The man in the dugout

Baseball fans love to second-guess managers' strategies and speculate about their styles of managing and Leonard Koppett is no exception. Koppett brings 52 years as a working baseball writer to his understanding of these men in the dugout. His analysis is based on personal interaction with all of the managers active since 1950 and their descriptions and judgments of the generation of men who preceded them. Every manager inherits his method from some influential manager he played for. Three seminal figures John McGraw, Connie Mack, and Branch Rickey form the trunk of a genealogical tree whose branches have eventually intertwined, but whose key characteristics remain identifiable nearly a century later in the style of current headliners like Joe Torre, Jim Leyland, Tony LaRussa, Dusty Baker, and Bobby Cox.This highly acclaimed study, first published in 1993, has been updated to the year 2000 and now includes some recent winning managers and completes the careers of others. Author note: Leonard Koppett has been writing about baseball since the 1940s (his earliest memories include seeing Babe Ruth hit and John McGraw manage) for the New York City newspapers, the San Francisco Bay Area newspapers, and "The Sporting News". He is author of half a dozen baseball books including "Koppett's Concise History of Major League Baseball" (Temple). He is the winner of the J. G. Taylor Spink Award from the Baseball Writers' Association of America. Koppett is the only sportswriter named to the writers' wing of both baseball and basketball Halls of Fame.