Talk:List of Major League Baseball managers with most career wins

Joe Girardi

The "Win Percentage" section qualifies the list as 400 minimum wins, but then pains to mentions that Joe Girardi would qualify but he doesn't have 400 wins. Mentioning him here is useless, because he doesn't qualify--period. If and when he reaches 400 wins, feel free to add him.63.239.65.11 (talk) 16:23, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

The reason I had him included is due to him being the only current manager who has the win percentage to qualify. He is so close that I have considered expanding the table to 350 win managers to let him be on (and I was the one who created the arbitrary 400 win cutoff). I feel he is so close he does warrant a mention. If there were multiple managers in his situation, I would keep him off, but his is a unique situation. (Either way, it is not a pressing issue. Assuming he returns with the Yankees, he'll probably reach the 400 win mark sometime next June or so.) --- Dralwik|^{Have a Chat} 20:58, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

How about having an extra section listing the records of the 25 current managers who aren't already on the list, without regard to number of games won or lost? That could be useful and interesting just by itself. And of course Girardi will float to the top of that list and can be moved to the other list once he hits the magic number. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:25, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Ah, that is a good suggestion, although perhaps suitable for a different article. When I have time, I'll look into creating a third table, of all current managers sortable by wins, losses, and win percentage. Interestingly, the next two after Girardi in active managers not qualifying for the list were Ken Macha, at a .540 percentage, followed by Joe Torre at .538. Tony LaRussa is the returning manager with the best record (.535) not to make the list after Girardi. Dralwik|^{Have a Chat} 21:35, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Maybe for that percentage table, instead of a minimum number of wins, how about a minimum number of games - kind of like with pitchers won-lost percentage, or analogous to batting average championship: Batters have to have 502 plate appearances, except that if they have, say, 482, and you add 20 outs, and they still come out on top, then they win. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:38, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

OK. I'll try doing the list with a minimum of 600 games managed. Dralwik|^{Have a Chat} 00:05, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Updated. The new cutoff increased the pool of managers from 156 to 211, but added only three slots to the list, one of which was Girardi (and also revealed that BR's list of managers sorts a little off by percentage, as I was checking by calculator). So this should settle this discussion. Dralwik|^{Have a Chat} 00:33, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

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Duplicate list merged

I've merged in a duplicate list, while keeping this page intact as this list is much more thorough. --- Dralwik|^{Have a Chat} 03:45, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

Article merged: See old talk-page here

Win percentage table?

I'm confused by the Win percentage table. What's the source for it?

The issue is that for the 23 managers in this table that are also on the 1,000 wins table the total number of games do not match. I have confirmed that for each of the 23 that in the 1,000 wins table the numbers are for the regular season and do not include post-season wins/losses. The first part of the table has the wins/losses from the 1,000 game table, the total of those two and resulting percentage. The second "Games" column is from the Win percentage table and finally the difference.

At first I thought the difference was the post-season results but those are available in the articles for two players. Davey Johnson has a 20–19 post season record and yet his total in the Win-percentage table is two higher than the regular season record. Tony La Russa has a 70–58 post season record yet his total in the Win-percentage was four higher than his regular season record. I deleted Tony La Russa from the Win-percentage table as his percentage was .536 which was below the .540 cut off used for this table.

Rank	Name	Wins	Losses	Games	Pct.	Games	Diff
1	Joe McCarthy	2,125	1,333	3,458	0.615	3,487	29
4	Frank Selee	1,284	862	2,146	0.598	2,180	34
5	Billy Southworth	1,044	704	1,748	0.597	1,770	22
7	John McGraw	2,763	1,948	4,711	0.586	4,769	58
8	Al Lopez	1,410	1,004	2,414	0.584	2,425	11
9	Earl Weaver	1,480	1,060	2,540	0.583	2,541	1
11	Harry Wright	1,225	885	2,110	0.581	2,185	75
13	Cap Anson	1,295	947	2,242	0.578	2,288	46
14	Fred Clarke	1,602	1,181	2,783	0.576	2,829	46
17	Davey Johnson	1,188	931	2,119	0.561	2,121	2
20	Steve O'Neill	1,040	821	1,861	0.559	1,879	18
21	Walter Alston	2,040	1,613	3,653	0.558	3,658	5
23	Bobby Cox	2,504	2,001	4,505	0.556	4,508	3
24	Miller Huggins	1,413	1,134	2,547	0.555	2,570	23
27	Billy Martin	1,253	1,013	2,266	0.553	2,267	1
32	Mike Scioscia	1,066	878	1,944	0.548	1,944	0
35	Charlie Grimm	1,287	1,067	2,354	0.547	2,368	14
38	Sparky Anderson	2,194	1,834	4,028	0.545	4,030	2
40	Hughie Jennings	1,184	995	2,179	0.543	2,203	24
43	Leo Durocher	2,008	1,709	3,717	0.540	3,739	22
43	Joe Cronin	1,236	1,055	2,291	0.540	2,315	24
44	Danny Murtaugh	1,115	950	2,065	0.540	2,068	3
N/A	Tony La Russa	2,728	2,365	5,093	0.536	5,097	4

