The Personnel Files (Part One - ML Managers)

[Tyler]

If you manage your organizational personnel like me, you keep warm bodies in every position and then just hope that you signed quality guys at reasonable prices. But what do you do when the personnel pool is full of the same mediocre 50/50/50 guys? Should you sign one to be your AA manager? Would he be better than his peers? Worse? And he's asking for a salary of $350,000. Will he be overpaid? Underpaid?

I can't promise to answer any questions about how significant or important it is to your organization to have that 90 Teach Pitching coach instead of that 85 Teach Pitching coach, but what I can do is tell you how his ability and salary will compare to that of his peers.

Introducing the Personnel Files. They'll tell you the PEBA average ratings and salary for personnel at every organizational position. Hopefully this will help owners know just what caliber of coach they should look for to fill organizational vacancies.

This is Part One - ML Managers. An Excel sheet of the data is attached to this post.

SUMMARY

ML Managers average out nicely to almost exactly 80 per rating. The average manager pulls in about $670,000 a year.

Best Bargains
San Antonio - The Calzones are paying a league-average manager less than league minimum for a replacement-level player. Nice.

Gloucester - The Fishermen have one of the best managers in the game, and he makes the league average.

Most Overpaid
Reno - I suspect that my analysis of AAA managers will reveal this is where Isoruko Ito belongs, yet he's managing the Tenpinners for league-average money.

Florida - Sure, Jaime Sanchez is good, but he's not $840,000/year good.

Important Qualifications
The "Best Bargains" and "Most Overpaid" awards are given solely based on OOTP personnel ratings, not team performance.

The switch from OOTP 7/8 to 9 brought with it the new personnel contract system, where personnel sign like free agents, instead of through our forum-based waiver system. This has led to an increase in average salary for all personnel. Keep in mind that current personnel were signed under both the old and new systems, and that this will create disparities.

[John]

Somebody's angling for some bonus CP. This is very interesting. Now what I'm dying to know is if higher-rated personnel have a tangible effect on the development of players. It'd certainly be nice info to have in your back pocket the next time you're in the market for a top-rated manager that's asking $800,000+ a year from you. Any idea how we could measure something like that?

[Tyler]

Now what I'm dying to know is if higher-rated personnel have a tangible effect on the development of players. It'd certainly be nice info to have in your back pocket the next time you're in the market for a top-rated manager that's asking $800,000+ a year from you. Any idea how we could measure something like that?

No idea at all. There are so many factors that go into development (coaching, morale, player personality) that when you combine those with the inherently "random" development of prospects that I can't think of any way to separate out the factors.

[Dinosaurs]

Yeah I know the manual indicates that managers, bench coaches (at the ML level), hitting and pitching coaches (on their respective areas of expertise) influence the development of players. But how much, who knows. I've certainly taken an effort (a costly one as I had to fire some guys with years left on contracts to do this) to fill my minor leagues with better managers and coaches. There seemed to be a dearth of good pitching coaches this time around I wonder if that will be the same next offseason.

[John]

I'm also bemoaning the lack of pitching coaches. In fact I still haven't filled the PC vacancy on my AAA club.

[Paul Moots]

Yeah, good ol' Stuart. We just resigned him to a four year deal at 700,000 each year.

[Maulers]

Somebody's angling for some bonus CP. This is very interesting. Now what I'm dying to know is if higher-rated personnel have a tangible effect on the development of players. It'd certainly be nice info to have in your back pocket the next time you're in the market for a top-rated manager that's asking $800,000+ a year from you. Any idea how we could measure something like that?

I would imagine that a multi-variate regression analysis would be able to tease this out rather nicely. One would compile all of the possibly relevant data into "variables" (coach salaries, age, morale, team performance, etc.), figure out an appropriate measure for performance (VORP leaps to mind) then plug all of this into a regression formula. The regression analysis would then statistically measure which one, or multiple, of the variables had the greatest effect (if any) on the player's development (as measured by VORP, in this example).

The appropriate statistical software would be SPSS or Stata - SPSS is much easier to use. The tough thing would be compiling the data into workable variables. Also, it would help if one were better skilled at these analyses than I am (it's probably been 12 years since I ran a regression analysis). In a word, this kind of analysis can be done.

[Leones]

Wouldn't that be relatively difficult because part of development is presumably based on happiness which would be extremely difficult to pin down?

[John]

Wouldn't that be relatively difficult because part of development is presumably based on happiness which would be extremely difficult to pin down?

That's true, but partial correlation would be preferable to none at all. Jeff, do you have experience SPSS or Stata? I admit I've never even heard of these programs until now. I'd be very interested to see a report like this. It'd be a practical shoo-in for the end-of-season Best Of... Statistical Analysis award.

[Maulers]

Wouldn't that be relatively difficult because part of development is presumably based on happiness which would be extremely difficult to pin down?

That's true, but partial correlation would be preferable to none at all. Jeff, do you have experience SPSS or Stata? I admit I've never even heard of these programs until now. I'd be very interested to see a report like this. It'd be a practical shoo-in for the end-of-season Best Of... Statistical Analysis award.

The morale issue would be tough to pin down, mostly because it changes every so often and, at least to the best of my knowledge, there is no tracking of a player's morale over time. Correct me if I'm wrong on this, John. So the analysis would have to use morale as a snap-shot variable (basically whatever the morale is at the time the data is collected), which is, of course, not preferable. On the other hand, if the regression formula was robust enough (that is, if it captured a sufficient universe of important variables) it would conceivably be able to say something meaningful about morale.

I have experience with SPSS but not with Stata. And my SPSS experience has been a long time going (I don't even have it on my work computer). Nevertheless, the actual running of the statistical program is simple. It's the collecting of data and converting them into workable statistical measures that is very time-consuming. I wouldn't mind giving this a stab, but realistically it's going to be at least the summer (and even then, maybe not until June) before I could get to it.

[Tyler]

It's the collecting of data and converting them into workable statistical measures that is very time-consuming. I wouldn't mind giving this a stab, but realistically it's going to be at least the summer (and even then, maybe not until June) before I could get to it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I do believe Dan of Arlington may know how to streamline his process, as it sounds like this is what he was looking at doing for the PEBA Fantasy Baseball game. Maybe the two of you could work together?

And if I'm wrong Dan, I'm sorry for speaking for you.

[John]

Dan was indeed working with some of our .csv files for the PEBA Fantasy Baseball website. However, he didn't have access to player morale data since it wasn't germane to what he was working on. I don't think he'd be able to help here, and Jeff is right that there's no way to track morale over time in-game (which is too bad, actually - after all, you can track player development, so it would seem to make sense to track morale as well).

I'd still be interested in seeing a "snapshot in time" analysis, and I wouldn't mind waiting until the summer for it. If you feel up to it, Jeff, feel free to put it on your "To Do When I'm Damn Well Good and Ready" list. I'll be waiting eagerly and patiently.