FanGraphs: Bo Porter’s thoughts about managing

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

“I think my football background has a lot to do with my approach to the game and my thought process. As coach Fry would say, ‘You have to scratch where it itches.’ Playing football for Hayden Fry at the University of Iowa, you learned that if someone shows you something that you can take advantage of — whether it’s conventional or not — you’re doing your team an injustice by not taking advantage of it.”

--snip--

“When people ask what kind of manager I’ll be, I always tell them, ‘Give me a roster and then I’ll tell you how I’m going to manage that ball club.’ You can say you’re going to be an aggressive manager and that we’re going to steal bases and hit-and-run, but if you have six guys in your lineup that can hit 25 home runs, it’s probably not a good idea to take too many chances of giving away outs. Conversely, if you have a team that doesn’t have a lot of power — but you do have guys who put the ball in play — you can put runners in motion.

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.