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Thursday, June 14
Give the nod to Williams

By Joe Sheehan
Special to ESPN.com

After the aberration of 2000, a season in which no managers were fired, we've already had three pink slips handed out in 2001, plus a resignation. As you'd expect, the changes have involved teams off to poor starts, playing below the optimistic projections of their ownerships. This is what happens in baseball: teams disappoint, managers depart.

But what happens when the manager of a good team, a division leader even, finds himself with a bull's-eye on his back? What if that's the same manager who in the last four years has led his team to the postseason twice, won a Manager of the Year award and finished no worse than second in any of the previous three seasons?

That's what we're seeing right now in Boston, where there's a collective cry to can Jimy Williams and replace him, preferably with the recently-fired Felipe Alou. What in the name of Connie Mack are these people thinking?

Jimy Williams	        Felipe Alou
Year	   Record	Year	   Record
1997	   78-84	1997	   78-84
1998	   92-70	1998	   65-97
1999	   94-68	1999	   68-94
2000	   85-77	2000	   67-95
2001	   32-23	2001	   20-33

Now, I'll grant that some, even a lot, of that gap is the relative talent levels of the two teams. But even given that, why would you replace a manager who has established a 90-win level with the talent on his roster, and replace him with a manager who hasn't sniffed success since 1996 with the talent on his?


	Jimy Williams has guided Boston to the postseason in two of his first four years as manager.

I know it's standard to praise St. Felipe for his work with the Expos, granting him a wide berth because he had his best season taken from him and because he's worked for a pair of clueless, counterproductive ownership groups. But in addition to that string of 90-loss seasons, Alou had a number of good prospects stagnate under his watch, his teams had a gaping plate-discipline hole, and he grew increasingly willing to play up his own martyrdom after the 1996 season.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Felipe Alou is a bad manager, just that his record doesn't indicate that he's one of the best, the way the records of Billy Martin or Davey Johnson or Buck Showalter do. Alou is like the great majority of managers, a collection of good and bad traits that add up to be a relatively neutral influence.

Jimy Williams drives a lot of people crazy, and defending someone who chooses Darren Lewis over Izzy Alcantara, or Tim Wakefield over Tomo Ohka, isn't an easy task. But you can match his record against just about any other manager without shame. Here's the complete list of teams with better records than the Red Sox since the start of the 1998 season:

Atlanta Braves
Cleveland Indians
New York Yankees

Here's the complete list of teams with more postseason appearances in that span:

Atlanta Braves
New York Yankees

The Red Sox have a tremendous core, with three of the top 10 players in the game -- Nomar Garciaparra, Pedro Martinez and Manny Ramirez -- on their roster. Their problems include some roster spots wasted on non-contributors, some questions in the bullpen, and an infatuation with a pretty bad third baseman. Blaming Williams for all of that, especially when he has the Red Sox in first place despite those things, is scapegoating at its worst. Wanting a manager whose primary skill appears to be garnering public sympathy is inexplicable.

Jimy Williams doesn't deserve to lose his job, and he certainly doesn't deserve to lose it to a man whose performance record doesn't approach that of Williams.

The team of writers from the Baseball Prospectus (tm) will be writing twice a week for ESPN.com during the baseball season. You can check out more of their work at their web site at baseballprospectus.com. Joe Sheehan can be reached at jsheehan@baseballprospectus.com


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