Process to Check the Delta Flight Status ($1554) · Snippets · Snippets

If I knew a guy had a problem, I gave him a chance to come forward and let the ballclub help him.That’s a guy you can work with, because he’s honest with himself and still willing to be honest with you .But other guys, if you give ‘em the same chance, stay in the shadows.That’s when you call off the hunt.Get him off the reservation.No ballplayer should ever get into the habit where he drinks before a ball game .When I had one of those boys, I said, ‘Well, this man is limited .These are examples of a manager’s preferences and tactical hobbyhorses being utterly irrelevant to his personnel choices, which have been eviscerated by entropy.As Stengel said, Percentage isn’t just strategy.If a situation calls for a bunt and you have a batter who can’t bunt, what’s the percentage of bunting? Miller Huggins might have added, Managing is not so difficult.What makes evaluation even more difficult is that even if a manager has Pujols, Gardner, and Halladay, he might not get the desired results.Managers being fallible human beings, sometimes they just plain miss.The Indian center fielder I inherited didn’t impress me at all.Roger Maris had difficulty catching fly balls close to the wall.In spring training, one of my coaches was assigned to spend 30 minutes every day hitting balls over Maris’s head so he’d get rid of his fear of colliding with the wall.Excessive effort was not Maris’s problem.He didn’t look very impressive with the bat either, and in his own words, ‘I was born surly.’ He would not have won any personality contests.I didn’t find much playing time for him once the season started.Similarly, Cito Gaston won two championships with a mostly veteran Blue Jays club in 1992 and 1993, but clashed with younger players John Olerud and Shawn Green.Each new player delivered in the spring to a big league manager under [the] farm system method represents upwards of $100,000 of corporate spending for bonus and salary, scouting, study, optioning, supervision, transportation, teaching and even medical bills .Extension of front office operation, then, comes as the manager tests the new player under big league conditions.A single look, a few innings of competition in a game already lost will not suffice.He represents a small fortune.Was it wasted or not?If a big league manager’s pride and ego thrive upon his unique ability to detect talent or lack of it when others can’t, he’ll never get along with the front office .Decisions based on whim or caprice are useless.As a corporate employee, the manager must return a fair and concrete appraisal of the rookie’s value .He must get results from players handed over to him or give a valid reason for their failure.Torre initially ordained Jeter as his starter, but reportedly less than thrilled about playing a rookie shortstop, began to backtrack, insisting that Jeter would only be given an opportunity to win a job.A dynasty was born in that moment, perhaps in spite of its manager.The human element of managing is everything.In contrast, the strategic element is painfully, pitifully small.As stated earlier, Whitey Herzog has long since been retired, and his gogo tactics went with him.Even when they have not, when managers have taken risks, they have not often worked.This prompted Stengel to observe, They say you can’t do it, but sometimes it doesn’t always work. It didn’t.Three years later, the situation had reversed and the Yankees were chasing the Indians.Stengel briefly tried a power lineup in which Yogi Berra played third and Mickey Mantle shortstop, but it accomplished nothing.In 1964, Gene Mauch tried to staunch what would become a historic bout of bleeding by his Phillies team by starting Jim Bunning and Chris Short on two days’ rest.These outlandish gestures had little more impact than does the daily effect of a bunt here and a bunt there.Leo Durocher created the Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff when he realized he could win the 1951 pennant by playing his ex–center fielder at third base and an outfielder at first.Making bunt signs and calling for the hit and run had little to do with it, as much as Durocher might have preferred to think otherwise.Those managers who best utilized these tactical tools influenced their team by an average of about half a win in the standings.Not coincidentally, those who used those tactics best were also those who used them least.All managers were burned by intentional walks, but in their best seasons managers gave themselves fewer chances to be hurt by this tactic.One of the worst things a manager can do is force a team without speed to run.We have finally found areas in which managers can have a dramatic influence on their teams, but it is a negative one.Among recent managers, Clint Hurdle achieved this counterproductive feat in four of his six full seasons as manager with the Rockies, while Dusty Baker has done it three times for three different teams.Both managers continue to be employed, suggesting that skills other than a facility with the Xs and Os of baseball carry a greater weight with general managers when choosing a skipper.For both batters and hurlers, Birnbaum created algorithms that determined how they should have done in a given season based on what they did in surrounding years .Running everyone who played under a manager through these algorithms should provide an idea of how well he did at coaching and leading his men [emphasis [added].The](https://my.bankstreet.edu/ICS/Campus_Life/Campus_Groups/Child_Life_Program/Group_Collaboration.jnz?portlet=%5bICS%5d_ForumPortlet&screen=PostView&screenType=change&id=bee5a707-fef7-4829-8a58-ae0efa38526a) logic bounds like a gazelle on the savannah.However, such estimates or projections, as the very name implies, are purely hypothetical.Paraphrasing Shakespeare, the fault is not in our baseball stars, but in ourselves.If the projections were gospel, they wouldn’t have to play the games.None of these elements reflect in any way on the manager.Jaffe, though, is married to this notion, saying that though his analysis may be imperfect, I do not