D I S PAT C H
likewise taken teams in shambles and rebuilt
Is This Man Too
Smart for Baseball?
buck showalter has an obsessive mind for the game.
that’s been both his greatest strength — and his undoing.
by paul solotaroff
I
f you took an informal sample
of baseball’s chattering class, the
advance scouts and beat guys and
assistant GMs, they’d tell you there
are maybe a half-dozen managers now who
actually make a difference in games won.
The names you keep hearing? Joe Mad-
don, Terry Francona, Mike Scioscia, Bruce
Bochy, and, depending on who’s talking,
Ron Gardenhire.
Then there are two — perhaps the best
of the bunch, based on their preparation,
pho to graph b y ALESSAN D RA PETL IN
The Orioles went on a
late-season tear after
Buck took over last year.
smarts, and laser-guided eye for young talent
— who have had a hellish time getting hired.
One is Bobby Valentine, who by general ac-
clamation is as brilliant as he is noxious, and
who watches each winter as soft-skulled re-
treads gobble up the jobs he covets. The other
is Buck Showalter, the two-time Manager of
the Year (Yankees in ’94, Rangers in ’04) who
took over the Baltimore Orioles last August
and, during the last two months of the season,
turned the worst team in the majors into the
AL East’s best. In New York and Texas, he’d
MEN’S JOURNAL 46 APRIL 2011
them on the fly, making them models of mar-
ket efficiency. In Arizona, he presided over
the birth of a franchise, designing each detail
of the organization, from the color of its jer-
seys to its clubhouse layout, and then guided
the Diamondbacks, in their second year of
life, to 100 wins and a title in the NL West.
Both the Yankees and D’Backs went on to
win the World Series within five years of his
arrival; the Rangers took seven but were
owned by Tom Hicks, a meddlesome fool.
You’d think that someone so effective
would inspire a little love and stable employ-
ment. But Showalter never made it to even
one of those Series, being axed by the D’Backs
and Rangers and allowed to leave by the Yanks
before he could finish the job. The stated rea-
sons for his departures varied, but the whispers
were the same at every stop: For all his savvy,
he wore people ragged with a slakeless thirst
for control. Players groused that he called each
pitch and changed signals three times a game.
Suits in the front office bitched that he tried
to undermine them or invade their turf. Fairly
or not, a reputation grew and attached itself
to him: He’d fix your team but drive players
and employees batshit.
And so it was that when Texas canned
him in ’06, he waited almost four years for
another shot — and a chance, maybe his last,
to clear the record. If history is any guide, he
will reconstruct the Orioles for a quantum
leap in 2012, if not this year. And then maybe
we’ll get an answer to a pointed question:
Can he change his spots in middle age and
see a job through to completion?
“I’ve had my heart broken so much,” said
Showalter when I passed through his winter
town of Plano, Texas, a couple of weeks prior
to spring training. “Every stop I’ve been to,
I’ve approached like it was my last. Invested
in it to the point where…”
We were sitting in a restaurant in an up-
scale mall, talking till they closed the place
down. On TV screens, over the course of two
decades, he’d come off as a clench-jawed field
commander, the dispassionate mover of men.
Across a table, however, he proved anything
but, speaking soulfully about the game he
still worshipped even after it kicked him in
the teeth three times. Built like the minor-
league catcher he once was, he seemed ageless
somehow at 54, though his hair was going
from blond to white without ever pausing at
gray. “My dad once warned me about caring
too much,” he said of his fervor for the sport.
“I think I’ve gotten better at that over the years,
but don’t try and hold me to it.”
If he’s any less obsessive and detail-driven,
though, I saw no sign of it. His cell phone
kept throbbing every 15 minutes, and he had
a stack of files needing attention at home
— mostly reports on minor-league free agents.
Somewhere in that pile was an uncut gem,
an aging prospect whose undervalued skills
will win the O’s several games this year. “One
of Buck’s strengths, maybe his best one, really,
is the ability to spot talent that people miss,”
says Don Mattingly, the manager of the Los
Angeles Dodgers, who played for Showalter’s
Yanks in the early ’90s. “He could tell, from
an instructional camp in Florida, which guys
had the traits and the demeanor.”
