Not really any major divergence here. It really sounds to me like most of these guys were just in over their heads and couldn't play 'the game.' I've seen nurses and doctors get chewed up by a small, rural hospital's bureaucracy - and most of them were flat-out amazing at their jobs.
This thing kind of reminds me of the Starks on Game of Thrones; those guys were studly warriors, accomplished leaders, and very well-respected for those skills throughout the land by pretty much everyone - they were even somewhat feared by the most powerful houses. And yet, in the span of about two months (probably more, but I'll accept a little hyperbole to illustrate my point) they got in over their heads playing court games and were shattered against the Iron Throne because they couldn't keep up with their contemporaries' level of intrigue and maneuvering.
A key difference between them and this group of former employees being: the Starks didn't go around whining about it. Every. Single. One of them stuck their chins out and did their best to make it through the mess and out the other side. You can't be guaranteed success or longevity in anything - the only thing you can really control is your response to what happens. These former employees failed to honorably deal with their defeat.
I'd be mad too, but I'd never be part of anything like this following something as simple as a politically motivated firing - heaven forbid they were actually let go because they weren't good enough at their jobs! ::gasp::
But yeah, the M's FO is horribly dysfunctional - no arguments there. Only question is: can they win in spite of it? Too early to tell, but this hatchet-job will definitely factor, however little, in the rest of the offseason.
P.S. I'll say that Wedge went out with what looked to be class, but this whole thing calls that into question for me. Don't think I'd hire the guy now :(
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Don't have much time, but ... that piece was a loooooong time coming. Thanks Geoffy!
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Q. Does the piece indicate, to you, that Zduriencik is "a bully"?
A. Not by F-500 standards, no ... by baseball standards, apparently, he uses his authority in a way less gentle than they'd like.
Now, bear in mind, Dr. D hates bullies, hates men who pick fights with smaller men and run from fair fights. Where there is real bullying, he's the first one to speak his mind. But that's not what we read, in this case, not based on the content of Geoff's article.
.......
Jack Tatum, in They Call Me Assassin, once mocked Dick Butkus for bragging "When I hit people, I like to see them wobble back to the huddle." Tatum scoffed, "Anybody in today's NFL knows that if you hit somebody with your best shot, and they can get back to the huddle under their own power, then you are not a hitter."
It's all a question of how you calibrate things, I guess. I dunno how many high-ranking execs that Geoff has worked under...
Not much that was attributed to Zduriencik, in Baker's article, would have been at all unusual for the Boeing execs I worked for.
Just f'r instance, I was puzzled, the "bullying" account that Zduriencik apologized to Fusco in the phone call, "You didn't do anything - it wasn't my call." The exec's I've been around wouldn't have been sheepish about a firing. No way no how, babe.
The guy who fires anybody sheepishly, that's not the bully you watch out for ... :- ) Some of these guys need to meet some execs with REAL fangs down to their chins.
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Q. Any other examples of "re-calibration" on "bully" definitions?
A. Guerrero said that JZ "probably" fired him to "force Engle out" because "they often pushed back against his directives." Slap me silly!
I've worked for third-levels who, if you said one word they didn't like, they looked up with a huge glare, the room fell silent, and you spluttered trying to repair it. Here is a VP, and his people "often push back against his directives," and this is the big bad bully?
If the running back can wobble back to the huddle, you are not a hitter.
..........
Another example - Zduriencik coming down to Wedge's office and "buffering" between Wedge and Armstrong. Wish I'd ever had any 4th-levels who were interested in doing ANY "buffering" between their CEO's and ANYBODY.
It's dog-eat-dog at those levels, with those pay stubs. The picture being painted here is more of confusion, stress, and chaos than it is of bullying.
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Q. Are you saying Zduriencik is a nice guy?
A. No, saying that at all.
He does sound like a soft touch, compared to the average Nintendo VP I'm used to -- but at the same time, he probably is indeed "tough to work with" compared to the genteel standards that baseball people are used to.
I'll quickly concede that there are a few details in the article that give away the fact that he has his unpleasant moments.
If you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch. You don't sit down at a conference table with $500,000 execs and expect to be coddled. You sit down with them in order to make money.
