Buck Showalter is a guy who commands a room. He never struck me as a guy who wanted to sit down and be told something by some young guy/gal about baseball. I’m sure Buck thinks he was open to some analytics, but it’s clear from players, to front office people, to agents of players that they would disagree about his openness to receiving and using this information.
Lost in all of this was that Dan Duquette wanted to apparently fire McDowell after last season but Buck being Buck, apparently said no.
I personally think Buck is one of the last old school managers who likes to surround himself with old school coaches. They like hunches, trust their eyes, and like their guys, even to the point of being detrimental to the on field product.
This whole battles also shows that Duquette never had full control over baseball operations. If he couldn’t get his on field coaching staff to accept the information he wanted them to, he should have replaced them. I don’t think he ever had the power to do so and was hamstrung.
He was also hamstrung by the amount of money he could put into scouting and analytics as Ownership would blow $3 million of a Chris Tillman or Colby Rasmus vs putting that into those important areas.
Hopefully the Angelos brothers will hire a good baseball person to run baseball operations and give him the budget to make this organization first rate once again.
