Admittedly, I am a big Gene Mauch phan and I know there are more than a few fellow phans from the Mauch era on this site who don't feel the same way...but I was amazed at how many of the revolutionary ideas that he used were common place in the playoffs and WS.
To wit, Mauch was a big believer in using starters in the bullpen to pitch on their normal throwing days. In 1964 alone, Bunning, Short, Bennett and Mahaffey [his 4 main starters] all pitched occasionally out of the bullpen and his two aces [Bunning and Short] both recorded multiple saves that year.
And Mauch routinely played the percentages [lefty-righty] when setting his batting order, something that he was often criticized for doing. He also often switched outfielding positions during a game to increase his defensive odds of success, seeing a Callison in the box score with a RF-LF-RF-LF-RF during a game, with Covington showing just the opposite occurred quite often.
Mauch was also a big proponent of getting ahead early [thus his use of the sacrifice bunt], believing it increased his teams odds of winning, and much was made of Boston's 10-0 record in the playoffs when scoring first.
Mauch also was a big believer of using all his players during a game and he often would use 16-17 guys in various roles, from pinch hitting to pinch running, from defensive replacements to using pitchers to face one hitter.
i found it most interesting that the very things Mauch tried to do during his team's 10 game losing streak [using starters on short rest, playing youngsters like Johnson and Phillips against pitchers like Blasingame because they had success against them recently in the minors, and platooning his players relentlessly] were many of the same things that Cora and Roberts did well during the post season.
I understand all of the reverse arguments against Mauch, afterall I was agonizing like the rest of us every night during that horrible stretch, but recently Peter Gammons wrote an article for The Athletic about some past baseball figures who belonged in the Hall of Fame for their overall contributions to the game, and Mauch was one of them.
Gammons argued, somewhat convincingly, that Mauch had done so many things to revolutionize the game and was in many respects way ahead of his time. To me, this WS was a vindication of all that Gammons wrote.
The biggest difference between the way Cora and Mauch managed was that players like Price, Kelly and Pearce were successful and players like Herrnstein, Covington and Baldschun failed. Because both managers used many of the same strategies.