Here we go.
That’s the thought. Not a question, not even really a statement. Just a feeling you get when you’ve watched enough baseball to sense the next ten minutes before they actually play out. Watch enough movies and the patterns start announcing themselves. The lighting looks familiar. The music comes in right on cue. Certain movements happen at certain moments, and before the scene is finished, you know what kind of story you’re in. Baseball has more games than endings. After a while, you don’t need every detail. You know the shape. You kind of know the ending. And you’re already a little tired of this particular plot.
June 6th. Wrigley Field. Section 322R
Ben Brown is dealing - 87 pitches, 5.1 IP, one hit, one walk, five punchies.
The crowd feels it. There’s a vibe that only comes out when the starter is locked in, things are humming along, and the game feels like it’s headed in the right direction. Then Craig Counsell walks out of the dugout. Same walk. Same expression. Same gesture toward the bullpen like he’s flagging down a cab he already knew was for him. No emotion on his face. A man present but feels somewhat disconnected, managing the Chicago Cubs on a June afternoon when his starter is absolutely dealing.
Caleb Thielbar comes in. Thielbar gives up the homer.
Here we go again.
We already knew. All the hands up around us. All the smacks to the forehead. Then the voice from a few seats over, “he’s over-engineering everything!”, followed by a bunch of words I don’t need to repeat, but you can imagine. My wife, a lifelong Cubs fan, didn’t even flinch. She’s seen this movie too, and she doesn’t like the feeling when Thielbar enters the game.
Baseball lies to our memory. It turns three bad moments into “always,” and one bad inning into a personality trait. That’s why I included the Thielbar graphic. Not because he’s been a disaster, and definitely not because fans are always fair. It’s because these are the moments that stick. Fair or not, they become the scenes you remember.
I’ve been sitting with this in my head for a few days now. Replaying it. Reconfiguring it. Checking it against the numbers and theories. Poking and prodding. And every time I poke it, the feeling stays the same.
Craig Counsell manages like a man protecting something rather than going after something. I’m wondering if we’re looking at someone who is always one step ahead in his own mind, but exhausted by the effort of it. He says a lot in interviews without saying much. He is analytically fluent and looks emotionally absent. He has a track record, a big contract, and the look of someone who hasn’t genuinely surprised himself in a while. He manages like he knows how the movie is cast, produced, directed, edited, market studied, and distributed. And yep, one could argue that’s baseball these days. And yes, I can see the value of that type of mind, that’s not up for debate.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Counsell isn’t just a manager making moves. Like many others, he is a symptom of his environment. It’s what happens when baseball starts leaning more towards the data than reading the room. And once I stopped looking at the move as just a bullpen decision, I started to see a couple of patterns emerge.
Then it hit me. I’ve seen this guy before.
Different city. Different job. Same brain. Same problem?
“Craig Counsell is the David Stearns of field managing.” - me
David Stearns. All process, no pulse.
All numbers and rules. Black and white in a game that has always lived in the gray. A strangely powerless kind of powerful guy- somewhat of a contradiction, walking around in a very expensive suit, making very expensive decisions that somehow still manage to feel a bit hollow.
Stearns built something genuinely worth talking about in Milwaukee. Budget constraints, limited resources, expectations - and he architected a system so good and repeatable that it still produces fruit today. That’s real and undeniable. Maybe pressure and scarcity made him brilliant. The constraints pushed him. Challenged him. Forced him to operate differently because he couldn’t just buy his way into contention. Then the New York Mets handed him the world.
And maybe something got lost in the translation.
Second-highest payroll in baseball, Juan Soto, and a roster that was supposed to be built for a World Series run. And yet here we are, still talking about why the trophy hasn’t shown up yet. The five-year championship promise came and went. Bo Bichette at $42 million a season. Pete Alonso, the Polar Bear, the powerful force of the franchise, the franchise home run leader, the guy fans felt endeared to, was allowed to walk out the door. When that big, loud, lovable force walked out the door, something went with him.
And then this nugget came out recently. Pete Alonso, at some point in what I can only imagine was a spectacular and tense conversation, looked at David Stearns and said, according to Jon Heyman of the New York Post, “When my career is being evaluated for the Hall of Fame years from now, you’ll still be fiddling with your fucking formulas.”
That’s not an opinion. That’s an indictment from the inside. From a player who lived it.
Here’s what I keep coming back to. Counsell and Stearns are not bad at baseball, obviously. That’s not the point. The point is that they represent a very specific type that the modern game has elevated, celebrated, and paid big money to, and that type may have a ceiling. Stearns has the most money to play with, and Counsell has an expensive roster to manipulate. You can see it from our seats; maybe these guys are too smart for their own good.
It’s hard to imagine Sparky Anderson getting through a modern interview process. Think about that. Three World Series, 26 years. The man was baseball - fire, understanding, pulse, presence. Today, his kind might have trouble surviving the room because he couldn’t turn instinct into a spreadsheet-ready answer in one minute. This isn’t anti-data. I’m a SABR member, and I have an LI analytics certification. I’m not arguing against information. I’m arguing against it becoming an identity. Process is necessary. But when analytics processes become identity, the game loses.
Maybe the problem isn’t just the man walking to the mound on a June day. Maybe the problem is the factory that keeps producing people like him. Baseball has always lived in the space between the plan, logic, and the pulse. The numbers matter, the matchups matter, and the prep matters. But so does the room. So does the dugout. So does the guy on the mound who has earned one more inning. So does the feeling when everyone in the ballpark knows exactly what type of movie they’re watching.
Here we go.
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Good stuff my man. Spot on