Sports Reference Blog

Ejection Totals and In-Game Tendencies Added to Manager Pages

Posted by Alex Bonilla on October 24, 2018

For manager pages on Baseball-Reference, we have added a column for ejections to their primary Managerial Stats table. Bobby Cox's career 162 ejections make for a nice finishing piece on his collection of accolades. We have ejections data for managers all the way back to the 1889 season, so even classics like John McGraw are fully accounted for. We'll also take the opportunity to mention that if you want to dig into what the cause for these ejections were, Retrosheet's Managers section will have that for you.

We have also added a new Managerial Tendencies table to managers' pages, showing how often their teams employed certain strategies and how their rate compared to the league they were managing in. We show a manager's tendencies in stolen base attempts at 2nd and 3rd, as well as how often their teams attempted sacrifice bunts, issued intentional walks, or made player substitutions.

Using one recent example, in Dusty Baker's final year with the Washington Nationals, his players attempted to steal 3rd base on 2.9% of the chances they had. Using 100 as the league average, Baker in 2017 had a league-adjusted rate of 180, meaning that Baker's team was attempting this almost twice as much as the average NL squad that season.

We have intentional walk tendencies back to 1955, while the other managerial tendencies are available since 1925. If you have any questions about this new feature or any other section of Baseball-Reference, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2018 at 9:00 am and is filed under Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Data, Features, History, Statgeekery, Trivia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “Ejection Totals and In-Game Tendencies Added to Manager Pages”

  1. Ankit Says: October 24th, 2018 at 12:50 pm

    The stolen base and manager review seen to be a stretch and don't know if they are truly reflective of managerial tendencies. The reviews usually come from the teams video person so how much say a manager has in that is questionable.

    For stolen bases, it's highly dependent on the personnel. For Dusty Baker in 2016 and 2017, it is mostly due to Trea Turner and Michael Turner who were super fast runners. If anything stolen bases are reflective of the First Base coach. Take Davey Lopes for example. A better measure is probably how aggressive a team is on sac flies or taking an extra base on non-HR hits.

  2. Tom G Says: October 24th, 2018 at 9:06 pm

    Team payroll gives a bit of context to the experience and talent level a manager may have to work with.  Could be a useful indicator to include.  Teams/managers like KC and Tampa who have had fairly recent success look even more impressive in that light.

  3. Charles Saeger Says: January 6th, 2019 at 10:07 am

    Any chance of getting player ejections?