The Manager of the Year award is more about narrative than anything else.
Outside of wins and losses, there aren’t really statistics to gauge how well a manager is doing in a given season. It’s more about feeling, guidance and the environment they foster over the course of 162 games, a period when players and coaches see each other way more than they see their own families and friends.
Perhaps the highest compliment for a manager is, simply, that they get it. Buck Showalter, who will win the National League Manager of the Year award handily, absolutely gets it.
Listening to him talk can include many things: deciphering old sayings and aphorisms, history lessons, a way of conversing about baseball that’s somewhere between old school outlooks and new school meme-talk. But underneath it all is someone whose decades of experience have taught him that managing a baseball team isn’t always about balls and strikes, or even wins and losses.
Showalter will poke fun at himself when he knows he’s telling a story or using a favorite line for the third time in a week. He’ll start most of his postgame media availabilities by asking what the time of the game was, acknowledging that as much as we all love baseball, no one wants to consume it for four hours.
He seems to understand, above all else, that this is supposed to be fun, and the best way to create as much fun as possible is to prioritize playing good team baseball in a way that isn’t too intense or draining for the players.
“You have a choice to make for what you’re going to hold yourself accountable for,” Showalter said on Monday. “It’s hard to do. There might be a rain delay in Philadelphia and a day game in the 24th hour of four games. Are you going to give in or not? There’s so many lures to give in, in life and in sports. Is your yes button and your no button working together?”
During one of his recent sprawling conversations with reporters, Showalter assured that everybody who works in and around Major League Baseball is worn out by August. On Monday, speaking to a much larger media audience who descended on Yankee Stadium for the Subway Series, he put it a little differently.
“You have that devil and angel having a fistfight behind your back. Who’s going to win?”
Showalter, who’s shepherded the Mets to the top of the National League East and refused to let go, oversaw the most wins in franchise history through 124 games since 1986. He was asked when he knew that the 2022 Mets were out of the ordinary, in a good way.
“There’s not one moment,” he said. “It’s a product of a lot of things. It’s a relentless pursuit. There’s no Cinderellas. You play too many games, every strength and weakness shows up. It’s one of those things that’s hard to evaluate analytically.”
In the parlance of our times, the concept that Showalter is referring to is often reduced to the catch-all term “vibes”. The vibes with this team are better than they’ve probably ever been in the Citi Field era. A large portion of that is Showalter. His influence on the also nebulous “culture” is why he will win Manager of the Year for the fourth time, tying Bobby Cox and Tony La Russa for the most wins in the history of the award, which was first given out in 1983. That culture is not all him, of course, and he succinctly explained how the Mets have gelled so well this season.
“It’s good people.”
Sure, but the Mets also boast one of the most stacked rosters in the league. They have two Hall of Fame-caliber starting pitchers heading their rotation, with two All-Stars and a 100-game winner behind them. Their closer is putting together one of the best seasons a relief pitcher has ever had, full stop. Francisco Lindor is among the most naturally gifted players in the sport, and Pete Alonso leads the league in RBI thanks, in no small part, to Lindor always being on base for him. The list goes on and on. From 2022 All-Stars Starling Marte and Jeff McNeil to 2022 debutantes like Nate Fisher and Nick Plummer, everything that touches a Mets’ jersey turns to gold.
“You have to have a certain amount of ability to play this game,” Showalter said. “I’ve had guys with great attitude and great makeup that just weren’t very good players. Usually that’s what they call coaches and managers, guys who weren’t quite good enough.”
Something about Showalter, or Papa Buck as he’s sometimes known, leads you to believe that he could still pull some winning baseball out of those guys who weren’t so good. Luckily for him, he hasn’t had to worry about that much this season, as the combination of talent on the field and a certain hard-to-describe something in the manager’s seat have created a whole team of guys that, unquestionably, get it.
