Coaches and Class, Part 2: Coaching and the PMC

If you missed it, check out Part One here.

Before we dive back into the discussion of coaches and class, let’s take a step back and ask: What makes a good coach? The skill is tricky to define—we can’t really break it down into discrete tools and statistics, the way we can for players. Sometimes coaching involves instilling fundamentals; other times it’s about creativity and innovation. Some coaches succeed through strict discipline; others by being loose and flexible. Some coaches build relationships with players through warmth and camaraderie; others are challenging and contentious.

Being a good coach surely involves knowing which type of approach is appropriate for the particular situation, and being able to adapt to your personnel. But the fact that there is no clear mold to follow makes it hard to evaluate the job.

You can see this confusion in the way leagues hand out their awards for coaching, which typically amount to little more than an award for Most Surprising Team. Every year, fans and sportswriters go into the season with some expectations. When a team dramatically exceeds those expectations, we don’t just say those expectations were wrong—we attribute the difference to the coach’s ability to get the most out of the team. This ends up being a remarkably accurate predictor of these awards. The 2020 Cleveland Browns were 3.3 wins better than the Football Outsider projections—only three teams overperformed by more, and they were all already playoff teams in 2019, so their turnarounds were less noticeable. And so, unsurprisingly, Kevin Stefanski was named NFL Coach of the Year.

This also leads to some silliness around these awards. In 2017, Paul Molitor led the Minnesota Twins to 85 wins just a year after the team lost 103 games, and for that turnaround he took home AL Manager of the Year honors. But then a year later the team reverted back to 78 wins and he was let go. In 2018, Dwane Casey won NBA Coach of the Year and was fired the same year. These are not just aberrations—coach of the year awards are actually a pretty bad predictor of which coaches will keep their jobs.

All this is simply to say that, while coaching is certainly a real skill, it’s pretty hard to identify from the outside. And in the absence of a clear criteria, a coach’s skill tends to be defined in a way that favors ownership. Just look at the last decade of the MLB’s Manager of the Year Awards, combined with their team’s payroll rank, out of 30:

The trend is hard to miss. Of the 20 awards handed out, only one went to a team among the top five in payroll—SEVEN went to teams among the bottom five. Over half the time, it went to a team in the bottom third, and 70% of the time to a team in the bottom half. It’s not an ironclad rule, but clearly what is happening is that payroll is serving as a rough proxy for a team’s expectations, and then managers get the credit when teams exceed those expectations. But when teams simply pay for good players, then managers don’t seem as valuable.

It is in this sense that managers and coaches are understood as part of the PMC—they are part of the “knowledge economy,” whose jobs cannot typically be broken down into simply quantifiable measures, like widgets per hour or Wins Above Replacement. They are rewarded for strategic acumen and intelligence, with those terms being defined in such a way that often comes at the expense of the working class.

The term “professional-managerial class” was coined by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in an attempt to precisely identify a type of “middle class” worker that was not really accounted for in traditional Marxist thought. In a recent interview, Barbara Ehrenreich said, “There was a real difference between people who worked essentially telling other people what to do… and people who do the work that other people tell them to do.” This would seem to describe the difference between coaching and playing—the coach designs the offense and calls the plays; the player runs them.

But coaches, like the PMC in general, are not mere overseers or task-masters. In that same interview, Ehrenreich talks about the “service ethic” you often see among professionals, like lawyers and social workers and, yes, coaches, who see it as their calling to help players develop and reach their potential. This also lends PMC work an important cultural status.

While the PMC concept was introduced in 1977, it has gained new attention in recent years, starting in discussions of the 2020 Democratic primary, and then later in debates about whether movements like Defund the Police and student debt cancellation resonated more with the PMC or the traditional working class. It seems useful (and kind of funny) to think of coaches as examples of the PMC because these recent debates have been largely about cultural markers that divide the professional-managerial class from the working class. The two groups do often seem to inhabit different worlds: The PMC lives in high-cost cities and suburbs—the working class lives in small towns and rural communities. The PMC spent the pandemic working on Zoom—the working class got laid off or sent right back to work with scant PPE. The PMC reads Robin DiAngelo—the working class listens to Joe Rogan. The PMC drives like this—the working class drives like this.

But none of that shit really applies to the divide between coaches and players. There are certainly gaps between the two classes—age, for one, and coaches as a group are far whiter than players. But culturally, at least, they generally come from the same worlds. Coaches are usually former players themselves, and in baseball they even wear the same uniforms.

As a result, the antagonisms between player and coach get much closer to the root of the antagonisms between the working class and the managerial class. Because those antagonisms DO still exist, even when you factor out all the cultural differences. For example, coaches still approach players with the kind of paternalism that exists between the PMC and the working class—insisting that they know better than players and making decisions about discipline and strategy with limited or no input from players. More fundamentally, a coach’s material interests are more aligned with the owners, as the Coach/Manager of the Year votes show. An owner who hires a good coach or manager (or other PMC staff, like scouts and analytics departments) can save tens of millions of dollars on player salaries.

Of course, these tensions don’t mean that professionals and workers are hopelessly at odds. The goal of the original essay by the Ehrenreichs was to identify ways the two groups can work in alliance. And I think the coaching example works for that as well, but we’ll have to save that for Part Three…