MLB Managers Have Fewer Distinctive In-Game Tendencies

A narrower set of choices

Major League Baseball managers have fewer visible tactical signatures than they once did. The numbers on sacrifice bunts and intentional walks suggest that today’s clubs have converged on a narrower range of in-game choices. That doesn’t mean every manager runs the same game, or that dugout decisions have stopped mattering. It does mean two once-familiar tactics now offer less room for a club to announce its identity over the course of a season.

That trend surfaced in a recent Baseball Prospectus piece by Patrick Dubuque, who observed that the publication’s once extensive work quantifying managers has dwindled to a few pages in its annual. I helped introduce manager comments and statistics to that book years ago, and I still miss the feature. But Dubuque’s larger point lands: the old variety has faded. The change is visible not just in the size of a section in a book, but in the shrinking gap between teams’ use of certain decisions.

Managerial identity has always been difficult to reduce to a count. A statistic can show how often a manager orders a sacrifice bunt; it can’t, on its own, explain the game situation, the hitter at the plate, or what the manager hoped to gain. Still, repeated decisions can form a recognizable pattern. When those decisions become rare across the league, it gets harder to distinguish one club’s approach from another by looking at the same numbers.

Two decisions, little separation

This season, teams recorded between nine sacrifice bunts for the Tigers and 45 for the Rays. The league average was 23, roughly one per team each week. That’s a tight range compared with the era when managers could make the bunt a defining part of their approach. The spread still shows that clubs aren’t identical, but the numbers suggest that bunting has become a limited tool rather than a routine expression of managerial preference.

A sacrifice bunt asks a team to give up an out in exchange for moving a runner. That trade can make sense in a particular situation, but it also comes with a visible cost: the offense has one fewer out with which to score. When a manager chooses it repeatedly, the choice can say something about how that manager values a single advance against the chance to keep an inning alive. When most teams use it sparingly, the tactic says less about a club’s character.

Intentional walks show a similar pattern. The Astros led with 41, while the Rockies and Twins each issued 10; the average was 18. Even the team at the top of the list used the tactic sparingly by historical standards. The intentional walk can put another runner on base, making it a costly way to manage a threat. It’s a deliberate exchange: the defense removes one hitter from the immediate matchup while giving the offense a baserunner.

Those totals don’t reveal every reason a manager made the call. An intentional walk depends on the hitter, the game situation, and the alternatives available to the defense. The count does, however, show how infrequently clubs accepted that cost across the season. Here’s the thing: a tactic can remain part of the manager’s toolkit while losing its power to define the manager.

Those totals are a long way from Gene Mauch’s 150 sacrifice bunts in a season played under the designated hitter, or Leo Durocher’s 75 intentional walks. The current figures don’t prove that every manager thinks alike, but they leave less room for a conspicuous team identity built around either choice. The historical comparisons make the shift easier to see: what once could stand out as a season-long signature now sits at a much lower level of use.

Old work, new perspective

Dubuque’s remark also stirred a personal reaction. An editor named Steven, now largely absent from the company’s institutional memory, was proud of adding manager material to the annual. That editor was me. It’s easy to feel slighted when a contribution gets dismissed without anyone recognizing who made it, even when the criticism wasn’t aimed personally. The reaction is human, but it isn’t evidence that the work still belongs in the book.

Still, nostalgia isn’t a strong argument for keeping an old feature alive. Baseball Prospectus has changed, and its current priorities matter more than preserving every editorial choice from the past. I’d rather acknowledge that I miss the work and accept that the criticism is probably right. A section can have mattered to its creators and readers, then become less useful as the publication changes what it wants to cover.

That distinction matters because the personal history and the baseball question can pull in different directions. Remembering the effort behind a feature can make it tempting to treat its disappearance as a loss in itself. But an annual has limited space, and the value of a recurring feature depends on whether it still helps readers understand the game. The numbers here are underwhelming as evidence of managerial variety, even if they’re useful evidence of how much the tactics have receded.

What a quieter dugout means

For readers, the more interesting question is what managerial identity looks like when familiar levers such as bunting and intentional walks are used so sparingly. The season’s figures point to a quieter dugout: fewer decisions that set one club apart, and less statistical space for the old managerial archetypes to stand out. That’s a real change in how managerial tendencies show up in the record, though it doesn’t tell us that managers have stopped making consequential choices.

If you’re working in this space, the challenge is to describe a manager’s approach without leaning too heavily on two tactics that no longer separate teams as clearly. Counts remain a starting point, not a complete portrait. They can identify where the clubs differ and where they cluster; explaining why requires attention to context that a season total can’t supply.

And yet. A narrower range of choices can make the remaining differences more revealing, not less. If one team uses a tactic noticeably more than its peers, that gap may prompt a better question about the situations behind those calls. The point isn’t to restore an older style of managing by wishing for more bunts or intentional walks. It’s to notice when a once-distinctive choice has become ordinary—or uncommon enough that its use deserves a closer look.

(And this is the part most people overlook.) Fewer visible signatures don’t necessarily mean that every manager is interchangeable. They mean that these particular measures have less reach as descriptions of a manager’s style. The dugout still has its choices. Just fewer easy tells.