believe in limiting myself to mathematic rationales.Jaffe excepts the results because they confirm his beliefs, not because they are illustrative of reality.Jaffe’s method assigns managers responsibility for things that have nothing to do with them, including the volatility of teams under certain conditions, be they maniacal or impoverished owners or simply the vagaries of the modern free agent market.Today, teams are rewritten each winter in a way inconceivable only 30 years ago.Yet, the more static days of the reserve clause offer evocative testimony of the wisdom of not giving managers overmuch credit for the records of their teams.Whether the manager was Durocher, Burt Shotton, Durocher again, Shotton once more, or Chuck Dressen, the outcome for the club wasn’t much different.The only continuity that mattered was that of the roster and general manager Branch Rickey, who did the most to create it.The standing at present is 53 disputes, with Ruth winning them all. This did not change until general manager Ed Barrow banned the owners from the clubhouse and Huston sold out after announcing to the press that Miller Huggins has managed his last game as a Yankee, only to find out he could not make the firing stick.Huggins confessed to Barrow, I wouldn’t go through the years from 1919 to 1923 again for all the money in the world. Huggins later argued that the Yankees could have won five straight pennants, from 1920 to 1924, if they hadn’t loafed, a reference to his being undermined in matters of discipline.Richards’s last White Sox team had three starting position players and one starting pitcher in common with his first.Asked almost 40 years later about the deal, Bauer shouted, That bastard in Baltimore wouldn’t do it!That son of a bitch!Later they traded Epstein even up for Pete Richert.Williams, left field, Blair in center, Frank Robinson in right.With the team trailing by eight games and only a month to play, the veterans decided to play inside baseball with their own set of signals.Second baseman Bobby Grich recalled, Earl did have a strategy for that year .We didn’t have Frank Robinson and Boog Powell and that was what Earl was used to in the previous four, five, six years.If you know you can do this, Earl might not realize you have the confidence to do a hit and run, so work a sign with the guy on first base.’ Weaver, said Grich, had momentarily misjudged the team.It was one month out of his career .As Reggie Jackson said of Steinbrenner after he was inexplicably held out of a postseason game, That sonofabitch.In some ways, managers are the game’s most pathetic creatures, held responsible for all kinds of events that are out of their control, while their most dramatic and direct actions have negligible or a negative impact.The next season his team reversed its record, something he would not be able to undo in three more seasons of futile effort.Stengel, who had won the 1949 championship with an aging Yankees team that had been predicted to finish a faint third, inherited the Sporting News award.Meeting Meyer that winter, Stengel quipped, Ain’t it funny, Bill, how all of a sudden I got so smart and you got so dumb? The Ol’ Perfesser had been around long enough to understand that there is only so much in life that can be controlled by man or manager, and that it’s the ballclub that makes the man.The search for objective knowledge in baseball will go on forever, but this is one truth that we may be forced to accept without numbers.Same pitcher, same environment, vastly different results.It might seem as if Greinke flipped a switch and salvaged his season at the start of July, but his underlying performance tells a different tale.What does this have to do with relievers?For years, owners and general managers have been shelling out millions to bolster their bullpens without seeing a substantial return on their investment.The small edge in save percentage that employing an elite reliever as closer confers doesn’t justify an extra expenditure to obtain a player who has been employed in that role in the past.That means that team can get by without established closers, but while it should avoid paying a premium for past saves, it also needn’t necessarily settle for mediocrity.From 2009 to 2010, the Brewers paid Trevor Hoffman $13.5 million to serve as their closer as he marched toward 600 saves.Of course, even once they identify their best relievers, managers tend not to use them optimally, reserving them for save situations that don’t properly leverage their talents.The outcome of the last serious attempt to replace the status quo with a system that has come to be known as a closer by committee, undertaken by the 2003 Red Sox, makes it unlikely that we’ll see another such effort soon.Closer by committee, a term coined by the Boston media, was something of a misnomer, since the plan depended on having no true closer at all.Boston’s otherwise sound strategy was sabotaged by two failures of execution.Chad Fox predictably pitched well only until he got hurt, and Bobby Howry, Ramiro Mendoza, and an assortment of other journeyman arms pitched poorly.When the personnel failed, the plan took the blame, and before long, Boston was back to depending on a closer like the rest of the league.As Alan Embree, a lefty who pitched fairly well out of that pen, later remarked, We lost four of those guys and had to make do with what we had.Then after that, you’re being criticized for anything that goes wrong.Another culprit behind the exorbitant going rate for bullpen help is the high rate of turnover among leading relievers.Top players at every position are susceptible to a statistical phenomenon known as regression to the mean, the tendency of extreme observations to become less extreme with repeated trials.However, relievers, dependent as they are on the vagaries of good and bad bounces, stand to suffer even more after enjoying a successful season.On average, over 60 percent of the bullpen top 50 turns over in a single season.That percentage has only increased in recent years, as more relievers have crowded major league rosters, pitching even fewer innings apiece.