Hire the Right People, Get Good Results

I've always been fascinated by sports management.  As a fan of specific teams, my enjoyment of a sport over months and even years is affected greatly by who is running the team - the president or owner, the general manager, the manager or coach on the field.  The players themselves are most important of course, but for the most part, the players perform close to expectations much of the time.  Peyton Manning is a great quarterback.  JaMarcus Russell is not (at least not yet).  The Colts went 12-5.  The Raiders were 5-11.  These are not surprising results.  And there are many ways to build a team.  Free agents generally don't work in football, where it seems like "system" and coaching are of paramount importance, while baseball teams win in a bunch of different ways.  In college basketball, the only other sport I follow intensely, recruiting is at least half of the battle, maybe more, and in this case the coach/GM role is merged.  The point is, there are a lot of routes to success in every sport and luck plays a great role, so when a team I'm a fan of is running things so poorly that a blind monkey with only dial-up access to the Internet can predict it will suck, that gets me a little upset.  Take the Raiders, for instance.  They just set an NFL record for most seasons in a row with 5 wins or less.  Five in a row.  They were in the Super Bowl in 2003 (with Jon Gruden's team).  Which means they've had double-digit losses every year since they made the Super Bowl.  That gets me a little upset. 

Or take the Phillies between 1998 and 2005.  We were run by the same GM the entire time (Ed Wade).  He had a fascination with overpaying aging relievers and doing little else to help the team, besides trading prospects for those aging relievers.  We had skinflint owners unwilling to purchase any free agents.  And we had a losing record most of those seasons.  That can tend to turn the fans off.  Wade was belatedly fired, Pat Gillick came on board and in three years, we'd won a World Series.  I mean, seriously, was it really that hard?  Because it's not like anyone ever thought it was a good idea to trade Curt Schilling for Travis Lee and Vicente Padilla or Scott Rolen for Placido Polanco -- well, no one other than our management did, and we (the fans) suffered.  It just makes me so pissed that someone in charge of my sports happiness has no fucking clue what he's doing.  Ruben Amaro has taken over the job after Gillick's latest retirement and his biggest offseason move (signing Raul Ibanez) was roundly and correctly criticized.  When our offense drops off in Pat Burrell's absence and our defense doesn't improve (because we found the one major league left-fielder that is actually as bad as Pat the Bat in the outfield), it's not like I wasn't predicting it.  I mean, that's the thing, a lot of decisions can go either way -- is that prospect going to turn into a stud?  or is that draft pick going to be worth the signing bonus?  But when decisions are made that are so blatantly bad that they can't help but bring about bad results, and then those bad results happen, and then the team keeps making those same decisions for another five years with the same management team still making those same bad decisions, it gets a little frustrating.  And Ed Wade got another job.  He's currently running the Houston Astros into the ground -- taking a perennial Central contender to the basement of the division in only three short years!  But it's not like anyone could have predicted that to happen.  (And thanks for trading us Brad Lidge for Michael freaking Bourn, Ed!  Michael Bourn.  That's funny).  Sorry Astros fans.  But sometimes losing is no excuse for a firing.

And speaking of losing, the Seattle Mariners cratered to the worst record in the American League in year 5 of the Bill Bavasi experiment.  Pat Gillick took the team to 90+ wins for four straight seasons before his "retirement" and the team (and Pat) picked Bavasi as a replacement.  His moves were questionable from the start and got worse every season.  I think they finished in last three times and only once were above .500, the illusory 2007 season in which they gave up more runs than they scored.  Of course that "success" led Bavasi to trade five players (including the best position prospect in the organization in a decade) for an oft-injured pitcher only two years from free agency, despite screams from everyone in the statistical community.  Bedard got hurt.  The Mariners lost 101 games.  And Adam Jones is the starting center fielder for the Baltimore Orioles.  But at least the trade did one good thing.  It got Bavasi fired.  And the Mariners somehow, some way, made a smart decision on his replacement. 

The new GM is Jack Zduriencek, the former head of scouting with the Brewers, and he brought in Tony Blengino (who has a background in statistical analysis) as his right-hand man.  Every decision made so far by the new team in charge has been met with universal glee by the stat conscious boys at USS Mariner, including a recent decision to hire advanced Internet stat guru Tom Tango ("tangotiger" to any of you in the know).  It's just been so wonderful to see that the people in charge of my team know what the fuck they're doing, for once.  And if my initial impressions of Ruben Amaro are accurate, in about two years, the Mariners and the Phillies may have reversed places.  But one thing's for sure, the Mariners got so much smarter in just one offseason that I can pretty much guarantee we'll be contending in 2010 at the latest, and for a long time after that (even without Adam Jones patrolling the outfield). 

Here's Blengino talking to Baseball Prospectus about the wisdom of the Jones/Bedard trade.  This response had me smiling all day.  Now, if Al Davis would just die, all of my sports teams would be on the road to success.  Go Orange!

DL: A year ago, the Mariners gave up a number of highly regarded prospects in the Erik Bedard deal, feeling that they could compete for an AL pennant in 2008. The move was panned by statistical analysts who recognized that the Mariners had greatly outperformed their talent level in 2007 and would have been better served building for the future. How did you view their situation?

TB: I thought that it was clear going in that, with all due respect, they overrated their team from the last year. They gave up more runs than they scored in 2007, and by all indications were about an 81-win club. Obviously, when you win 88 and come as close as they did, the natural reaction was, 'We're this close.' But looking at it from the outside, and again, they had access to a heck of a lot more information about the individual players—the personalities and makeup of the club—but from the outside, I had the impression that it was not a team that was a piece or two away. That seemed to be borne out by the results. Were they truly a 61-win team [in 2008]? No, I think they probably underperformed relative to their talent last year and were better than a 61-win team when we came in. But I do think that it is one situation in which statistical analysis having a voice at the table last year may have made a difference in the way that the Mariners tackled 2008. Moving forward, I think the key is that you have to know your own players first. Before you know the rest of the league, you have to know your own team, and the value of each of your own players, and that's what we intend to do: start everything from a framework in which we know what we've got and what we need to get. Then we go out to attempt to get it with whatever excess talent we have to spare. It's an ongoing battle to maximize each roster spot, and to maximize the flexibility of your roster construction. There are all types of little battles that you need to win every day in order to win the big battles at the end of the day.

Comments

[LegFuJohnson]

Who is the ghost writer for VS today?

The author I know would suggest that the struggles of all teams are the result of the Yankees spending, possibly including the Raiders.

[Bill]

No doubt the Yankees are the cause of most evils in the world, as everyone else in the world would rightly agree. But I can't blame them for Al Davis.

[Tex]

My wife and I are just so excited to be here. We love NY already!