“I remember in 1990, he showed me the
stat line of a kid who was a marginal prospect
in low-A ball,” says New York Post columnist
Joel Sherman, who’s covered the Yankees for
22 years. “He pointed to K’s and walks and
said, ‘Forget the other numbers; that kid’s
going to be a star.’ ” The kid, of course, was
Mariano Rivera, whom Showalter twice kept
out of trades.
But when he stepped in last August to run
the dreadful O’s, he hadn’t the luxury of a
spring or off-season to hand-pick and polish
young finds. He was the team’s third manager
in less than five months and inheritor of the
dead-last staff in the American League. The
club had little speed, only occasional power,
and was built on the backs of promising kids
(Matt Wieters, Nick Markakis, Adam Jones)
who’d stumbled out of the blocks and lost their
way. Late in a lost season, Showalter could’ve
sat back and staged auditions, sizing up the
“i’ve had my heart broken so
much,” says showalter. “every
stop i’ve been to, i’ve
approached like it was my last.”
roster for future plans. Instead, on day one,
he met his players in front of a whiteboard
bearing the names of their replacements at
Triple A. “It was strategically placed to remind
them all that it’s a privilege, not a right, to be
in the majors,” he told me. “I wanted them to
hold each other accountable; if a player doesn’t
want to please his teammates first, then, sorry,
he’s gotta go.”
After instilling a healthy fear of God in
them, he told them to stop playing scared.
Don’t give the other team that much credit:
Screw the Yankees, screw the Red Sox, he
said. “The first time we went to Yankee Sta-
dium, I screamed at Derek Jeter from the
dugout. Our young guys are thinking, ‘Wow,
he’s screaming at Derek Jeter’ — well, he’s
always jumping back from balls just off the
plate. I know how many calls that team gets
— and yes, he pisses me off.”
Soon, he sat with each player privately
and told them, in blunt terms, what he ex-
pected. To Brad Bergesen, a second-year
starter with a habit of eyeing the dugout
when things unraveled: “Trust your stuff,
be the big dick in the shower — and if you
look in the dugout once, you’re coming out.”
Bergesen hadn’t won a start since May, but
went 5–3 from then on, with an ERA under
three. Something like that happened with
the rest of the staff as well. Pre-Showalter,
they went 32–73, with a five-plus ERA. Post:
34–23, 3.54.
His in-game cunning is a subtler advan-
tage. Ordering, say, a decoy pickoff move,
he’ll closely eye the plate while his pitcher
throws to first. “If the hitter’s leg twitches, I
know the hit-and-run’s on.” He’ll keep men-
tal lists of opposing skippers who get their
relievers up early and bait them with moves
in the middle innings so he can “pound their
tits” in the eighth. “No one in the game can
steal signs like Buck or catch a guy tipping
his pitches,” says Bob Klapisch, a columnist
for The Record in Bergen County, New Jersey.
“But the drawback is, he couldn’t back off,
loading his players with information instead
of letting them play on instinct.” Adds Gene
Michael, the ex-GM of those Yankees teams:
“I had to tell him sometimes to stop with all
that. He’s great at strategy but takes it too far,
and the guys tune him out after a while.”
To this day, he’s at his desk long after a
game’s over, jotting notes and watching the
playback till 1 am. “I know I make people
uncomfortable with that, but it’s all about
evaluating. On tape, I’m watching away from
the ball, ’cause that’s where the story’s being
told. I’m seeing who on our bench jumped
up to look when we hit a fair ball down the
line. If guys don’t look, it tells me they don’t
care” — and Showalter’s fixed on finding
players who care, building a core of obses-
sive-compulsives who don’t take mental days
off. Wherever he’s been, he’s traded for vets
who think the game as fiercely as they play
it — Paul O’Neill, Wade Boggs, Curt Schilling
— and sprinkled in heady utility players to
serve as coaches on the field. As that other
unloved genius, Billy Martin, used to tell
him, it’s the dumb players who always get
you fired.
Showalter concedes he can be a load, even
on a so-called off-night. “My wife will come
out, 1:30 in the morning, and say, ‘Really,
Buck? Still?’ ” he says, frowning. But she
doesn’t get it; no one does. There’s always
much more to be done. Take the spring-
training park in Sarasota, Florida, that’s being
remodeled, on his orders, to the specs at Cam-
MEN’S JOURNAL 48 APRIL 2011
the thinking man’s
guide to baseball
How the Game
Has Changed in the
Post-Steroid Era
MORE PATIENT
HITTERS
With home runs down
20 percent since their
peak in 2000, the good
teams now score the old-
fangled way: getting men
on base and moving them
over. After Derek Jeter
and the Yankees won it
all in ’09, in part by working long at-bats
and drawing walks, other teams followed
suit, driving pitch counts up in the fifth
and sixth innings and attacking opponents’
soft spot: middle relief. In 1988, teams
threw 136 pitches a game; now it’s 147. The
downside for fans? Average game times
have reached nearly three hours.
