A few days ago, Ben Lindbergh of Grantland put together a stellar piece, a 2015 version of his Managerial Meddling Index. Therein, Lindbergh quantifies each of the teams in the 2015 MLB season in accordance with how often they do certain things which interrupt or alter the course of the game. Looking over the results, you might find that some of Fredi Gonzalez's rankings surprise you, and others that do not. Overall, these rankings don't tell us much about the overall effectiveness of Gonzalez as a manager, but they do offer some interesting things to think about now that we're in the long, cold offseason.

One-Batter-Faced Pitcher Appearances - Fredi's Rank: 4th

This one may or may not be surprising, depending on how you look at it. On the one hand, a common critique of Fredi's managing is that he's not all too up on the platoon advantage thing (although other times, he follows it too slavishly; go figure). Per Lindbergh's research and number crunching, Fredi ranks in the top echelon of managers in terms of using pitchers to face a single batter, and his rate of doing so is a bit greater than one standard deviation above the mean.

From a tactical perspective, it's hard to say whether ranking highly on this metric is unquestionably a good thing. On the one hand, you definitely want to set up advantageous matchups for your relievers that place them, and thus your team, in a good position to succeed. On the other hand, this needs to be done judiciously to some extent, or else some bad breaks on balls in play may lead to a never-ending inning with constant reliever swaps.

It's tempting to say that Fredi's hand was a bit forced as far as this metric. After all, he was stuck with a dreadful bullpen where often there were no right answers for a given situation. On top of that, many of the relievers he had at his disposal have awful platoon splits and can't be allowed to, in good faith, face opposite-handed hitters. So given that, perhaps 4th is not surprising. After all, you wouldn't want to have Peter Moylan, Sugar Ray Marimon, or Brandon Cunniff facing lefties, or pretty much any lefty reliever on this team facing a righty (the numbers are really grim, and Luis Avilan was the only 2015 lefty reliever on the team who could actually get righties out at all).

But, on the other hand, Fredi was also around the top five overall when working with a better bullpen in 2014.

Fredi ranks highly in this metric for 2015, and was also around the top five in 2014. That bullpen wasn't among the league's best, but it was very solid, and given a lack of lefty relief options pretty much all season (especially once everyone became enamored with the strange idea that James Russell had sustainable reverse splits), it's a little surprising that Fredi would rank among leaders in this respect.

Among other managers, there's a weird mix of teams with ineffective and effective bullpens. Teams with the most such outings are the Giants, Cardinals, and Indians. The Giants had a poor bullpen, but the Cardinals and Indians had effective ones. Meanwhile, the Royals, Orioles, and Phillies used relievers for one batter the least. The Orioles and Royals had great bullpens, while the Phillies were average in this regard. It's hard to say there's anything specific to be drawn here with regard to how bullpen construction and performance influences usage.

Again, it's hard to make a definitive value judgment here, but it seems that Fredi meddles with relief outings more than the average manager in this day and age. Sadly, Lindbergh did not collect data on how often managers pulled starters in the innings after they were allowed to hit for themselves.

Challenges Used - Fredi's Rank: 7th

I will say that speaking from the eye/memory test, Fredi does seem to use challenges a lot, and the numbers bear this out, as he challenges about one standard deviation more than most managers. The downside of using a challenge is that you lose and don't have one to use at a later point, the upside is that you actually possibly reverse a call that benefits your team rather than sitting and waiting for a situation that never comes up in the future. I'd rather have a manager that errs on the side of more challenges, and Fredi seems to do this pretty well.





However, Fredi's success on challenges in 2015 was pretty poor, and he had a bottom 5 success rate , at least through the All-Star Break. The combination of lots of challenges and losing them at an elevated rate is not a good one.





Interestingly enough, Fredi was a challenge savant in 2014, finishing in the top three in terms of overturning success last season. However, per Lindbergh's 2014 stats, he challenged at a below average rate last season. Ideally, you'd want your manager to challenge successfully and do so a lot. So far, Fredi has challenged relatively few times but in a largely successful way, and challenged a bunch in a largely unsuccessful way. Of course, these things can be and likely are interrelated: there are probably a finite number of challenge opportunities that will result in overturned calls, and challenging above this threshold may seriously dent a manager's challenge success rate. In any case, Fredi probably could have stood to be more judicious with his challenges this time around.





