Astros hiring Bo Porter as 2013 manager

Good stuff from a July interview over at FanGraphs with Bo Porter, the Astros’ next manager:

Baseball has the reputation as “the thinking man’s game”. But let’s be honest about this for a moment, friends ... Football coaches discovered meaningful statistics and tendencies and analysis long before baseball people took them to heart. In systematic fashion, anyway. There are a lot of things I don’t like about football. But there are, or were for a long time, anyway, a lot of things that baseball managers could have learned from football coaches.

Because the Nationals are playoff-bound, Porter will remain with Washington until the end of the team’s playoff run, whenever that may be. When Porter does take over, will be charged with the difficult task of turning around baseball’s worst team in their inaugural AL season following consecutive 100-loss campaigns.

Update: It’s official!

Both candidates at least fit the “younger” criterion laid out by Astros GM Jeff Luhnow earlier this week.

Martinez, 47, is in his fifth year as Tampa Bay’s bench coach. Though he has no professional managerial experience, working alongside one of the game’s best managers, Joe Maddon, likely works in Martinez’s favor. A shortstop for nine different organizations across 16 major-league seasons, Martinez is very familiar with the ins and outs of big league clubhouses.

Bowa, 66, said that while he was “very impressed” with Luhnow, the team faces a lengthy rebuilding process and would be better served by a manager who could grow with the club.The Astros and Jeff Luhnow seem to be interested in the cutting edge of baseball, meshing together stats, pitch-based analytics, and traditional scouting in the post-Moneyball paradigm that’s so fashionable these days. And when you think “cutting edge of baseball”, you, uh, don’t think of Larry Bowa.

”The interview was really professional. Jeff has his ducks in a row. It’s just going to take some time.“It almost seems like it was blind date set up by a matchmaker who was simply picking names out of a hat, and everyone knew it was a non-starter before the interview even happened.

The Houston Astros were, at one point, on pace to lose 112 games. Think of a 100-loss team. Now think of a team 12 games worse than that. Eleven games is what separates the Tigers and Royals, for example. The difference between the Tigers and Royals is about the same as the difference between a 100-loss team and what the Astros were on pace for.

Since then, though, the Astros have done a lot better, with a winning record (8-7) in September. They’re stuck on 99 losses, but at least they aren’t charging toward history. And they’re enjoying this modest success with an interim manager, Tony DeFrancesco, who took over for Brad Mills in the middle of August.