Davey inherted a team that went 95 and 97 and in the next three season with mostly the same roster went 82-80!!!!, 93-69, and 26-34!!!!. With an admittedly slightly worse roster went... 65-97!!!! Still with maybe the best hitter in baseball the year after went 55-107!!!!
Arguably unestablished somewhat raised in the org Nats with significant playing time that left at 29 or younger :
- Victor Robles, dog house guy for Davey, finally left at 27. Went to Seattle and hit like a star for half a season.
- Michael A Taylor flourished under Dusty, immediately back-tracked under Davey, traded away and showed another solid couple years left in him.
- Joe Ross had the worst two seasons of his career under Davey before a decent one in 2021. in 2024, his first healthy season after leaving had a better season than ever under Davey'
- Erick Fedde, did come together under Davey... and then lost it again. Better seasons in 2024 and 2025 than ever under Davey
- Austin Voth started hot under Davey but degraded to the point of almost being out of the game. A credible starter in Baltimore and reliever in Seattle since.
- Wilmer Difo, WILMER DIFO, decent cup of coffee under Dusty, got worse under Dusty but even more so under Davey to the point he was almost out of baseball. Went to Pittsburgh PITTSBURGH and had an average year.
On the flip side... you have to stretch and say maybe Andrew Stevenson and Tres Barrera were guys that got a real shot here that didn't do any better elsewhere. Maybe Tanner Rainey though he's only 3 appearances into 2025.
You want me to say something nice? Well if you want to say Soto is Daveys then maybe he is the right manager for an amazing HOF level talent young player. Wood seems to be doing just fine. Gore we can argue about if he's reaching his potential, but is certainly better, so far this year. Maybe him and Mitchell Parker vibe?
But Abrams, a high quality player has been streaky and already had one beef with the manager. Luis Garcia Jr seems to have a similar hot cold performance matched up with a just cold relationship. Crews, we can at least agree he's struggling, right? I'm not going to get called out as a Crews hater for noting a guy hitting .181 / .239 / .313 a quarter into the season is struggling, am I?
The guy keeps failing. Dusty, original Davey, and even Matt Williams didn't fail like this. Frank Robinson has a better winning percentage with the Nats. Hell Jim Riggleman has a better winning percentage with the Nats.
Maybe it IS the roster. Hell I'll agree and say it's gotta mostly be the roster. I don't think Davey on the Dodgers makes them a .500 team. But what is here that makes you think he needs to stay because this record, this history says he has to go.
But hey, I'll meet you half-way. In conceding most managers are generally fine, we can fire Davey but we can hire back Manny Acta for you.
13 comments:
OK, you're right. Fire Davey. Now, what do you want to see in the next manager? I feel like "oh I don't know, because I don't know what makes the difference, mabye try " is just the wrong way to go about things. Sure, as fans we can sit around and argue (exactly what we're doing now) but does Rizzo know what makes a good manager? Probably better than we do. But maybe someone has compromising pictures of him. Does Lerner know what makes a good GM? Almost certainly not. He'd probably hire Boras if he could.
So, OK, I'll grant you he's not good. I just feel like the real situation is that you took an early dislike of the guy and you're just looking for ways to justify it. Maybe you can, but I really feel that neither you nor I really _know_ what makes a good manager.
When you're rattling off names of guys who muddled around - what about Voth, who was great for 3 months and then turned back into the same guy the next year? (He had a 5.12 ERA last year in Baltimore)
Robles has an OPS of 624 this year. Looks like he had a few good months and went back to being bad.
And what about the guys with NO pedigree who we've picked up on waivers? Call? Meneses? Vargas? A bunch of them went from nothing to not-much. Does that count as a coaching win?
I want to reiterate that I don't think this staff is very good, but change for the sake of change when you can't clearly define what it is you want to replace the current staff with is a foolish idea.
To my mind, the only way someone without access to the internal workings of an organization can fairly and reasonably evaluate a manager is to recognize the vast expanse of unknown confounders and, therefore, push ourselves at every step towards epistemological humility. If there appears to be signal even then, fair enough.
One way to do that is based on the bare W/L records. We accept the black box and simply hold DM accountable to the results. Harper, when you made the case against DM before the 2024 season, I agreed that the evidence supported it. Relative to expectations, we'd seen results of bad or worse in 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022 vs just 2019 - which was mixed, but more good than bad - and 2023 - which was good, but obviously luck-aided.
Even if you throw out 2020, that felt like a clear preponderance of evidence. But now that 2024 is in the books as "pretty good, and on the merits", I just don't think that's true anymore. It's still more bad than good, and I'm absolutely not making an affirmative case to keep him, but it's no longer clear enough to my eyes to support a data-based case for firing him.
Beyond that, we're really left trying to guess how to assign impact to things under Davey's control. And that's fine I guess, but I'd just ask that we recognize that there's a lot we don't know.
And, yes, I'll agree that Crews is struggling. And I have even begun to see signs that he's "struggling and could use a reset", but it has a lot more to do with how he reacts to bad outcomes than his triple-slash line. Even still, it's a defensible choice to think he's better off working through it in the majors. So even if I believed it was Davey's call to send him down or not, I still wouldn't list that as one of his bad decisions.
I'm not a Davey fan, even with the miraculous 2019 season. As we all have come to understand, MLB managers performance is hard to quantify- particularly for outsiders like us fans. For me, I look to leadership qualities as well as game tactical decision making. Leadership being communication and influence over the clubhouse, players, and on field staff. To me, Original Davey and Dusty were the best at that. I just don't see the qualities of those two in DM. I think this young team deserves a much better leader and role model.