Note that I focused on the 23 managers that were in both tables simply for ease of doing the comparison math as I dropped both tables into Microsoft Excel. I suspect that if we research the 23 managers that had less than 1,000 regular season wins that we'd also see their "Games" total was higher than expected in this table. --Marc Kupper|talk 08:54, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

All numbers are from the Baseball Reference managerial table. The reason for the number of games discrepancy is simple: tie games. If you notice, the difference is much more marked for early managers like Clarke and McCarthy and much less for modern managers like Cox and LaRussa, reflecting the almost total elimination of tie games in baseball. However, I'm not sure how LaRussa wound up on the win percentage table, as I maintained the list right at the .540 cut off. Dralwik|^{Have a Chat} 01:07, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

Thank you - that all makes sense now. I reordered those parts of the table to be by the percentage to all decimal places rather than the version where it was rounded to three decimal places. I'm wondering if we should include the wins and losses so that it'll make sense to someone else who may come along and decided to check the math. --Marc Kupper|talk 06:10, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Feel free to add the win-loss numbers; they probably would make the table clearer. The main reason I didn't add them was simply to cut down on how many numbers for the active managers I would have to update, but two more numbers for the four or five active managers won't be difficult at all. Dralwik|^{Have a Chat} 01:00, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

That's a good point on the increased workload. One option is to change the wording to note that the tables are only for completed seasons so that we don't get into day-by-day editing (and sometimes by the hour) such as what happened with this article in the past. As it is, sources such as www.baseball-reference.com have not updated their manager pages to include the 2011 season other than for Tony La Russa though for La Russa the site does not include his most recent postseason results.

The following managers were all active in the 2011 season but baseball-reference only has data on them for up to the 2010 season. The Wikipedia article has not been updated yet to include their 2011 results though that could be done if we look at the team records which I included here.

Manager	baseball- reference	2011 results
Jim Leyland	leylaji99	81-81
Dusty Baker	bakerdu01	91-71
Bruce Bochy	bochybr01	92-70
Mike Scioscia	sciosmi01	80-82
Terry Francona	francte01	89-73
Charlie Manuel	manuech01	97-65
Joe Girardi	girarjo01	95-67

I did not update the main article as it'll be a bit of work as the place numbers for much of both tables also changes. Do you already have a spreadsheet that generates the tables? I typically manage tables like this a spreadsheet that also generates the wikitext. If you don't have a spreadsheet then I'll update the one I have and see if I can post it to Google docs.

I heard back from the editor that had added La Russa to the second table. That was an error on his part. He had accidentally used La Russa's St. Louis percentage (.544) rather then the entire career (.536). --Marc Kupper|talk 22:15, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

No spreadsheet on my end, as I've just been using the BR table. However, during the season and a few days afterwards the managerial table was fully up-to-date. That strange "reversion" to 2010 I believe is part of the offseason maintenance of the site. The current tables are all up-to-date, and all active managers include 2011. For example, right now BR has Jim Leyland at 1493-1518. 2011 had his Tigers go 95-67, to bring him to the article's 1588-1585. Also, in that chart of yours, I'm a bit puzzled as to why the record column is using the 2010 records. Next season, I can keep track of the daily editing for both tables, inclusive of wins and losses on the percentage table. Dralwik|^{Have a Chat} 02:04, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

I see my mistake. I was on BR's Jim Leyland manager record page. Since the page ends at 2010 I clicked on the word "Detroit Tigers" on that line thinking it would bring me to the page for the Tigers most recent season. I was not paying attention and did not notice it brought me to the page for the Tiger's 2010 season... Your numbers and the wiki table are correct. --Marc Kupper|talk 20:21, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

A better asterisk?

I know daggers are often used in place of asterisks, when asterisks are already used, but they look so similar to crosses used to indicate someone has died. I thought, "Joe Torre died?" until I noticed that Tony LaRussa, who is still managing, also had a dagger.

Showalter

Buck Showalter has 1600 wins as of 7/3/22. 68.207.188.191 (talk) 16:55, 4 July 2022 (UTC)