I dunno - maybe in baseball you do. Expect to be treated with sensitivity, that is.
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Q. In baseball?
A. That seems to be the basic dichotomy here. Employees of baseball executives seem to have much different expectations of their bosses, than employees of Nintendo or Microsoft execs get to have of their bosses.
In baseball, stats analysts seem to expect to "work with" a VP, as opposed to "working for" a VP. That would be where Tony Blengino and I talk past each other.
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Q. What about Zduriencik "not knowing one iota about stats"?
A. Blengino, a disgruntled ex-employee, then proceeds immediately with an anecdote about Zduriencik picking apart his presentation, fine-tooth. How many stats presentations did Blengino make in front of Zduriencik?
I'm speaking as a guy who ran these presentations. How can you have an exec sitting in front of a PowerPoint presentation on the budget, 100 times a year, and then say "the guy doesn't know one iota" about budgets?
Blengino was Zduriencik's #2 man for years. What did he talk about with Zduriencik? Did they talk about uniform color? It was Blengino's job to make sure that Zduriencik knew what OBP is. That is what a SME does.
I'd be ashamed to admit that I worked with an exec for two years as his chess coach, and when I was done, he didn't know what a Bishop was.
But ... Blengino is using a figure of speech, that's all, to say "There were too many times Jack made a call I wouldn't have made." Tony should be careful, because now people are going to misconstrue that to mean "Zduriencik literally doesn't know what OBP is."
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Q. To what extent WOULD a non-math GM like Zduriencik understand an argument like Blengino's recent one on Fangraphs?
A. I also don't doubt that Zduriencik would have a hard time giving Blengino quality technical feedback on his Cano piece, like you or I could. Usually, talking to a VP about your own expertise is a lot different than talking about it with a fellow SME.
But it's a little weak for the SME to complain that his boss doesn't know as much as the expert does, within his field.
If you think that Zduriencik couldn't sit through that kind of presentation on Cano, and process it, and include it in his decision, you're being naive. But Zduriencik's judgment might very well tell him, "I'm not buying it," and that's fine. It so happens that Dr. D doesn't buy it, either, for different reasons.
For the SME to say, "well, you can't understand any of it, or you'd be buying in..." that's a critical misunderstanding of the role. Personally, I never sneered at execs for being unable to keep up with me on technical subjects. They have their own strengths.
.............
I was going to write a piece about Blengino's current article at Fangraphs, pointing out its intent as a thinly-disguised swipe at Zduriencik. It's pretty clear to me what has happened between the two men .... Blengino pushed his ideas hard, and Zduriencik started rolling his eyes a little (as Dr. D also rolled his eyes at Blengino's Cano piece), and the tension grew, and finally Zduriencik said "I've had enough."
Look, who works for who?
When I was consulting, it was my job to know when to shut my mouth. If you wear out your welcome with a VP, that's on you, not him.
As Earl Weaver (!) put it, "If I'd taken the Yankees' offer I'd have been fine. It would have been my job to get along with Steinbrenner, not the other way around."
The fact that Blengino was arguing with Zduriencik, that right there tells you that they had a "soft" relationship by Nintendo standards.
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Q. Do you read Zduriencik as being inaccessible?
A. I regret that Geoff didn't balance the article, include some accounts of Zduriencik calling his staff together to "think tank" a trade offer.
We remember, at the time, was it the Montero/Pineda deal?, a report of Zduriencik getting off the phone, calling his staff into a room with donuts and coffee, folding his hands behind his head, and saying "OK, guys, what do you want to do?"
Again, I'm not used to execs who "think tank" ANY decision in that fashion.
......
I've been very impressed by the way that Zduriencik has treated Geoff Baker himself -- apparently quite cordially, and with few reprisals, despite the fact that Geoff has (thankfully) been No-Holds-Barred on the team he covered.
It's too bad that the discussion isn't more balanced tonight.
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Q. Should a SME resent it, when his ideas aren't used?
A. You think this didn't happen to Dr. D? :- ) Where he put together (what he fancied to be) a Rembrandt of a report, and ... the steering committee yawned and ignored it? That happened most of the time.
Gimme my $$$ per hour, take my report, if you don't want to read it that's on you. I'm going to the movies after work.
