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Is Clint Hurdle a Good Manager?

By Steve Kubitz

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Pittsburgh Pirates fans are surprisingly divided on Clint Hurdle. Are they wrong to be?

I recently did a Pittsburgh Pirates Grade out on Pirates’ manager, Clint Hurdle and I gave him an A for the 2015 season. To say this sparked some discussion would be an understatement as some fans believed I wasn’t harsh enough and Hurdle did not deserve such a good grade. This got me thinking as to what makes a good manager?

Baseball is a game of statistics and there’s almost a stat for every aspect of it. You can determine the worth of a player using WAR, how lucky a pitcher is with xFIP, how lucky a batter is with BABIP and a plethora of other things that can be used with hard numbers. Despite a plethora of stats used to measure players, there are very few objective ways to judge a manager.

Are wins enough?

Clint Hurdle has has gone 280-206 over the last three seasons, which is among the best in all of baseball. He’s officially had more winning seasons as Pirates manager than losing seasons, yet to some fans he isn’t a very strong manager. If the Pirates lose a tough game, you can almost guarantee a barrage of tweets crying “Hurdled.” If winning is all that matters, why is there so much backlash against a manager that has won nearly 58 percent of games he has managed over the last three seasons?

Kang was coming from the Korean Baseball Organization, a league which plays a 144 game season. Kang averaged 124 games played per season in his KBO career. In terms of percentages, Kang started in 86 percent of the games in the KBO season. Until his injury Kang played in 86 percent of the games the Pirates played

The most common complaint against Hurdle seems to be the way he puts together lineups and in 2015 the cause for most of the criticism was playing Sean Rodriguez. Playing him in the Wildcard game was a mistake and something that Hurdle deserves lumps for, but was playing S-Rod in the regular season really that bad? The Pirates were 22-12 in games started by Sean Rodriguez in 2015, which is nearly a 65 percent winning percentage and Rodriguez hit .268 in 119 at-bats in the games he started. He also drove in seven of his 17 RBI in the games he started. Still, it is an unsustainably small sample size and I am not saying Sean Rodriguez is some hidden offensive juggernaut, but starting him more often than not wasn’t a bad decision by Hurdle and often it turned out to be a good decision in terms of game result. Not to mention the games he was substituted in for his more than stellar defense. Hurdle used Sean Rodriguez fairly effectively in 2015, outside of starting him in the Wildcard game of course. I am aware that a playoff game carries more weight, but it is still one game, and Rodriguez never really factored into the result.

Another criticism of Hurdle in 2015 was he juggled the lineup too much and didn’t start Jung Ho Kang enough before his injury. Kang was one of the Pirates’ best offensive weapons, but any time he was sat in favor of Jordy Mercer, it was “HURDLED” on Twitter. Kang was an incredible weapon for the Pirates and maybe, just maybe he was able to maintain his pace because he was given the proper amount of rest in his first MLB season.

Kang was coming from the Korean Baseball Organization, a league which plays a 144 game season. Kang averaged 124 games played per season in his KBO career. In terms of percentages, Kang started in 86 percent of the games in the KBO season. Until his injury Kang played in 86 percent of the games the Pirates played.

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I am a firm believer in numbers don’t lie and the fact that Kang’s debut MLB season resulted in the same percentage of games played is likely not a coincidence. Hurdle and the entire Pirates’ front office is very numbers based and they talked about coming into 2015 how they were going to look at various ways to keep players fresh. So maybe Hurdle keeping Kang out of the lineup at times was no accident and there was a method to the madness. Kang’s results spoke for themselves as Kang was the Pirates forth most valuable player in terms of WAR.

There is nothing I can say to change some fans mind on Clint Hurdle and I respect that. Hurdle is far from a perfect manager and in terms of x’s and o’s, he does struggle at times, but if the name of the game is winning, Hurdle has done that a lot as manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. It’s really hard to argue with his results. The one thing I would ask of his most vocal haters is what makes a manager good? Can you give me reasons you would take Joe Maddon over Hurdle?

Perception can greatly influence how we judge athletes and managers. We’re told that Maddon is one of the games great managers, but what does he do that Hurdle doesn’t? Bat the pitcher eighth in the lineup? Maddon likely makes the same boneheaded decisions that all Big League managers make at times. The only difference between him and Hurdle is you see Hurdle every single day. So the mistakes seem much more glaring. Hurdle is a perfectly acceptable and talented Big League manager. He goes outside the box when he needs to, but more often than not, he is about in-line with his peers.

In the end, I don’t think the average fan can tell you the difference between a good manager or a bad one. The only thing you can really go by is wins and losses and by that metric, Hurdle is one of the league’s very good managers. However, the talent on the field trumps the manager every single day. A great manager doesn’t mean much if the team is lousy and while a bad manager can sink a team, the Pirates are still a talented organization and that is really the important thing. Clint Hurdle is generally a solid manager that doesn’t hurt the team more than he helps it. The Pirates don’t seem to be winning in spite of their manager, but if they were, how would you honestly be able to tell?

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