Power structures and the GM hunt
A short comment on this Hickey piece:
It’s clear that club CEO Howard Lincoln and club president Chuck Armstrong will not allow the new GM to have as free a hand as Bill Bavasi, who was fired on June 16 and replaced on an interim basis by Lee Pelekoudas.
There is the perception, particularly in the blogosphere, that this is a horrible thing. Many of the pundits of the internet don’t like past decisions that Lincoln and Armstrong have made. And, frankly, there’s some reason to feel that way.
Dave’s agreed that Bavasi did, indeed, get to run the org the way he wanted, in response to my general concerns about whether candidates would want to work for those two (I would love, btw, to hear what Woodfork’s reasoning was for telling them he wasn’t interested after that first interview — but we’ll never get that).
But the reality is that the new power structure is simply a return to the old ways. Once Lincoln put Bavasi and then-manager Mike Hargrove ”on the hot seat” after the 2006 season, Bavasi and Hargrove went to their bosses and said if they were on the hot seat, they needed to be able to make their own calls, to live and/or die on their own.
So Armstrong and, to a lesser extent, Lincoln relinquished much of their normal input and let their general manager and his manager make the moves they wanted to make. Although the 2007 season produced a winning record, that philosophy proved to be a loser in the long run.
Let’s take it as a given for a moment that this is entirely true: that the Lincoln/Armstrong braintrust went to Bavasi and Hargrove after 2006 and said “succeed or you’re fired” (and they succeeded and then were fired). And that now they’d like to return to pre-2007 decision making.
The question unasked here is “is this a good thing”? Reading Hickey’s post, I got the feeling it was — that unleashing this new and dangerous GM/manager autonomy got them a good 2007 and a disastrous 2008.
But previous to that up-down, there were three just awful seasons, bad decision piled on bad decision, from 2003 on (and the 2003 roster construction had its problems) as the Bavasi-Armstrong-Lincoln trio decided to focus on role players with proven established professional veteran role experience (and so forth), particularly clubhouse guys — and you know the rest.
Now, my feelings on Gillick would take their own post. And it’s true that they’re clearly looking at some new approaches in the front office. But the M’s are interviewing all assistant GMs at this point: there’s no one there like Gillick who could, in the event of an argument with Lincoln, for instance, say “kiss my previous World Series rings and if you don’t like it I’ll quit and take the best GM job that opens next season.”
It would seem that a hidden qualification for the job is going to be the ability to make those two front-office guys feel involved, warm, and fuzzy about decisions, while still being able to steer the whole ship.
If we see Bloomquist given a two-year, $4m deal I promise not to get angry right away but instead wait to see if the M’s sign twenty awesome minor-league deals while Lincoln and Armstrong are at the press conference.
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Sounds like a par-for-the-course blame shift that always happens after bad decisions were made in a business. Blaming the people who were fired is a time-honored tradition.
This actually reminds me of Dilbert.
Well, none who did it as a GM. There’s certainly one who did it as part of staff.
And how is this different from any other organization? Even with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, you have to have the ability to bring them on-board for any decision the company makes.
Woodfork might well have sensed that he wasn’t going to get the job (based on inexperience or whatever), and withdrawn from consideration because that makes it look slightly better for the next time he’s a candidate. Especially if he and DiPoto compared notes after their interviews – after all, they’re in the same organization currently, although I don’t know what their relationship is like.
If you’re going to argue that working with Steve Jobs or Bill Gates is in any way representative of “any other organization” you have either a seriously warped view of working with those two or of working in every other company in the world.
If Bavasi was given the level of autonomy in how much to contract with players to the extent suggested above, his management should have been fired. What company would give a General Manager ultimate authority over multi year multi million dollar deals? The only issue I see in this is why was that authority ever given out? The President and CEO should always have to be convinced and sign off on big contracts. If I were his Board of Directors, I would fire him for his above statements than anything else. “You delegated your control of the company to a mid manager…!”
I don’t think that is a problem. If you are in charge of business, and you hire someone to be in charge of baseball, they shouldn’t need to run baseball decisions by you; you hired them because you trust their judgement about baseball (whether this trust is well-placed or not). This is how teams should be run, with the baseball people making decisions they think will help the on-the-field team. The fact that our baseball guy wasn’t any good doesn’t mean the management should take more control; it means we need a better baseball guy.
I’d say there are a few equivalents in the world of sports…Al Davis, Jerry Jones, Mark Cuban, Peter Angelos, and anyone name Steinbrenner. 🙂
In fact, these sorts of “companies” are probably more common in the world of sports franchises than they are in the rest of the business world. Eqomaniac owners, that think they know better than anyone they hire.
Of course, that isn’t the way the M’s work, nor would I want it to be.
I don’t think DMZ was referring to Gates’ or Jobs’ egos there…
Yeah, but I was….(or, at least, keeping that more in mind as opposed to actual skill)…
The problem with letting a GM control his own fate is that he does what Bavasi did, namely, he mortgaged the future to try to save his job this season. It would be fine if trade reversals were allowed; we’d send Bedard back to Baltimore and get those 5 young guns back. Alas, that’s not in the transaction rules, so Chuck and Howard have to keep the new guy or Ng from doing the same thing, or give them a long-term contact and stifle that “hot seat” crap.
Just wanted to congradulate the Rays. Hopefully with in 5 years we to may know the feeling.
The trouble with this plan is that the baseball decisions often overlap with the business management decisions. In particular, if your GM signs a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract with some mediocre pitcher, he has saddled the business with an accounting liability (and likely a baseball liability) for years to come.
So, you can’t simply say to the GM: “Go and make all the baseball decisions”. Because in doing so you’re losing control over your company’s costs, always a bad idea.
A better, but still unworkable, arrangement would be to say: “For 2009 you’ve got a payroll of $95M. Go out and do the best that you can with that.” That would work if all baseball contracts were for one year only, but there are multi-year contracts to worry about. And unless you’ve got a crystal ball that tells you what you know your payroll should be for 2010 and 2011, you can’t tell your GM “spend $95M in 2009, $105M in 2010, and $120M in 2011”. Those payroll numbers could easily turn out to be non-optimal when 2010 and 2011 roll around. But you’ve already hamstrung your GM to tie his (or her) 2009 decisions to those locked-in-stone 2010 and 2011 numbers.
It pretty much has to be a continued process of negotations, where the GM says to the President or CEO “hey, if you let me commit the team to a contract of 5 years and YYY million dollars, I can get CC Sabathia for 5 years”, and the team has to decide if that’s a gamble that good enough to make.
Unhappily for the Mariners, that means that Armstrong and maybe Lincoln too have to be involved in these decisions. If they get a really sharp GM who they really trust, they can rubber stamp those decisions. That might be the best way for the Mariners to go, given how well Armstrong’s and Lincoln’s decisions have all too often gone in the past. But usually you don’t want to give carte blanche to your GM (or indeed to any one person) in that fashion. They’re likely to overspend, in pursuit of on-field victories. Someone’s got to play the role of budget bad-guy, keeping a rein on the spending.
[doesn’t matter how many times you post it, it’s still off-topic]
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So, any chance it gets announced tomorrow? I imagine the new GM can’t do much until the decision is made public, and if not tomorrow it will be at least another week, possibly up to two.
Other teams are already knee-deep in offseason decision making and preparation for free agent/arbitration season. The M’s need to get cracking.