What is a manager good for? Haughtily swinging his codpiece to-and-fro, pacing the dugout like a caged tiger, all the while merrily chanting, “Plip-plop! Plip-plop…”

If you take, for a second, that a manager doesn’t add a lot in the way of value to a team actually on the field, allow me to posit the following: the MOTY (as all the kids are calling it) should go to the manager that best fulfills the role that he was hired to do. At the Yankees, for example, this involves sitting on the bench looking vaguely miffed, making sure everyone has shaved and then bringing in Mariano Rivera in the 9th. Genius.

Anyway. Our own beloved Bob Geren, then.

What is the A’s priority at the moment? To bring through some promising young players before they with the World Series in 2012 against the Giants (this will happen, by the by).

So, the A’s needed a manager who wouldn’t moan and mither in the press about his GM taking away his established players, who is willing to play erratic, but talented youngsters over more consistent veterans, and who, above all, is going to act as a shield for these rising superstars, protecting them from the slings and arrows of outrageous Ratto.

In this sense, (and I daresay that his time in AAA has been a help), he’s been great. Aside from some occasional murmurs of discontent coming from veterans not getting what they consider to be their due (Giambi, J, Brown, E, I’m looking at you), he’s held the dressing room together; this is something I don’t consider to be an easy task, given three consecutive seasons of dissapointment.

Secondly, he’s always shown outward support to his young pitching staff, even through their many, many struggles. This might seem a fairly worthless excercise, but thoughout all the games I went to during the season, not once did I hear the crowd booing a starter. Now, you might put this down to other factors – faith in Beane, the seductive nature of hope in the future over the reality of the present, or just no-one turning up – but I don’t think Geren’s role, acting almost as a lighteng rod for fans’ frustrations, should be underestimated.

Also, his post game press conferences are so crushingly dull, win or lose, that reporters seemingly lose the will to live before they’re able to ask pertinent questions about, say, why Tim Trevor Cahill can’t throw strikes.

It could be argued, too, that he’s not had such success with position players, and I guess we’ll see this coming year what happens.

And here we go – I think I’ve happened on a conclusion – the best thing about Geren is that Beane has the confidence in him to be able to bring up a large number of untested players, all around the same time, with the wheels entirely falling off.

Hm, I’m not sure I’ve entirely convinced myself, but still.

I will award the Manager of the Year award to whoever got paid the least money, since he did the least to damage his team’s chances of competing.

In this case, I think that means Bob Geren is the Manager of the Year.