I knew in the first inning (actually, before the first was even a third of the way through) that the Reds were in deep, deep trouble against the Milwaukee Brewers last night. The starting pitcher for the Reds was missing the strike zone - A LOT. The one time (well, okay, there were a few more times) he didn't miss the strike zone, Brewers outfielder Ryan Braun hit a grand slam home run. By the end of the top of the first inning, the Reds found themselves behind 6-0. And just like that, the Chicago Cubs' season came to an unceremonious close.
Before the game started last night, the Brewers could have knocked the Cubs out of the play-offs with either a win over the Reds or a loss by the Cubs to the Pittsburgh Pirates. As it turned out, the Brewers got both the win over the Reds, as well as the Cubs' lo, their eighth loss in a row. Even the casual baseball fan knows that an end-of-the-season play-off race is absolutely the worst time to go on a losing streak.
Unfortunately, no one was surprised by the Cubs' epic flop. Well, not really. The season simply did not go well. What's sad is that most of the key members of the 2016 World Series Champion Cubs team were still part of the organization. Fans and pundits alike expected this team to be competitive for many years to come. Some even used the word "dynasty." While the Cubs were certainly relevant this year, their collapse at the end of this season, combined with last year's end-of-the-year slump (though not as bad as this year's for sure) followed by a loss in a one-game post-season play-off here, can only be summarized with the phrase "lost opportunities."
So what happened? There were injuries to some key players this year, including the fact that the 2016 World Series MVP, Ben Zobrist, missed four months in the middle of the season to deal with a family situation. It's not a great excuse though, as every team experiences injuries at some point. Just look at the team that eliminated the Cubs from the play-offs - the Milwaukee Brewers - who lost their reigning MVP and superstar, Christian Yelich, to a season-ending injury less than 3 weeks ago. The Brewers still managed to pull off a winning streak to clinch at least a Wild Care play-off spot, and they remain just one game behind the St. Louis Cardinals for the NL Central Division championship.
The bottom line is that the Cubs just didn't perform. The starting pitching rotation was horribly inconsistent. Look no further than Kyle Hendricks, who pitched six scoreless innings against the Pittsburgh Pirates a couple of nights ago before surrendering six runs in the bottom of the 7th inning. The Cubs had one of the worst win-loss records on the road this year (31-46, not counting the last 3 games of the year that have yet to be played) - it was almost like they were a completely different team when they played outside of Chicago. They gave up leads late in the game, and they never could seem to win in a one-run game. They lost four games in a row to the Cardinals this weekend by one run - in every single game! They even led the Major League in baserunning errors. Championship caliber teams simply must, and do, perform better than the Cubs did this past year.
Inevitably, whenever a sports team finishes out the year like this, fingers start to point and ask, "Who is to blame?" And almost always, the fingers start to point at the individual in charge - the head coach or manager. There's been speculation all season about whether or not the Cubs will extend an offer to Manager Joe Maddon to come back next year. Maddon has been a good manager for his entire career, so is it really his fault that the Cubs underperformed this year?
Is it fair to blame the head coach or manager when athletic teams underperform? Do coaches and managers really have that much impact on the success or failure of a team? Most of the studies performed to date have tried to answer this question by looking at whether a team's wining percentage improves after a coaching change - generally, it does not. Studies performed since the late 1960's have shown that baseball teams that change managers rarely, if ever, improve their winning percentage. A recent study found that managers have very little effect on the performance of hitters and pitchers. Another study used data from 1970-2011 and found that managers, on average, account for about 8.5% of the variation in team performance in Major League Baseball (MLB). Not very impressive! Dave Berri summarized the available literature on coaching and team performance for the blog, Freakonomics ("Is Changing the Coach Really the Answer?"), perhaps stating it best:
"It may be true (and more than likely very true) that you are better off with a professional coach than with a random person grabbed from the stands (or no one at all). But it doesn't appear that the choice of professional coach matters much."
Not a ringing endorsement, right? However, University of Chicago researchers, Christopher Berry and Anthony Fowler used a slightly different approach in their analysis of data from MLB, the National Basketball Association, the National Football League, college football, and college basketball. They used a technique that they called, "Randomization Inference for Leader Effects" (RIFLE) to account for effects that are beyond the control of individual coaches. They found that baseball managers actually account for about 20-30 percent of the variation in an individual team's success. MLB managers affect the number of runs scored, the number of runs allowed, point margins, and victories (they actually mattered more for the number of runs allowed than for the number of runs scored). As it turns out, they used the RIFLE method to analyze political leaders too (see the study here) and found that world leaders have significant effects on a country's Gross Domestic Product, and U.S. state governors had important effects on a state's crime level. So, maybe we should blame Joe Maddon for the Cubs' lackluster performance this season.
These issues are certainly germane to a discussion of leadership in general. Is leadership important? Absolutely. Do leaders have an impact on the of their teams outside of the world of sports? It depends on who you ask (see the article Do CEO's Matter?" published a few years ago in The Atlantic). As it turns out, there are a number of studies that show that a corporate leader doesn't really influence his or her company's performance all that much. As a result, several management theorists have followed the leads of companies like Zappos (see the Harvard Business Review article, Beyond the Holocracy Hype) and Morning Star (see the HBR article (First, Let's Fire All the Managers) and adopted either a flattened hierarchy or self-managed teams. Similarly, Sam Walker's book (it's a really awesome book, by the way), The Captain Class suggests that it's not the head coach that matters, as much as it is the team captain (Walton analyzed several different teams from several different sports and found that the team captains for each of these dynastic teams shared a number of similar characteristics).
The problem here is that someone has to be ultimately accountable for a team's performance. Fair or not, it's generally almost always the head coach, manager, or corporate executive that is the one that is held responsible for a team's poor performance. Regardless of what he has done for the Chicago Cubs organization, I just don't see how Joe Maddon will be able to keep his job when the season ends this Sunday. And, as much as I like and respect Maddon, he probably deserves a share of the blame for the way that the Cubs ended their season this year, even if he deserves at least some credit for winning the first World Series Championship for the Cubs in 108 years!
For now, as much as I hate to admit it, the Cubs are the "Lovable Losers" once more - at least until next year! Just wait until next year. There's always next year.
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