![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
[This is part of a series exploring the Baseball Tarot. If you would like to prompt for a part of the game or a card from the deck, all the rest of the month is available for your curiosity, about either baseball or Tarot. Leave a comment with a prompt if you want in. All other comments are still welcome, of course.]
There is, in fact, a puppet master, pulling the strings from the shadows, rarely leaving the dugout, but working their will on the Baseball game unfolding, in opposition to the other shadowy figure in the opposite dugout. If they appear in the field, it heralds a significant change of direction for the game. They respect the umpires, even as they work to curry favor with them and protect their minions from the harsh and unyielding judgment the umpiring crew provides. While individual efforts may provide peaks and troughs of the game, these entities are tasked with the balance of short and long term, and are often executing some form of grand strategy to end up with a victory for their team. If the team does well, they prosper. If not, they often are replaced with another by the powers that hold sway over even them.
On the field, they are primal forces that move and inspire and motivate their teams to excellence. Off the field, they face fanatics and their significantly meaner and stronger cousins - sportswriters.
It's not uncommon for players that have retired from the game to stay with the organization they had a career with. Many of them end up getting jobs in the front office, as fundraisers, fan experience captains, and the like. Others become broadcasters and color commentators for various networks and programs, usually for the team that they played most prominently for. Some, however, stay in the game and move to the mentorship roles - coaches on the field and off, helping develop the next generation of talented players into seasoned veterans. Some become scouts, gathering information about the opposing teams or visiting minor league affiliates to see how the talent development is going and make recommendations about who should be promoted and who needs more time. And very few step into the role of the field manager, the nominal head of the team.
The Manager is not the owner, and not the person in charge of baseball operations - that would be the general manager. The amount of money the team has to work with for salaries, equipment, and the like is often determined by the general manager's budget for the year. While there's a desire to sneer at teams that "buy" their wins with a high payroll, it is a bit of a challenge to produce consistently winning baseball in a free agent system when your top players can be led away at any time with the promise of a bigger contract.
Before the game even starts, the manager must craft the initial lineup for the offense, deciding who will get to start the game on defense and which order the players will approach the plate on offense. They decide on the rotation of pitchers. They're even involved in decisions regarding the disabled list, trades, and in sending players to other affiliated programs in the minor leagues or calling players up to The Show. They often direct the content of practices and schedule the days off from work.
There is, however, a maxim attributed to Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke that says "No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength." This is true in baseball as well as military exercises. If the catcher is the general in the field for the defense, positioning them and signaling to the pitcher what to throw next, and the base coaches are the officer corps for the offense, giving signs about tactics and relating information about the state of the field to them, then The Manager is the Person In Charge of everything related to the baseball game. They determine how aggressive the batters and baserunners are, whether or not to put the shift on against certain hitters, who takes, bunts, and swings and when they do these things, and they have the power to call forth pinch hitters, relief pitchers, and to generally change the lineup and the defensive alignment. So great is their power that the rules state only one visit can be made by a dugout coach to the mound during any given inning. The second time the manager comes out, they have to call in a relief pitcher. They are truly the managers of the baseball game before them, responding to the situations that arise with new strategies, gathering the information from their scouting reports and analyzing it to influence decisions and produce percentage plays and sometimes playing to defy the percentages and trust in individual effort to produce the improbable. Catchers and base coaches have varying degrees of autonomy on how to execute the plan from pitch to pitch, but the manager is responsible for the overall strategic plan and decision-making for the team before, during, and after the game, and for knowing when to change the plan to a new plan that will probably work better.
Managers are also the primary contact points with the umpires. Their knowledge of the rules and procedures are on equal with the officials, always on the lookout for an irregularity or an improper process that could net extra runs, negate runs for the opposition, or collect extra outs. In the era of replay, they are given the power to initiate challenges when something that is reviewable comes up and they believe the on-field call is in error. If anyone is going to come out to talk to the officials about what they have seen, or to ask questions about the reasons behind calls, it's the manager. Partially, this is a practical thing - pleading a case with the umpire always carries the risk that they will be so unimpressed as to hand out an ejection. Position players are more valuable to keep in, managers are expendable, ish. But many a discussion between umpire and manager starts with, "That's not what I saw." coming from the manager.
About the only power the manager doesn't have to affect the game is to directly control how the players will play. They can't make spectacle happen through directly manipulating the fielders and the hitter. What they can do, however, is put the fielders and the batters into a position where those players can do great things with their talents, or, as a backup, do something that advances the cause toward winning the game, whether by getting outs, hits, or runs.
Should the Manager appear in your reading, it's a pretty clear need for the twin virtues of planning and improvisation, as well as all the requirements that go along with being a good manager - listening, considering, being approachable, fair, avoiding gossip and favoritism, and otherwise ensuring that everyone who works with you and that you supervise is able to function at their best.
As a major card, the Manager is the equivalent of the High Priest in a Rider-Waite Tarot deck. This has connections with tradition and doing things the way they have always been done, which is the downside of this card - sometimes people in power get too invested in there being one right solution, which is conveniently the solution that has always been correct and orthodox. A manager that can't adapt to new situations and take into account new information will lose a lot of games and eventually their job. Would that it also works in the real world, but it's much more likely that the blame will roll away from the poor manager. Baseball is still only metaphorical, after all.
