansion, generally speaking the fourteen teams that have been created from the 1960s on have a tougher time being consistently successful than the sixteen teams that date back to the beginning of the 20th century or before. It follows that serving as manager of one (or more) of the those fourteen expansion franchises can be a task with special challenges. Mike Scioscia has handled that task as well as anyone. Indeed, Scioscia needs just four more more wins as manger of the Angels to become the winningest expansion franchise manager ever. The numbers are after the jump.

Bobby Valentine managed expansion franchises over fifteen different seasons — eight with the Rangers and seven with he Mets. He never did finish in first place in any of those years. But he did win a total of 1,117 regular season games with those clubs. That’s more wins than any other manager to date has achieved as an expansion franchise manager. But with Bobby now wrestling with the difficulties of his first gig as skipper of an Original-16 franchise team, his record as the winningest expansion franchise manager seems ready to fall within the next few days. Mike Scioscia is now in his thirteenth season as the field general of the Angels and has skippered 1,114 regular season wins over that time. With just four more wins, Mike will pass by Valentine — although Scioscia has reached his win number over only 2,030 regular season games managed in total, compared to the 2,189 games that Valentine needed with the Rangers and Mets to reach 1,117 wins. Here’s a top 10 list for most wins as an expansion franchise manager.

Most Regular Season Wins As Manager of Post-1960 Created Franchises:
1. Bobby Valentine 1,117
2. Mike Scioscia 1,114
3. Lou Piniella 1,040
4. Dick Williams 1,023
5. Bruce Bochy 951
6. Cito Gaston 894
7. Gene Mauch 878
8. Phil Garner 840
9. Buck Rodgers 784
10. Felipe Alou 691

Although there are over 9,000 wins in the above Top-10 list, they’ve produced just three World Championships: one by Scioscia and two by Cito Gaston with Toronto.

If you go by winning percentage instead of raw win totals, the most successful expansion franchise manager is a guy who has been doing it — successfully managing an expansion franchise — again this year:

Best Regular Season Winning Percentage as Manager of Post-1960 Created Franchises (min. 500 games managed):
1. Davey Johnson .581
2. Whitey Herzog .574
3. Larry Dierker .556
4. Mike Scioscia .549
5. Bobby Cox .548

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brp

11 years ago

Scioscia is a great manager, but it does make sense that the Angels would be the “easiest” team to do this with given their market size and location. Still it’s surprising how low that 10th-place figure is… only 8 years, really.

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birtelcom

Reply to brp

brp: Yes, Scioscia has had advantages over other expansion franchise managers in having a large market and a team that can maintain a high payroll. But compare the 13 years of Mike’s tenure (1,114-916, .549 winning percentage) to the 13 years of Angels baseball immeidately preceding Mike joining as manager (979-1062, .480). The Angels have been a big market, well-financed team competitive in the free agent market for many years, but it’s only since Scioscia came on board that they have consistently escaped the mediocrity that is the fate of many expansion franchises in most seasons.

MikeD

I’m not convinced that Scioscia is a great manager. He’s had good teams, but many of them have underperformed from my perspective. He’s also overly loyal to veteran players, which is why Jerry DiPoto had to outright cut Bobby Abreu since Scioscia seemed to actually want to play him for some reason. If I was DiPoto, I’d be aching to replace Scioscia with my own hand-picked manager. Change sometimes is good.

Dr. Doom

First of all, the winning percentage for Davey Johnson should be .581, not .588 – the .588 reflects only his time with the Mets, and doesn’t include the Nats. Additionally, he’ll be knocking Felipe Alou off the wins list in the next two weeks (he needs seven wins). Does anyone remember in Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame? (or The Politics of Glory, if that’s the title under which you read it) that Bill James laid out a method by which one could (sort of) display pitcher wins and winning percentage on a one-dimensional scale? The formula was Wins… Read more »

Lawrence Azrin

Reply to Dr. Doom

I think that you’re referring to the Fibonacci sequence, named after Leonardo Fibonacci. The method James uses rewards pitchers with fewer wins, but higher W/L%’s. Very clever of you to apply it to managers.

Using this, Sandy Koufax is dragged up to the same level as Gaylord Perry and Phil Neikro, even though he has far fewer career wins.

I guess this at least backs up my belief that Bobby V is a good manager… not sure Boston would agree with me but their outfield most of this season would probably pass for that of a AAA team.

Cody Ross has an OPS+ of 131 in 230 PA, and Daniel Nava has an OPS+ of 118 in 207 PA. That sounds a lot better than a AAA team (even if Nava did come up from AAA on May 10th).

I do understand what you’re saying, about the amazing turnover in the Red Sox OF this year because of all the injuries.

I always thought Bobby V was a good manager, but I can’t really rate him on what’s going on in Boston this year. From afar, it appears he made some missteps early on, such as his comments about Kevin Youkilis. Then again, maybe it wasn’t a misstep at all and he was brought in to rip apart what had become a cliquish, dysfunctional club house. More so than Valentine’s comments (I do believe they were calculated), I found it more interesting that Pedroia then felt comfortable attacking his manager’s actions in the media, which I saw as confirmation there was… Read more »

BTW Looking at the overall list of expansion-team managers, I believe the guy listed at #3, Davey Johnson, is the best.

Thanks for the correction — good catch: I misread my spreadsheet. I’ve fixed it in the text.

Larry

I’m sure I am overlooking several such managers, but it doesn’t seem that many star pitchers become managers and even fewer did as well as Larry Dierker

The Bill James metric used above for pitchers then applied to managers might show that Dierker has one of the highest combined scores in history