But, sometimes good tactics and getting the most out of your players are the same thing. Usually, we think about leaders motivating and tacticians drawing in a notebook with numbers and diagrams, but there is quite a bit of overlap that we don’t often discuss.

I’d like to call your attention to a pair of players, Zack Cozart and Brandon Crawford, who have reasonably similar skill sets, but their managers used them in different ways to different effect in 2013. To get a sense of their raw production, see chart.

Crawford gets on base more often, but Cozart hits for a bit more power. Factor in their parks, and you have Crawford at 91 wRC+ and Cozart at 79 wRC+. Crawford is the better hitter, but Cozart is the better baserunner and rated a touch better defensively. All told, FanGraphs has them at 2.2 and 2.1 wins above replacement for the season. They’re both glove first shortstops who hit somewhere between 10 and 20 percent worse than league average.

When you start converting their offensive production into run values, you’re left with Crawford sitting at six runs below average and Cozart at 12 runs below average. If you look at a context adjusted number like Run Expectancy 24 (RE24) which factors in how their offensive actions contributed to the probability of scoring runs, Crawford sits at -7.2 and Cozart at -14.1. Neither was good at the plate any way you slice it.

But the interesting difference is the number of plate appearances each player had. Cozart played in two more games but had 68 more chances at bat. Cozart batted second 64 times with another 80 coming between the seven and eight spot. Crawford spent just 20 games batting second and 106 batting seventh or eighth.

Compared to their peers, Crawford and Cozart performed poorly at the plate. They were convincingly below average players at bat and brought value to the team with good defense. In other words, the right way to use them would be to make sure you were getting plenty of innings out of their glove with as few trips to the plate as possible. Bochy and the Giants did that with Crawford while Baker and the Reds didn’t with Cozart.

It’s actually an interesting consideration. There’s a line of thinking that suggests sticking with a player and trusting him to produce at the top of the order is the way to get the best out of him, but in reality, you’re just putting him into more situations in which he will fail. Cozart batted in a lot of important situations in which he didn’t succeed before he was moved out of the two spot and that was probably more damaging to his confidence than if his manager put him in the right place in the order from the start.

This isn’t meant to harp on Baker or even to stress progressive lineup structure; it’s meant to reconsider our preconceptions about what good leadership looks like. I think the conventional wisdom was that Baker sticking with Cozart was a signal to Cozart that he thought he could handle it, which would in turn make Cozart more successful. But it actually seems like Baker left Cozart in a position that would routinely pummel his confidence.

Leadership isn’t trusting your players to rise to the occasion, it’s knowing what they’re capable of and putting them in the best situation to succeed. Bochy had that from the start. He knows Crawford’s skills and hit him at the bottom of the order because that’s where Crawford will get the fewest at bats with the least amount on the line. That’s where a good fielding, light hitting player belongs.

Baker, on the other hand, left Cozart in the second spot until he had absolutely flunked out of it. One waited for his player to fail and one knew what was best from the beginning. Surprisingly, while Cozart was the worse hitter of the two, he hit higher in the order for a nearly equal offense.

I think it’s important to consider these intersections of leadership and strategy as we make judgments about managers. This is especially true in the bullpen or when deciding when to remove a starting pitcher. Players are, by nature, hypercompetitive and will fight to stay in the game. We saw that in the World Series when Lackey talked Farrell into another batter. It’s the manager’s job to know better.

Zack Cozart didn’t want to perform poorly and he wasn’t going to ask out of the second spot. Managers are paid to know what’s best for their players and their teams – and sometimes what is best means doing something that looks like you aren’t confident in your player’s ability. In reality, however, that’s better for everyone involved.

Neil Weinberg is the founder of New English D and the associate managing editor at Beyond The Box Score.