Buck Showalter has very strong opinions on baseball load management
Former New York Mets manager Buck Showalter is very open-minded when it comes to the use of analytics, but he is still deep down an old-school mind that values experience and instinct in certain situations.
That is especially true when it comes to the idea of load management in Major League Baseball.
He discussed the subject on a recent appearance on Foul Territory when discussing load management during his time with the Mets.
Said Showalter: "We had a guy who had a triple and two doubles, and they came in and said, ‘He probably needs a day off because he ran too much around the bases. So what do you want me to tell him? Don’t get any hits? So you can play the next day? I didn’t quite understand that. I said, ‘OK, you got out there and tell Brandon Nimmo that he’s not playing today because he did too well last night.'”
He did not mention anybody in the Mets front office by name, but he reportedly had several run-ins with former general manager Billy Eppler over the team's designated hitter position. Eppler wanted Daniel Vogelbach to be the primary DH, while Showalter wanted to use the DH as a revolving position to give position players days off in the field.
That could be where some of Showalter's load management opinions come from.
Showalter went on to discuss the use of analytics in baseball, and seemed far more open to them. He acknowledged that the number-crunchers in the front office provide them with massive amounts of information and that his door was always open to it. He even mentioned having an "analytics for dummies" discussion during his time in Baltimore so nobody was afraid of them.
But he also pointed out that his experience as a manager also brought something to the table that the front office might not have when it came to making game-deciding decisions late in the eighth or ninth inning.
There is a lot to be said for managing playing time and keeping player's fresh, especially for veteran players over a 162-game season. Showalter's position on it — and analytics in general — seems pretty logical.
Neither he or Eppler is running the Mets this season with David Stearns taking over the front office and Carlos Mendoza taking over the dugout.
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