In Moneyball, too, there was a scene where a bunch of scouts started yelling at Billy Beane for "overruling" their conclusions. One of the scouts spoke up said, "Guys, guys! We're here to ADVISE Billy!" ... Bill James said it was awesomely accurate.
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Q. How about the Lincoln/Armstrong content in the article?
A. Even Dr. D, in his worst nightmares, did not imagine to what extent they were micromanaging the baseball people.
It's one thing to get along with upper management on a personal basis. It's one thing to hand upper management a report, and it gets ignored. That's fine.
It's another thing when execs micromanage the Subject Matter Experts (SME's), interfere with them, and foul things up that way. Execs are supposed to understand that SME's know things they don't. We all have a role.
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Q. Wedge blaming Zduriencik for siding with his bosses?
A. :: blinks ::
I guess baseball is a lot different from Boeing or Nintendo or Weyerhauser. :: shrug :: At those companies, there isn't any chance that a 4th-level is going to "side with" a 3rd-level against the CEO.
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Q. How about the reaction that Lincoln and Armstrong are getting from around baseball?
A. I don't doubt, in the least, that baseball is rolling its eyes more and more at the two lawyers who fancy themselves to be twin Steinbrenners.
Jason Churchill relayed that Gillick didn't come back because he "is not a fan" of the M's front office; Lou Piniella barely considered coming back ... these things add up.
It has been DOV/SSI's contention, for 10-15 years, that the M's front office was totally dysfunctional. The Top-Down message has been "the city is lucky to have baseball at all," and then the lawyers turn around and try to personally put their fingerprints all over the 25-man roster and all over the lineup cards. Yes, it's a mess.
..........
Geoff Baker relays that, internally, the M's are staffed with a whale of a lot of unhappy people. I've seen that a lot in F-500, orgs of 500 people all being unhappy with the adminstration, and usually you just live with it. In this case, though, it reflects a dry rot that goes all the way back to an absentee owner who doesn't like baseball.
There are lots of Peter Angeloses around baseball. You don't often see their ex-employees come out this hard against them. But Gillick, and Lou, and now Wedge, and others, have been coming out against the regime for quite a while.
..........
It is my considered opinion that the root cause of the problem is Zduriencik's boss. I'd like to know how somebody else would handle Zduriencik's situation. Pat Gillick won't come near it with a 10-foot pole.
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Q. The state of SSI's opinion on Jack Zduriencik?
A. It's not much changed from before the article. As before, we all hope that with Armstrong being gone, Zduriencik will be free to operate in a coherent and agile fashion.
Apparently, among the 30 current GM's, you would put Jack Zduriencik among the 5 least people-oriented GM's in the game. I ain't saying that Zduriencik is a likeable guy :- ) but then again, I'm used to working with execs who are not at all likeable.
In the past, I had sort of read Zduriencik as being aloof, "more tart than sweet" as somebody put it of George W. Bush. With this new data, I would assume that he's fairly tough to work with, especially over the course of those 14-hour days those baseball amigos put in.
I hadn't pictured the GM as quite as gruff as Geoff reports, but ... sure. He's never come across as Mr. Congenial.
......
These "baseball people," many of them seem to resent Zduriencik's management style. Personally, it sounds to me like they're spoiled. I'm sure they do wish that they had a nice guy, a Theo Epstein or a Pat Gillick, as their Vice President. Where I come from, that's not your birthright.
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:: shrug :: Moneyball painted Billy Beane as an intimidating, loud, temper-prone, difficult-to-work with GM. Dan Duquette, from what I've read, his arrogance is insufferable. Ned Coletti, Dayton Moore, and a few others would probably be pretty blinkin' unpleasant to work with.
The picture of Zduriencik as imperious, refusing to listen, being out-of-touch with stats, etc., well ... he actually comes off as MORE accessible than most of the execs I've worked with.
..............
How GOOD is he?
He's got Cano, he's got his young talent finally jelling, he's got lots more $$$ to spend. He's going to get to show everybody whether he's a winner, or whether he isn't.
My $0.02,
Jeff
Comments
Don't get me started...
