In his 18 years as a major league outfielder, 11 with the New York Yankees, Lou Piniella did not stand out as a candidate for a post-career job as a manager. His most outstanding attribute was his consistency for his honesty and his candor. (How often do you find a manager who is honest and candid?)

Probably the best example of that Piniella trait came at the height of the Yankees’ firestorm of George and Billy and Reggie. The owner, the manager and the superstar were constantly saying insulting things about each other that required responses from the others.

In one instance, two reporters went to Piniella at his locker at Yankee Stadium and asked him about something that one or two of the tragic trio had said. We offered to keep his response anonymous if he preferred.

“If you don’t use my name, don’t use what I say,” Piniella remarked in a stunning and unexpected response.

Piniella, who retired after 23 years as a manager with five different teams, has written a book with Bill Madden, a veteran baseball writer (“Lou…” HarperCollins). While Piniella’s career was interesting and productive, I found his opinions even more interesting. That they agree with mine could have something to do with that.

I knew Piniella from his first day with the Yankees in spring training of 1974. That was the day that Piniella met the Yankees’ new manager, Bill Virdon. It was not love at first sight, a development Piniella tells about in the book.

The players, Piniella writes, “quickly came to discover” that Virdon “was a stern taskmaster.” Piniella and Bobby Murcer, I recall, especially did not care for Virdon’s methods. Murcer was used to the easy-going way of Ralph Houk, Virdon’s predecessor, and Piniella simply didn’t like to run or otherwise work hard.

“Virdon was like a Marine drill instructor,” Piniella recalls. “All that was missing was the combat fatigues. He never smiled, said little and was all business, a stickler for physical fitness and fundamentals.”

And then Piniella relates the message Virdon delivered to him: “If there’s one thing I know about this game, it’s that you can’t win unless you have a good outfield.” The manager, Piniella writes, made his point “by putting me and all the outfielders through the most extensive and grueling drills I ever experienced.”

Though at the time Piniella might have doubted his chances for survival, he did survive and went on to play 11 more seasons, then broadcasting for a year before becoming a manager. Incidentally, Piniella acknowledged that he had one of his best years as a player under Virdon.

Personally, I thought Virdon was terrific. His honesty made him stand out among managers, and reporters can ask no more from a manager than honesty.

To be honest myself, I have to acknowledge that as a manager, Piniella occasionally slipped and was less than 100 percent honest. However, to put that statement in perspective, I don’t recall that those instances were major.

Meanwhile, I can’t say I expected Piniella to become a manager. He didn’t act like someone who could be disciplined enough to manage 25 players. Nor can I recall anyone saying during Piniella’s playing career that he would make a good manager.

And I wonder if he had played for an owner other than George Steinbrenner that he would have been hired to manage that owner’s team. Steinbrenner made him the Yankees’ manager for the 1986 season replacing Billy Martin.

Piniella was a Yankees’ coach briefly after he retired as a player in 1984, then replaced and was replaced by Billy Martin as the manager in Steinbrenner’s strange system.

When Martin replaced Yogi Berra only 16 games into the 1985 season, the owner instructed Martin, Piniella writes, to prepare Piniella to manage in the majors. That scenario almost certainly meant Steinbrenner would replace Martin with Piniella for the 1986 season, which he did.

To Martin’s credit, Piniella says, “he did do everything he could to prepare me.”

As I said, I found Piniella’s views on relatively recent baseball developments the most interesting part of “Lou.”

One example: the new metrics, which Piniella includes under the label sabermetrics.

“Call it the invasion of the Ivy League mathematicians. Every team in baseball now has a small army of math wizards working in the front office, breaking down every aspect of the players to determine value.”

Piniella isn’t exaggerating the proliferation of Ivy League graduates in baseball front offices. Many of them are general managers, the chiefs of the front office, who have replaced the men who used to be general managers, baseball lifers.

The statistics they deal with are called advanced metrics, suggesting they are better and say more about players than the old-fashioned statistics – batting average and runs batted in, for example.

Pinella writes:

“When people say a pitcher’s wins or a hitter’s RBI are two of the most meaningless statistics in baseball because they are dependent on the performance of other players, I get it. I understand in this new age baseball there are many far more comprehensive formulas to evaluate players, but in my opinion it’s becoming way too complicated.

“The favorite stat among the sabermetrics crowd is WAR, or wins above replacement, whatever that means. It’s a stat so vague and complicated, even the creators of it can’t seem to agree on what it should be made of. Yet most of the baseball executives and baseball writers today use it as gospel.”

“What they’re doing is turning human being into a statistic. Scary, if you ask me.”

Piniella offers other criticism as well. The newest gimmick: measuring bat speed.

“…do I really need to know how fast a struck baseball gets out of the ballpark? How does that help a manager win a ball game?”

Piniella refers to the gimmicks devised by Major League Baseball Advanced Media. The system, used by television and radio, measures the distance a baseball travels, how fast it goes, a fielder’s path to a ball and assorted other nonsense that means nothing but enables teams to sell commercial time that is attached to the announcer’s recitation of the results produce by Statcast.

Just think. In another part of his life Piniella could have used those results on his game telecasts.

Piniella also doesn’t endorse pitch counts or limits on the number of innings a pitch can pitch. He writes:

“By now, you probably get the idea I’m somewhat baffled by the way pitchers are being babied in baseball today.”

And then there are defensive infield shifts and instant replay, which managers use to challenge umpires’ calls.

Replay has virtually eliminated arguments between managers. Piniella, of course, was infamous for his arguments with umpires, which included hat tossing, base throwing, dirt kicking and lots of expletives.

“Like sabermetrics, this is another example of the human elements being slowly eroded from the game.”

He adds:

“I realize instant replay would have saved me tens of thousands of dollars in fine money, but it would have been at the expense of my passion. A lot of times I was more than willing to take the fine in an effort to demonstrate to my players that I was fighting for them. Can’t do that anymore.”