BETTER PITCHING
In an age when most starters
hit the 100-pitch mark by the
25th batter, smart teams have
made it their mantra to groom
hurlers who pitch to contact.
A prime example is the Min-
nesota Twins, who lack the
means to sign a 20-game win-
ner but finish first or second
each year in fewest walks
allowed. At the other end of the pay scale,
consider the Philadelphia Phillies, who’ve
built a pending empire on strike-throwing
machines (Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, and Roy
Oswalt) while letting Jayson Werth, one of
their best hitters, leave as a free agent. That
decision reflects a deeper trend: Pitchers
are entering a golden age and may dominate
FRO M TOP : CHR ISTIA N P ETER SEN/GET T Y I MAG ES; EZ RA SHAW/GET T Y IMAGES; STEVE NESI US /R EUTER S/L A NDOV
as they once did, pre-steroids.
EMPHASIS ON YOUTH
Steroids did more than
goose homer totals; they
shortened stints on the
DL and kept marquee
vets playing into their
late 30s. Only a handful
of teams are flush (or
dumb) enough to build
around aging stars now.
The best of the rest are adopting the Tampa
Bay model — go young, go cheap, and pile
up draft picks. Over the winter, the Rays
cut bait on bedrock players (Carl Crawford,
Carlos Pena, Matt Garza, Rafael Soriano)
who wanted more money and got back a
bank heist of compensation picks. Mean-
while, they have a gusher of well-groomed
phenoms ready to play (Desmond Jennings,
Jeremy Hellickson). Other teams deep in
this mode: the A’s and Padres. —P.S.

With the Boss
in 1995, shortly
before the
Yanks let him go
den Yards; that way his fielders will know it
backward and forward before they break north
for Opening Day. Or the clubhouse he’s hav-
ing reduced by a quarter so his players can’t
hide after a loss. That’s another virtue Show-
alter brings: He’ll make a dozen subtle deci-
sions to improve a team before he even deals
for a star. With the Yankees, for instance, he
changed the infield sod, which was dreadful
and produced bad hops, then turned the indoor
batting cage from a sty to a shrine so his play-
ers were proud to hit there. “I mean, who else
studies umpires’ schedules and plans his rota-
tion around them?” says Sherman of the New
York Post. “The guy just has no off switch.”
He’ll need more than home improve-
ments, though, to make the O’s contenders
in the big-dog AL East. He certainly can’t
match the Maybach budgets in Boston and
the Bronx, and for now must get the most
out of midlist players who come with gaping
flaws. His GM, Andy MacPhail, traded this
winter for a thumping third baseman in Mark
Reynolds, who’ll hit 40 homers in that band-
box stadium — and shatter the AL record for
striking out. He brought in vets Derrek Lee
and Vlad Guerrero, who’ll either be anchors
or dead weight. And aside from Brian Matusz,
the O’s don’t have a starter or a closer they
can count on. But Showalter’s fine with an
uphill fight; in fact, he seems to prefer it.
Without him, the Birds were 8–16 against
the Yankees and Red Sox; with him, they
served notice, going 6–6 against their long-
time tormentors. “I’d like to see how smart
Theo Epstein is with the Tampa Bay payroll,”
he jeers. “You got Carl Crawford ’cause you
paid more than anyone else, and that’s what
makes you smarter? That’s why I like whip-
ping their asses: It’s great, knowing those
guys with the $205 million payroll are saying,
‘How the hell are they beating us?’ ”
in his years of sof t exile af ter
Texas fired him, Showalter worked for ESPN,
classing up the dais on Baseball Tonight and
rarely tempering his sometimes-withering
critiques. It surely burned him to trade opin-
ions with dopes like John Kruk while manag-
ing jobs went begging in prime markets, but
Showalter wouldn’t bite when I raised the
question. “A couple of teams called to kind
of kick my tires, but the fit wasn’t right either
way,” he said. Nor was he disposed to take
my bait when asked how it felt to fix three
teams, then watch them go to the Series with
someone else. “If that’s my epitaph, I’m OK.