Hit-and-Runs - Fredi's Rank: 18th

I can't remember many hit-and-runs called by Fredi this season, so it might be that these are pretty rare in MLB these days in general. Fredi's overall rank put him just slightly below average in this regard. With that said, the Braves didn't have much of a roster for hit-and-runs: they were a below average baserunning team in aggregate (though not by much, just like a run below average in total), and while they were a top five contact team this season, that just isn't very valuable when the guys you have getting on base aren't very fast. Of the Braves hitters that avoided making outs in more than a third of their plate appearances (OBP > 0.333), Nick Markakis, Freddie Freeman, Juan Uribe, Nick Swisher, and AJ Pierzynski aren't the types of guys you send, no matter who's at the plate. Among fast players, Eric Young Jr., Pedro Ciriaco, and to a lesser extent Jace Peterson had trouble getting on base, while Eury Perez and Cameron Maybin were better but not exactly constantly there.

In general, hit-and-run frequency isn't a good or bad thing. But it looks like Fredi's roster really hamstrung him with regard to possibly calling for more of these types of plays, and it's surprising that he ranks around the middle of the pack rather than towards the bottom in this metric. (Fredi Gonzalez was similarly averse to hit-and-runs in 2014, when the Braves had a very slow team that was also terrible at making contact.)

Fact of endless amusement: Freddie Freeman was the team's best baserunner by BsR this year.

Intentional Walks - Fredi's Rank: 3rd

This also doesn't surprise me much: Fredi loves the ol' intentional pass, and issued them in 2015 at a rate of about 1.5 standard deviations above the mean. This, too is probably tied into the terrible pitching quality: worse pitching means more runners on second means more of a point where an intentional walk makes sense. Last season, without a dreadful pitching staff, Fredi was relatively IBB-averse. The guys ahead of him this season, Mike Scioscia and Lloyd McClendon (Angels, Mariners, respectively) featured subpar pitching staffs as well (below average for the Angels, pretty bad for the Mariners). On the flip side, though, the Marlins issued the fewest IBBs this season, and their pitching staff was pretty poor as well. Good pitching teams, like the Cubs, Dodgers, and Pirates, tended to be middle of the pack as far as this metric is concerned.

Overall, can't fault Fredi much here, though it's hard to say that a manager that issues a lot of IBBs should be faulted in general unless he's constantly doing so in situations that seriously harm the win expectancy or otherwise misinterpret the state of the game.

Lineups Used - Fredi's Rank: 1st

This should come as a surprise to absolutely no one. I don't think this really matters much at all, in any scheme, but for various reasons, Fredi and the Braves shuffled their lineup constantly. I'm not sure the tinkering had any effect, though, as the Braves were a consistently terrible offensive team regardless of the order in which the batters were arrayed.





The more damning evidence is likely that Fredi's lineups, as constructed, didn't follow what we currently think of as lineup best practices. But that's neither here nor there in terms of "meddling."





Pinch Hitters Used for Position Players - Fredi's Rank: 19th

Again, this is influenced at least somewhat by the roster, where Fredi mostly had a roster full of bench players, rather than a roster full of presumptive starters and a well-crafted bench. With that said, he didn't go to the well of setting up offensive platoon advantages all too often. This perhaps shouldn't be surprising as he did this at the absolute lowest rate among all managers last season. In any case, you'd like to see a manager use effective pinch-hitting more often, especially to set up platoon advantages or protect the lineup against weaker hitters getting a lot of exposure in high leverage situations, but with the current roster, what are you going to do? In a lot of cases, it should be noted that the Braves 2015 roster did not have sensible platoon-esque combinations for the same position, making pinch-hitting for a position player a riskier affair.





Pitchouts Called - Fredi's Rank: 17th This is kind of a weird one, because I truly believe that one place where Fredi excels above other managers is his ability to sniff out opposing baserunners and call appropriate pitchouts. There's been some research recently that indicates that pitchouts are kind of pointless, and this is probably mostly the case. But Fredi has shown an ability to be fairly uncanny with them (and if there were easily tracked pitchout statistics, I think they'd prove this for his early managerial tenure). Last season, Fredi led the league in pitchouts called; this season, he's slightly below average. It's possible that teams didn't run as much when Bethancourt started (as rare as that was) due to his perceived arm strength, or that Fredi and Roger McDowell didn't feel the need to saddle young pitchers with extra balls as they labored on the mound. Pinch Runners - Fredi's Rank: 13th

Fredi was pretty much dead average here, after being a bit above average in 2014. Again, the roster didn't lend itself super-well to pinch runner antics, as many of the Braves' players were either "slow, but can get on base" or "fast, but can't get on base." You wouldn't want to take one of the former out of the game for the latter, unless the run were really key. I can't think of an instance from recent history where I really wish Fredi did or didn't pinch run, so I'm inclined to give this category a resounding meh.



