Coaching great teams

Congratulations go out to the San Francisco Giants and their 2014 World Series Championship.  Bruce Bochy is sure making a name for himself as a manager having won three out of the last five

championships.  Right now the accolades are flowing but pretty soon the criticism of “he’s overrated!  Anyone could manage a team with Posey, Pence, and Bumgarner not to mention Vogelsong and Lincecum too!” 

The same thing has been hurled at managers like Joe Torre as well.  “With those Yankee teams, the hardest thing you’d do every day is just show up.”  

Not so fast.

Having tremendous talent is certainly an advantage but coaching a highly skilled team has its own set of headaches.  Just think of it this way … there are only nine players who can play at a time.  What do you think happens when you have more than nine good players?  That’s right … you get lots of complaining because chances are good the guys who are sitting have never sat before and they probably will blame the coach for this current transgression against their ego.  And if you have more than three quality pitchers at the high school level and only 2-3 games a week, how do you get them all enough innings?

People may say that these are good problems to have and they’d be right.  However, it still takes a skilled leader to manage all this to keep everyone happy and motivated. 

I never bought into the “anyone can manage a great team” line.  I think the more appropriate line is “anyone can manage a bad team because nobody expects them to win.”

Tomorrow’s post:  Why you pay attention to detail when covering first base