I think Joe Torre was the perfect guy to take
the Yanks to the next level. I consider all those
guys my friends.”
Really? Even Bob Brenly, who replaced
him in Arizona and won the World Series
his first year? Didn’t he take the rule book
Showalter wrote and toss it into the garbage
in front of the players?
“He did that to promote himself, and
probably pissed a lot of people off,” said
Showalter. Moreover, he clarified, it was a
manual, not a rule book, that was trashed.
“I’ve never had a set of rules. I take the senior
players and go, ‘You make the rules — but
when you leave here, they’re your rules.’ ”
But his tough sangfroid had chipped a
bit, a spider-crack in the ice. And if it happens
with Baltimore, too, I persisted, that they go
on and win without you?
He began by saying that Orioles’ owner
Peter Angelos had been gracious and sup-
portive thus far, even offering to spend on
big-ticket stars. Then he paused and, after
a moment’s reflection, said, “Look, I’m at a
state now where I’m not naive. I lost that
when I left New York. To this day, that breaks
my heart.”
And here I recalled that parting in ’95,
after he’d taken the bedraggled Yanks from
worst to first. He’d just lost an indelible play-
offs to Seattle on a game-five, walk-off double,
and stood in the dugout, scribbling notes, as
the Mariners and their fans went bonkers.
Later, when the Boss barged into his office,
presumably to skin his hide, he found the skip-
per slumped over the desk, sobbing into his
hands. Quietly, Steinbrenner slunk from the
room while Showalter wept for a half hour. A
man can only stand so much, said those tears;
he needs to see a return on all his labors. No
one in baseball has worked harder than Sho-
walter and gotten less back for his toil. It’d be
something other than human not to wish him
luck on his last push up the mountain. ■
MEN’S JOURNAL 50 APRIL 2011
the thinking man’s
guide to baseball
A New Way to
Rate Fielders
Evaluating a player’s defense is elusive,
mostly because it’s hard to quantify. But
Michael Humphreys, author of the new
book Wizardry: Baseball’s All-Time Great-
est Fielders Revealed, created a formula to
calculate how many runs each player saves
his team. Some lessons from his analysis.
IGNORE ERRORS
Pundits tend to look
at fielding percentage
(rate of error-free plays).
The problem: It rewards
less aggressive players.
“Someone can be good at
avoiding errors, but slow
at getting to the ball,”
says Humphreys. Omar
Vizquel has the highest
fielding percentage of any shortstop in his-
tory but saved only 17 more runs than the
average player from 1993 to 2007. “He was
more or less ordinary,” says Humphreys.
The flip side: Cliff Pennington of the A’s led
the league in errors last year but is worth
an extra 15 saved runs per full season.
GOLD GLOVES ARE
A CROCK
When coaches vote on
the fielding awards, they
fixate on flashy plays.
Which is why a guy like
Derek Jeter has racked
up five Gold Gloves (think:
leap into stands, relay flip
at home). But where does
Humphreys rank Jeter?
Dead last among post-1992 shortstops with
two years of experience. Near the top of
B RAD MA NGI N/ML B P HOTOS VI A GET T Y IMAGES; OT TO GR EULE J R/GET T Y IMAGES; JI M RO GASH/G ET T Y IMAGES
that list: Cleveland’s Adam Everett, who has
precisely zero Gold Gloves. “Actually,” says
Humphreys, “in terms of proven peak skill,
nobody’s been better than Everett. Ever.”
CLOCKWIS E FRO M TOP LEFT: LINDA CATA FFO/NY DA ILY NEWS A RCHI VE VI A G ET T Y IMAGES ;
POSITIONING IS KEY
Sabermetrics guru Bill
James came up with a
measure called Invisible
Range in 1977 to gauge a
player’s ability to get to
balls. Humphreys improved
on that in Wizardry, ad-
justing for such factors as
ground-ball versus fly-ball
pitchers. His metric exposes players who
position themselves poorly, like Anaheim’s
Torii Hunter. “He looks terrific on highlight
reels, but the two or three homers he saves
a season don’t make up for the singles drop-
ping in front of him,” says Humphreys. His
preference? Mike Cameron of the Red Sox.
—blaine mcevoy