Mike Scioscia: Managing For a Winning Formula

A year ago, the Anaheim Angels were playing great baseball, and their style of play took them to the World Series championship. Manager Mike Scioscia deserves much of the credit for the excitement the team brought to the Anaheim area.
 
This year Mike isn’t getting as much attention as last because the Angels are 15 games out of first place. However, I’m convinced they would be challenging again if it weren’t for key injuries to players that Mike couldn’t replace.
 
When I asked Mike how he got the team to play so well the year before, he gave me three nuggets of wisdom that I think you will find make up any winning team.
 
The first was that he picked players he could believe in. He didn’t give himself credit for molding them into a championship team. “The way they play were traits they had before,” he said. Scioscia believes guys like David Eckstein, Garret Anderson, Darin Erstad and Tim Salmon already had a supreme desire to win. All he had to do was “let the talent play out on the field.” He put together, and kept together, the group of guys he felt comfortable “were going to be the best they could be and had enough to bring a winner home.”
 
It doesn’t matter if you have the highest paid players on your team. It matters that a manager can sense that he can put the pieces together to form a team whose energy can be felt in the clubhouse and on the field to bring a level of play that he believes can win.
 
Even though the Yankees have a lot of money to spend on players, Joe Torre doesn’t get enough credit for fitting the pieces together the right way to produce a winner. Bobby Cox does it year after year in Atlanta. Many people are speculating Tony Pena will succeed Scioscia as American League Manager of the Year for the same reasons Mike won last year. He has believed in his players and gotten so much out of the Royals in such a short period of time.
 
The second thing Mike told me he did was to “create an atmosphere that the players feel is very positive and conducive to winning.” Mike felt with the talent he had that the team could be very aggressive. He created an atmosphere in which they believed that if they played sound fundamental baseball and could put pressure on the other team by being aggressive on the basepaths, they could win. Scioscia really stressed the ability to run the bases aggressively by going first to third on as many balls as they could.
 
The third ingredient to winning was that “all the team sets a tone and you connect with the passion and take it from there.” Early on the team realized that if it played sound baseball, it could win. So, the players were willing to work hard on fundamentals. They also saw that by being aggressive on the bases they could prolong innings and put together a lot of runs without necessarily hitting three-run homers.
 
By September, every team that played the Angels knew the passionate style of play with which the Angels played, and they knew they were playing a team that believed it could beat anyone.
 
By this time of the year, almost all of the contending teams have shown an ability to score runs, have quality starting pitching that can get the team into the seventh inning, and have the ability to hold a lead late in a game.
 
To pick a winner, I would look for the team that has developed a style of winning that has become contagious enough that the players have put aside personal goals and stats to create team energy.
The 1974 National League champion Dodgers team I was on developed a pattern early in the year of coming back in games to win. It seemed that manager Walter Alston was continually bringing Manny Mota or Ken McMullen off the bench to deliver key hits to allow us to go ahead late in games, and then either Mike Marshall or Jim Brewer would shut down the other team in the last couple of innings. We developed momentum from that to the point at which we never felt we were out of games, and day in and day out, we were excited about how we were going to find a way to win. We expected it and so did the teams playing us.
 
Right now, only Atlanta and San Francisco look like sure bets to win their division. The Yankees have just stretched their lead over Boston in the AL East. Then there are three teams each contending in the AL and NL Centrals while Oakland and Seattle are battling in the AL West. In addition, Boston and Seattle are also battling for the AL Wild Card, and seven teams are currently contending for the NL Wild Card slot.
 
The contending teams that are struggling to score, can’t close out games, or have recently had key injuries, are long shots to me.
 
I look for the teams that have a manager who has applied everything Mike Scioscia did last year and developed a style of winning that has become contagious. With so many teams still in contention any one of many teams could win. But, I feel confident that whichever team wins will have been led by a manager like Scioscia, who believed in his guys, created a positive winning atmosphere, and, most important, connected with his team’s passion and took it from there.
 
It’s going to be an exciting September.
 
Note: Since this article Mike is still the manager and has kept the Angels in contention including this year, 2007.
 
By Geoff Zahn Former Head Baseball Coach University of Michigan and 12 Year Major League Veteran Pitcher