Davey came in and was supposed to be Joe Maddon-like having been his bench coach for so long. But Joe Maddon was an analytics-forward motivational and brash coach. Davey is none of those things. Davey seems like a people pleaser, not a leader. He's loyal to his players and staff because of it, but it should be the other way around. They should be loyal to the manager, the manager should be leading and if something isn't working, being willing to make the tough decisions and have the tough conversations. I've rarely seen that, and it seems like he relies on the vets in the clubhouse to establish the culture as opposed to establishing it himself.
This is, of course, a lot of speculation on my part based on comments in the press and by players, but there is definitely a "signal" in the noise that Davey isn't much of a leader. I haven't been hard pressed to fire him, yet, because the team has been bad. But now that you've got the young core in place, it's time to bring some one in to lead the team.
My vote, despite little experience, is Doolittle. Analytics-minded, gels with players, proven clubhouse leader, and recently out of the league so he knows the drill with these younger guys. It may not work, but as we've talked about, manager "WAR" is worth maybe a few wins in the positive direction, it's the negative direction that worries me, seems to have a much longer tail
Well, Doolittle is very popular with the fans.
Yawn. Harper is demonstrating the lazy fans' mindset of "let's notice former Nats only when they go on a heater and ignore them when they aren't." As KR noted about Voth and Robles, they went on heaters and then essentially turned back into who they were. And Harper does leave out the Nats turning Kyle Finnegan, Hunter Harvey, and Robert Garcia into "found money" off of the waiver wire. But that doesn't count, because reasons.
I don't see much signal, or even noise, that players aren't behind Martinez/loyal to him as a manager. It's not like Matt Williams, when the clubhouse was in open rebellion. I suspect that a lot of that is fan projection: "I don't like him, therefore players don't like him" A reminder: WE DON'T KNOW WHAT GOES ON IN THE DUGOUT OR CLUBHOUSE. Most of what a manager does, we don't see. But we're happy to fill in the blanks.
That said, would I object if the Nats fire Martinez? Nah. Especially if this losing skid is a harbinger of things to come. But the last manager that most Nats fans liked was 2012 Davey. By 2013 folks were done with him. Even Dusty Baker was an extremely divisive figure on the InterNats. From the noise that I've seen on various baseball cites, the vast majority of team managers are hated/regarded as incompetent by their fan bases. I don't expect that to change after the Nats have moved on from Martinez.
I love Doolittle, and I'm happy that he's in the organization. But his primary role for fans seems to be to have someone other than Jim Hickey to give credit to when things go right on the mound. We love Doolittle, and hate Coles, but the 2025 Nats are hitting better than they are pitching.
But change for the sake of change is DOING SOMETHING! At the very least it enables us to do our traditional pivot from "DO SOMETHING" (whether a hiring/firing/player signing or extension, etc.) to, after the team does something, to "NOT THAT!"
Voth has as many IP now outside of Washington as here and clearly has better stats outside of DC. I'm not sure I'd bet on that lasting too much longer but that's the facts.
Robles played 10 games this year before breaking himself against the wall. You guys were all over me trying to say we might want to take a look at Crews after 25 games as being too soon. Come on here.
I think the "found money" of FA totally counts. But that to me is a Rizzo thing, who I'm much more ambivalent about firing because I can see the good and bad of that. Grabbing a guy who comes here at about the age I'm talking these young guys leaving seems like an entirely different thing. And if we're really talking about that I think Davey's track record is average. Some older guys come here and thrive, others don't. I can't knock him.
The season is one-quarter complete, and the Nationals are 17-24. That’s a 67-win pace over a full season, which would represent a four-game regression from the last two seasons.
They’re nine games out in the NL East. They’re seven games back in the NL wild card race, with only three teams currently behind them: the Marlins, Pirates and Rockies (the last two of which fired their managers in recent days).
Republishing a late comment from the prior post.
I know it's easy to Monday Morning Quarterback, but there are multiple times each week I find myself yelling at the television (or radio) BEFORE SOMETHING HAPPENS to helplessly try to convince the universe to stop Davey from making a mistake that is quite obvious to even me, a person farther away from being an MLB manager than about any other human on Earth. And more often than not, the stupid thing blows up in the Nats' faces. At some point this isn't randomness or luck, but incompetence.
I get the challenge in constructing the "should the manager be fired" algorithm, but the constant W/L underperformance relative to projections, combined with the day-to-day incompetence one can easily observe, makes firing him an easy decision in my view.
Isn’t there a more objective way to have this debate? Why cant we simply take each preseason win projection by Fangraphs or whoever, and compare it to actual wins that season? Sure, you can add some color in there by factoring in COVID (50 games isn’t enough games to evaluate a season), deadline trades/acquisitions and injuries, but once the raw numbers are adjusted for those things, you’d get a rough idea of “Manager Quality”. Not super accurate (far from it), but at least forms a more objective starting point for debate
G Cracka X -- I think the whole reason this debate has gone on as long as it has would suggest there isn't an objective way. If I had more time, I could do some homework and come up with a collection of statistics to try to place a value on reliever/pinch-hit/steal/etc decisions, but the discussion has mentioned lots of unquantifiable things about keeping the team working well. (e.g. Ted Lasso.)
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