Earl Weaver is another alleged genius who gets about a million times more credit than he deserves. Remind me what the huge holes in the skills of guys like Eddie Murray, Cal Ripken, and Jim Palmer were. Further, his actual accomplishments as a manager are only sightly greater than noted baseball savant Charlie Manuel.
Oh, bull. For one thing, Weaver had exactly two years of Cal Ripken, which included switching him from third to short. He had six years of Murray, meaning that Palmer was the only one there for a majority of Weaver's tenure (and it happened to be all of it).
For the most part, the rest of the lineups were guys who weren't exactly Cooperstown-bound. Ken Singleton was a good hitter who couldn't run. Boog Powell could clear the bases and only get a single in the process. Mark Belanger couldn't hit. Mike Cuellar was 31 and hadn't established himself as a regular player. And those are just the good players that he had.
Getting 90 wins and having the type of success with a roster that was threadbare compared to a good chunk of the rest of the AL is a hell of an accomplishment. The Houston Astros of 1998-2004 had better rosters than most of what Weaver had. And keep in mind that I'm of the opinion that there's very little positive impact that a manager can have, but a lot of negative impact.
Mike Marsall is just another self anointed prophet who talks about how brilliant his theories are but has no proof of their efficacy. How many adherents to his program are in the major leagues? Oh, that's right. Teams are colluding to keep his guys out of the Show to prevent the gospel of his methods from taking hold.
If you're an 18-year-old kid, which of these three options are you going to take:
1) Go to college, where you have a scholarship waiting
2) Sign with the MLB team that drafted you and get on a bus for the minors
3) Go live in a place that's hotter and stickier than a donkey's nutsack in spartan conditions to unlearn everything that you've learned and learn something entirely new
I was down in Zephyrhills a little over two years ago and saw these kids going through an extremely intense workout, followed by 72 maximal pitches, followed by more of a workout. They do it every single day, and yet no one has suffered an injury.
The only way to get people to sit up and take notice would be if an injured or washed-up former phenom were to go through it and end up back in MLB. Mark Prior and Dontrelle Willis would be good candidates.
It took Bill James 30 years to get an interview because the ability to state the obvious, while cloaking it as revolutionary, isn't that valuable. "Guys who get on base a great deal while putting up huge extra base hit numbers are valuable." Groundbreaking.
That's a pretty dramatic oversimplification there. Having read James' work extensively, I'd say that it's a good 50:50 split between something that flies in the face of the conventional and analyzing/clarifying the obvious. It's like the early scientists hearing "The sun revolves around the earth, and the world outside gets hot when the sun is out"; half of that is bunk (the idea of the sun revolving around the earth), half of it was analyzed and clarified (to what extent does the sun heat the earth, and how does it happen?).