Ya, on Wedge... that's one reason you so seldom see those guys speak up. Even Davey Johnson (IIRC) said a lot less against Peter Angelos than Wedge is doing against the Mariners. It's going to come off as whiny.
Not that there isn't substance there, of course.
While I suspect the article paints an inflated picture of dysfunction, much of it rings true. The micromanaging by Lincoln and Armstrong is scary.
Jeff, with your F-500 comps, I wonder a bit if you're giving Jack Z. too much credit. It seems like you're saying that since you saw this or that comparable situation happen at Boeing or Nintendo or Weyerhauser, that it's okay and that the people that lost their jobs just need to suck it up and be tougher. But, maybe I'm misreading you. On the other hand, I'm sure in some situations they do need to suck it up. Stories get exaggerated in the retelling and disgruntled employees have their own slanted view of the circumstances that led to their being let go.
But, you know, there was also that comment by Divish in his chat the other day, the one that said something like "many, many, many people in the game" had told him that Jack Z. was in over his head as GM of the Mariners. Personally, I'm curious what evidence exists that Jack Z. is an effective leader and manager of people and I'm curious what evidence is out there that he has any understanding of how to put a roster together. So far, I haven't seen it. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Robinson Cano is good. I give Zduriencik some credit for the talent that's come into the organization, but most of that falls on McNamara. I say we keep McNamara.
That I'm assuming too much about Zduriencik. I don't work for him and have never met him.
...........
2) Sometimes, the loss of a job is justified, and sometimes it isn't. We have little information on these people and why they lost their jobs.
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3) If Geoff's article is the best shot that can be taken at Zduriencik, well, that article could have been written about pretty much any senior manager I ever worked for. That's all I'm getting at. The article, in itself, certainly doesn't demonstrate, to me, that Zduriencik is incompetent.
Geoff's article does powerfully confirm that the top-down regime is chaotic, "an exercise in herding cats" as they say. I've consistently pointed at LincStrong on that.
............
4) My overall read of Zduriencik, taking into account every little anecdote I've ever read about him, everything I've heard him say live, everything I've heard back channel ... and dovetailing them against the real-world situations I've seen ... is as above. I absolutely, positively could be way off the mark.
I know that a lot of people don't LIKE him. And I know that a lot of people don't like OLD-SCHOOL baseball managers. It doesn't look to me like anybody has proven that he's stupid. Usually their proof has been, "He didn't follow the USSM plan, so he's stupid." I know for a fact that that logic doesn't hold up.
:daps:
Get M's ownership into new hands?
It sounds to me like Blengino is the guy who led us through the deadball feeb years with Casey Kotchman and the gang! His confession is on the front page of the Seattle Times. He sounded like he doesn't approve of RBI's or the type of ballplayers that produce them. Mr. Blengino doesn't seem to show any remorse for masterminding a few of the worst offenses of all time.
Regarding the article, nothing seems that surprising except Howard and Chuck's instructions to win ball games and try harder. This does not work for athletes. Athletes do not control whether they win or lose. They only control how well they play, their tenacity, execution, focus, hustle and the like. But, no amount of trying hard can make up for a serious baseball deficiency; Brendan Ryan tried very hard to hit well. So did the 2010 Mariners.
About Wedge, does it seem unreasonable that he expected Z to stick up for him and the coaching staff to Lincoln and Armstrong? It seems like meddlesome ownership is part of the baseball package and is common to many baseball teams. Arte Moreno and Nolan Ryan have been known to overrule their GMs on baseball decisions from time to time.
It is important to note that everyone has serious personality flaws and other deficiencies. These deficiencies become more apparent the more authority and responsibility a person has. It is not surprising to hear that Z isn't good at everything. He is a super scout, not a leader of men. Thats okay. That is what managers are for.
I am a little disappointed in Geoff Baker for what to me seems like a melodramatic story. It had to be written but he could have composed it better IMO.
I am with you Doc on what this says about Z...very little. His results on the field are what count. We have already seen that he is not getting results yet, but Cano is a great get. People in the org would be much happier if the team was winning. Who cares if Z is a nice guy. It's one factor. Plenty of nice guy execs who are bad at their jobs too.
