This week there was something published in these pages that I took personally. It was written by my colleague Patrick Dubuque:

Once upon a time, Baseball Prospectus devoted a significant amount of energy to quantifying managers. Today the last vestige of that practice is a couple of pages near the back of the Annual that I think we keep putting in there, although it’s a good indication that as an editor I can’t remember. 

The occasional awkwardness of working for a company with which one has a long history but has had its institutional memory flushed a couple of times is that now and again someone will say something like, “Why do we have Taco Thursdays in the staff canteen? Everyone else has Taco Tuesdays but we have to wait. Whoever instituted that policy sucks.” You then have to count to 10 instead of jumping into the company Slack and swearing at people who don’t understand that the whole Taco Thursday policy was decreed by, well, you, after a hard-fought battle between editorial factions that seemed really, really important at the time. It wasn’t, or if it was it has no relevance now, but it still feels as if you and your contribution has been denigrated.

It was a now almost-forgotten editor named Steven who added manager comments and stats to the annual a very long time ago, and he was proud of them. I miss them, but then, I miss a lot of things, including $1 comic books with 100 pages in them, the Borders chain, and the odd shake made with the milk of human kindness. The problem with my feeling insulted over Patrick’s disparagement of one of my contributions to the Baseball Prospectus community mural is (1) he almost certainly didn’t know it was me, and if he did it wasn’t intended as a dig; (2) I very much prefer this present to that past, and no one owes the latter the slightest deference; (3) my saying, “seeing my work dismissed this way is hurtful” would be solipsistic. It always feels a little lonely when someone buries an aspect of your past without holding a funeral, but that’s between you and the cat. You don’t disrupt a business to cry about; (4) I think he’s right.

Patrick is correct that the formerly variegated managerial species has collapsed into a bland corporate sameness. The range of sacrifice bunts in the majors this year ran from nine (the Tigers) to 45 (the Rays, which is to say, “that team with Taylor Walls”), with an average of 23, or around once a week. Intentional walks, that weapon of self-harm, topped out at 41 (Astros, now sabermetric apostates) to 10 (Rockies and Twins; at least the Rockies understand the last thing they should be doing is putting extra runners on base), the average being only 18. The days of Gene Mauch bunting 150 times in a DH league, or Leo Durocher holding up four fingers 75 times in a season, are gone.