With Tim Bogar in his first season as third-base coach for the Red Sox, it will be interesting to see how he approaches his new job.
Over the last four years, the position has been held by DeMarlo Hale, who moved to bench coach when incumbent Brad Mills was hired by the Houston Astros as manager. Hale has been a managerial candidate for years now (even being interviewed for the Boston job that eventually went to Terry Francona), and the shift to bench coach is certainly a promotion.
However, it left a void at third base, at which point rising star Bogar stepped in. Bogar served as first-base coach for the Red Sox last year after coming over from the Tampa Bay Rays and is considered to be an eventual manager somewhere. (Longtime Pawtucket manager Ron Johnson will fill Bogar's shoes at first for the Red Sox this season).
Boston has had its share of third-base coaches that sparked controversy in "Wavin'" Wendell Kim and Dale Sveum. The job is generally a thankless one. Slip up once and get a runner thrown out at home, and your name is plastered all over the headlines. Do everything right, and no one knows who you are.
In an article for ESPN Insider, Russell Carleton contended that most third-base coaches are not doing their job properly in their lack of sending runners. Carleton found that, on average, teams left four runs on the board on sacrifice fly judgments alone.
Carleton's math shows that third-base coaches should send runners in situations when they are at least 75 percent sure the runner can make it. This is opposed to the 90 percent rate most do. Why?
"It's called blame avoidance," Carleton writes. "People do things not because they are the best things to do but because they have the least chance of something being traced back to and blamed on them."
While Sveum received some flak for his decisions to send runners — at one point allowing then-Devil Ray Rocco Baldelli to throw out back-to-back Red Sox runners at home plate — under Carleton's contention, perhaps Sveum was acting appropriately.
"It's counterintuitive, but the third-base coach doing the most for his team is not the one who has the highest safe rate but the one who has the highest go-now rate," writes Carleton.
Does this mean that Hale wasn't aggressive about sending runners? Absolutely not — he could just have had more success at having runners be called safe than Sveum did. (Hale was not listed in either the top or bottom four in sending runners in sacrifice fly situations, indicating that he was middle of the pack.)
Time will tell whether Bogar plays it safe or goes for the jugular.
