A guest post from Larry:
Jerry Manuel and The Peter Principle
From Wikipedia: The Peter Principle is the principle that “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” It was formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book.
Jerry Manuel is a well read individual. The problem is that he has used the Peter Principle as his way of doling out playing time and roles for his players.
Early in the season he helped decide to keep Mike Jacobs and Frank Catalanotto on the squad when they were soundly outplayed by Ike Davis and Chris Carter in spring training. Then he annointed Gary Matthews Jr. as his starting CFer when every piece of evidence held that Matthews was incompetent while Angel Pagan was not.
Recognizing Jose Reyes’ comfort in the leadoff position he formulated the idea of moving him to the 3-hole in the lineup.
Having one of the best LOOGYs in the business (that’s a left handed pitcher who is death on lefthanded hitters) he immediately decided to expand his role so that he could face more of the hitters, the righties, that he is less effective against. Are you seeing the Peter Principle at work?
Let’s do some more. Fernando Nieve showed some modest abilities early on so he gained the promotion to 8th inning guy to be used 4 or 5 times out of every 7 games. Nice.
And here’s where the manager had to work extra hard to gain that elusive incompetence. Once he finally pinned Matthews’ fanny to the bench he started using Pagan in the bottom half of his order. Angel hit. So he moved him to leadoff. Angel hit even more. Then Jose Reyes returned and Pagan slid into the two-hole. Bazinga, Pagan kept hitting.
What was Jerry to do? This guy has been competent everywhere.
But his persistence paid off. Manuel moved Pagan to the 3-spot which was a double whammy. This put Castillo and his wasted bunting right back behind Reyes and finally found a spot in the lineup where Angel was overmatched.
Now there’s a lesson for you.
