Portal:Baseball/Selected list/2

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tony La Russa, 4-time Manager of the Year

In Major League Baseball, the Manager of the Year Award is an honor given annually since 1983 to the best managers in the American League (AL) and the National League (NL). The winner is voted on by 28 members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA). Each places a vote for first, second, and third place among the managers of each league. The manager with the highest score in each league wins the award. Several managers have won the award in a season when they led their team to 100 or more wins. Lou Piniella won 116 games with the Seattle Mariners in 2001, the most by a winning manager, and Joe Torre won 114 with the New York Yankees in 1998. Tony La Russa and Sparky Anderson finished with identical 104–58 records in 1983 and 1988, respectively. Three National League managers, including Dusty Baker, Whitey Herzog, and Larry Dierker, have exceeded the century mark as well. Baker's San Francisco Giants won 103 games in 1993; Dierker's 1998 Houston Astros won 102 and Herzog led the Cardinals to 101 wins in the award's third season. In 1991, Bobby Cox became the first manager to win the award in both leagues, winning with the Atlanta Braves and having previously won with the Toronto Blue Jays in 1985. La Russa, Piniella, and Jim Leyland have since won the award in both leagues. Baker, Leyland, and Piniella have won three times. In 2005, Cox became the first manager to win the award in consecutive years. Joe Maddon and Piniella are the most recent winners. After the 1994–95 Major League Baseball strike cut the season short and cancelled the post-season, the BBWAA writers named the managers of the Yankees (Buck Showalter) and Montréal Expos (Felipe Alou), who led the leagues in winning percentage, Managers of the Year. Two franchises, the New York Mets and the Milwaukee Brewers, have not had a manager win the award.