By Steve Sailer
02/04/2022
Earlier: Do NFL Coaches Only Have Their Jobs Due To White Privilege?
iSteve commenter ScarletNumber follows up my post that 22 of the 27 current NFL head coaches did not play in the NFL with baseball manager stats:
I decided to do the same for MLB managers. Out of 30 MLB managers, only 6 didn’t play in the majors.
The median manager played 10 years in MLB:
• Terry Francona (Guardians)
• Dave Roberts (Dodgers)
• Bob Melvin (Padres)As for the other end of the spectrum, Dusty Baker (Astros) had the longest MLB playing career at 19 seasons, most notably with the Dodgers in the late 70s / early 80s. I would argue the manager with the most distinguished playing career is Don Mattingly (Marlins), who played 14 seasons with the Yankees and was the 1985 AL MVP.
Looks like 24 of the 30 current big league managers are non-Hispanic whites, four are Hispanics (three born in the U.S. mainland, one in Puerto Rico), one African-American (Dusty Baker, who has been around so long I can recall Vin Scully introducing him to the radio audience in, probably, 1968, when he was called up as a teenager to play in the Braves outfield with Hank Aaron), and one (Dave Roberts of the Dodgers) is half African-American and half-Japanese.
Non-American Hispanics are underrepresented among baseball managers, but nobody in the media cares.
I did a quick look at the 30 NBA head coaches.
It looks like 14 are black, one Mexican-American (James Borrego of Charlotte) and one half white-half Filipino (Erick Spoelstra).
It appears only 12 were NBA players, although some others played some pro ball overseas. Interestingly, at least three did not appear to have played college basketball: two were managers for their college team (i.e., non-playing waterboys who do grubby work for the coach) and one, Taylor Jenkins, was a Wharton quant.
A quick look suggests that various somewhat improbable underlings (such as Borrego and Jenkins) in the Coaching Tree of Gregg Popovich of San Antonio have been hired as NBA coaches in the hope of catching that Spurs magic.
At least two are sons of NBA coaches: Wes Unseld Jr. and Stephen Silas, although I may be overlooking some.
I don’t really know enough to explain why only 19% of NFL head coaches were NFL players, 40% of NBA coaches, but 80% of MLB managers.
One theory is that winding up a high school football coach is the best job and a high school baseball coach is the worst job of the three, so not so many baseball guys stick it out in the game unless they’ve got a shot at the big time. I don’t have data on high school coach salaries, but the top college baseball coach makes $1.3 million (which ain’t bad), while the highest paid college football coach, likely new USC hire Lincoln Riley, makes around $10 million, or about eight times as much.
On the other hand, Texas high school coaches aren’t really paid that much. This article says the coach at Westlake Austin, Todd Dodge, who just beat the coach (who is his son) at his old school, legendary Southlake Carroll, for the Texas 6A giant schools championship, makes $150,000, which is really nice but probably about what U. of Alabama coach Nick Saban spends annually on dog walkers.
So I’ll just fall back to my idea that guys love football.
Your theory?
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