The Family Tree

Larry Stone uses the current search for a Marine manager to touch on a theory of managers.

About 650 men have held managing jobs in the major leagues in the past 137 years, but none of them is among the first round of seven candidates for the Mariners' vacancy.

And yet each of those candidates, for all his top-level dugout inexperience, carries with him threads of the game's history, and echoes of some of the titans of the lineup card.

Call it Six Degrees of Casey Stengel.

In fact, it was the Old Professor himself who once said, "If you're playing baseball and thinking about managing, you're crazy. You'd be better off thinking about being an owner."

Odd words from someone who managed for 25 years, with tremendous success (until he joined the Mets, anyway).

Believe it or not, the roots of Stengel himself can be found entangled in the current crop of Mariners candidates, if you believe a theory by the late baseball historian, Leonard Koppett.

In his 1993 book, "The Man In the Dugout," Koppett put forth what he called the "family tree analysis" of major-league managers. Koppett posited that all modern managers are descended from three epic figures — John McGraw, Connie Mack and Branch Rickey (who managed for 10 years before becoming a seminal executive).

McGraw, he said, was the original disciplinarian. Mack was expert at finding talented players. Rickey was at the foundation of teaching fundamentals.

It's an interesting read because of bits like this:

McGraw's stem passed to, among others, Stengel, who played for him on the New York Giants in the 1920s. Stengel, in turn, greatly influenced his fiery second baseman on the Yankees, Billy Martin, who passed on his managerial intensity to Lou Piniella.

Piniella absolutely rubbed off on his own sparkplug infielder in Seattle, Joey Cora — who interviewed for the Mariners' vacancy Tuesday.

"Invariably, some of these kids, they play for a manager, and they cherry-pick the things they like, and shy away from the things they don't like," Piniella said last week in a phone interview.

There are more examples like this and examples of cross-pollination. Just go read it.