In his first season with the Texas Rangers, manager Bruce Bochy has just guided his team to the American League Championship Series.
But this is nothing new for the skipper, who became the seventh manager in MLB history to reach the semi-finals with three different franchises. None of them, however, have won the Championship Series on three different teams, but we’re betting Bochy will break that trend.
We can now call him the new “Mister October”.
Bochy’s most famous postseason skill is his ability to navigate three or four innings from one bullpen to another while almost always pressing the right buttons. And that’s even more important this fall, when he has one of the worst bullpens in all of major league baseball on hand.
Although it may seem paradoxical, it is refreshing to see a veteran skipper put in his little back pocket the opposing managers and their hordes of little geniuses of advanced statistics who have never set foot on a ball field. We greet John Schneider as we pass.
Bochy manages with what he sees, his head, his feeling, His experience. He runs a baseball game as if there were real human beings on the field and not just a collection of numbers that will dictate the final outcome.
Certainly, he does not completely put aside advanced statistics, he appreciates them and uses them. But he trusts his instincts, his baseball instincts.
The 68-year-old knows that his players are not computers, but rather men, and he does everything to ensure that his guys enjoy and thrive on being treated as such.
All this put together means that Mr. October once again risks taking his team to the World Series.