There is, in fact, a puppet master, pulling the strings from the shadows, rarely leaving the dugout, but working their will on the Baseball game unfolding, in opposition to the other shadowy figure in the opposite dugout. If they appear in the field, it heralds a significant change of direction for the game. They respect the umpires, even as they work to curry favor with them and protect their minions from the harsh and unyielding judgment the umpiring crew provides. While individual efforts may provide peaks and troughs of the game, these entities are tasked with the balance of short and long term, and are often executing some form of grand strategy to end up with a victory for their team. If the team does well, they prosper. If not, they often are replaced with another by the powers that hold sway over even them.
On the field, they are primal forces that move and inspire and motivate their teams to excellence. Off the field, they face fanatics and their significantly meaner and stronger cousins - sportswriters.
It's not uncommon for players that have retired from the game to stay with the organization they had a career with. Many of them end up getting jobs in the front office, as fundraisers, fan experience captains, and the like. Others become broadcasters and color commentators for various networks and programs, usually for the team that they played most prominently for. Some, however, stay in the game and move to the mentorship roles - coaches on the field and off, helping develop the next generation of talented players into seasoned veterans. Some become scouts, gathering information about the opposing teams or visiting minor league affiliates to see how the talent development is going and make recommendations about who should be promoted and who needs more time. And very few step into the role of the field manager, the nominal head of the team.
The Manager is not the owner, and not the person in charge of baseball operations - that would be the general manager. The amount of money the team has to work with for salaries, equipment, and the like is often determined by the general manager's budget for the year. While there's a desire to sneer at teams that "buy" their wins with a high payroll, it is a bit of a challenge to produce consistently winning baseball in a free agent system when your top players can be led away at any time with the promise of a bigger contract.
Before the game even starts, the manager must craft the initial lineup for the offense, deciding who will get to start the game on defense and which order the players will approach the plate on offense. They decide on the rotation of pitchers. They're even involved in decisions regarding the disabled list, trades, and in sending players to other affiliated programs in the minor leagues or calling players up to The Show. They often direct the content of practices and schedule the days off from work.
There is, however, a maxim attributed to Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke that says "No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength." This is true in baseball as well as military exercises. If the catcher is the general in the field for the defense, positioning them and signaling to the pitcher what to throw next, and the base coaches are the officer corps for the offense, giving signs about tactics and relating information about the state of the field to them, then The Manager is the Person In Charge of everything related to the baseball game. They determine how aggressive the batters and baserunners are, whether or not to put the shift on against certain hitters, who takes, bunts, and swings and when they do these things, and they have the power to call forth pinch hitters, relief pitchers, and to generally change the lineup and the defensive alignment. So great is their power that the rules state only one visit can be made by a dugout coach to the mound during any given inning. The second time the manager comes out, they have to call in a relief pitcher. They are truly the managers of the baseball game before them, responding to the situations that arise with new strategies, gathering the information from their scouting reports and analyzing it to influence decisions and produce percentage plays and sometimes playing to defy the percentages and trust in individual effort to produce the improbable. Catchers and base coaches have varying degrees of autonomy on how to execute the plan from pitch to pitch, but the manager is responsible for the overall strategic plan and decision-making for the team before, during, and after the game, and for knowing when to change the plan to a new plan that will probably work better.
Managers are also the primary contact points with the umpires. Their knowledge of the rules and procedures are on equal with the officials, always on the lookout for an irregularity or an improper process that could net extra runs, negate runs for the opposition, or collect extra outs. In the era of replay, they are given the power to initiate challenges when something that is reviewable comes up and they believe the on-field call is in error. If anyone is going to come out to talk to the officials about what they have seen, or to ask questions about the reasons behind calls, it's the manager. Partially, this is a practical thing - pleading a case with the umpire always carries the risk that they will be so unimpressed as to hand out an ejection. Position players are more valuable to keep in, managers are expendable, ish. But many a discussion between umpire and manager starts with, "That's not what I saw." coming from the manager.
About the only power the manager doesn't have to affect the game is to directly control how the players will play. They can't make spectacle happen through directly manipulating the fielders and the hitter. What they can do, however, is put the fielders and the batters into a position where those players can do great things with their talents, or, as a backup, do something that advances the cause toward winning the game, whether by getting outs, hits, or runs.
Should the Manager appear in your reading, it's a pretty clear need for the twin virtues of planning and improvisation, as well as all the requirements that go along with being a good manager - listening, considering, being approachable, fair, avoiding gossip and favoritism, and otherwise ensuring that everyone who works with you and that you supervise is able to function at their best.
As a major card, the Manager is the equivalent of the High Priest in a Rider-Waite Tarot deck. This has connections with tradition and doing things the way they have always been done, which is the downside of this card - sometimes people in power get too invested in there being one right solution, which is conveniently the solution that has always been correct and orthodox. A manager that can't adapt to new situations and take into account new information will lose a lot of games and eventually their job. Would that it also works in the real world, but it's much more likely that the blame will roll away from the poor manager. Baseball is still only metaphorical, after all.
