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A Hall of Fame sportswriter analyzes managers' stragegies
The Man in the Dugout
Baseball's Top Managers and How They Got That Way
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Expanded Edition
Leonard Koppett
"Leonard Koppett is the perfect man to write a book about managers. He could've been a terrific manager if he hadn't decided to become a terrific sportswriter. Koppett understands people. He is a master of analysis, statistical or theoretical."
—Dick Schaap
Baseball fans love to second-guess managers' strategies and speculate about their styles of managing and Leonard Koppett is no exception. Koppett brings 52 years as a working baseball writer to his understanding of these men in the dugout.
His analysis is based on personal interaction with all of the managers active since 1950 and their descriptions and judgments of the generation of men who preceded them. Every manager inherits his method from some influential manager he played for. Three seminal figures—John McGraw, Connie Mack, and Branch Rickey—form the trunk of a genealogical tree whose branches have eventually intertwined, but whose key characteristics remain identifiable nearly a century later in the style of current headliners like Joe Torre, Jim Leyland, Tony LaRussa, Dusty Baker, and Bobby Cox.
This highly acclaimed study, first published in 1993, has been updated to the year 2000 and now includes some recent winning managers and completes the careers of others.
Excerpt
Read an excerpt from Chapter 1 (pdf).
Reviews
"Long before the 'scholarly' study of baseball became something of a cottage industry, Leonard Koppett was out there doing it on his own with his keen reporter's eye, tireless research, and logical mind. Through the years, reading Koppett has been a joy and an education."
—Bob Costas
"What a pleasure it is to read Leonard Koppett on the history and science—no, make that Art, with a capital A—of managing a major-league baseball team."
—Robert W. Creamer, author of Babe: The Legend Comes to Life, Stengel, and Baseball in '41
"Nobody in sports has ever provided your brain with a better workout than Leonard Koppett. To borrow from the old E. F. Hutton spot, 'When Leonard Koppett talks, I listen—very, very attentively.'"
—Al Michaels
Contents
Preface to the Expanded Edition
Introduction
Part I: The Creators
1. The Antecedents
2. John McGraw
3. Connie Mack
4. Branch Rickey
Part II: The Developers
5. Miller Huggins
6. Joe McCarthy
7. Bill McKechnie
8. Casey Stengel
Part III: The Descendants
9. Leo Durocher
10. Al Lopez
11. Frank Frisch
12. Paul Richards
13. Loose Ends
Part IV: The Moderns
14. Walter Alston
15. Ralph Houk
16. Alvin Dark
17. Billy Martin
18. Dick Williams
19. Earl Weaver
20. Sparky Anderson
21. Tommy Lasorda
22. The Rest of the Story
23. Looking Ahead
A Final Word
Appendix
Index
About the Author(s)
 | Leonard Koppett has been writing about baseball since the 1940s (his earliest memories include seeing Babe Ruth hit and John McGraw manage) for the New York City newspapers, the San Francisco Bay Area newspapers, and The Sporting News. He is author of half a dozen baseball books including Koppett's Concise History of Major League Baseball (Temple). He is the winner of the J. G. Taylor Spink Award from the Baseball Writers' Association of America. Koppett is the only sportswriter named to the writers' wing of both baseball and basketball Halls of Fame. |