Blengino...his comments are VERY poor form. I can't take much of anything he says seriously, because the type of person who would air this type of dirty laundry in such an emotional way to the ST is the type of person whose perspective can't be trusted. But, his saying Z knows nothing about advanced stats is obviously exaggerated, but is still useful information and disconcerting.
I work in an F500 company. I have been around execs who are out of their depth / unqualified for their role, and they behave exactly like the anecdotes of LincStrong in this piece. So my reaction to the piece was, these guys just aren't qualified for their jobs. But without a real owner, the inmates run the Mariner asylum. So we can definitively file our leadership in the same class as Angelos or whoever. Let's just hope we can win in spite of that. The Orioles have been doing ok, and the Clippers under Sterling down here in LA have been doing ok. It's frustrating as a fan but not a death sentence. The M's are rich, and I'm still very excited to see how they spend the money.
Sports owners in general have no requirement to be good people, or caring people, or apparently even non-racist people. Their requirement is to have a billion dollars.
Lincoln and Armstrong represented the arm of that billion-dollar enterprise tasked with running the operations. Are they coherent, or skilled? It doesn't appear so. Nothing in Baker's article is particularly shocking to me.
Could Jack be in over his head? Sure. Could Divish just have been talking to Baker about this? Yep. Peter Angelos is a terrible owner who creates a dysfunctional work environment... but his Orioles are now a decent club thanks to some good FO moves (despite his ownership and meddling) and the correct pick of a manager to lead those 25 men.
Does having the ownership structure and upper-management that we do have make it harder to win a World Series than it otherwise could be? I don't see how it's even possible to argue that they give us the best chance to win it, not with a straight face.
Can we win one in spite of "disfunction" and "personality clashes" and "sour grapes?"
You bet. None of those guys play. Get 25 championship performers together and see if they can't overcome.
I don't care if we find them on purpose or by accident, I just want to find them. We'll have to find a couple more by accident than the really well run teams. Okay - San Francisco did, and got lucky with health to boot. That's what I want us to do. The rest is all noise, because I can't control any of it anyway. Lincoln isn't firing himself so unless Nintendo sells to Hansen after yet another Sonics deal falls through, we're stuck with what we've got.
Office friction happens. It seems that it happens here more than it happens in the best-run orgs, but I can't imagine anyone thought we were one of those. If anybody thinks the White Sox that won a WS last decade were a brilliantly-run organization with no friction I have a bridge to sell you. We have a FO with a skill in finding young talent. That talent now needs to be developed and either utilized or traded, and we need to use our dollar advantage to purchase the right players. Here's hoping they can do that in between shooting spit-balls at each other in the break room.
~G
Basically repeated what you said in my post above. Agreed on basically all counts.
~G
And a third one too, to me, the biggest strikes against the M's was the Wedge/Stooges interplay. The Blengino stuff was mostly fluff and fizzle, but I think it keys more the fact that Jack Z is either completely marginalized in the organization or is just not that effective as a Major League GM.
With nods from Curto and Divish coming in, along with DC and Jeff, it's a damaging piece of work that Geoff did the leg work on. Art Thiel led the first charge, but he was never nearly as aggressive as Baker. It's nice to finally have a man willing to call out our FO's responsibilities, should they be resting on their laurels or just being plain ineffective.
I think the norm is for sports owners to be unqualified and meddlesome. By definition they were successful at SOMETHING to get the $$$ to buy a sports team. But that something is most likely real estate, or technology, or finance, (or video games), or who knows what...that has nothing to do with the sport they get into. Yet, they also did not get where they did without a vast amount of self-confidence and resourcefulness. So they think they are smart enough to figure out how to run a sports team too.
I would guess that the toxic combination was Linc PLUS Strong. Howie is probably par for the course as far as a (de facto) owner goes. Really he just needs to cut checks; he can make wacky suggestions about bullpen sessions all day and a good President/GM/Manager team would tell him, interesting idea Howard but it won't work because of x, y, z...and put it to bed. The problem has been that Linc+Strong means the the balance of power is distorted toward the incompetent non-baseball people. NO WAY any rookie GM in Z's position could stand up to TWO guys above him who go way back and speak in unison...sorry that is just not organizational reality. I am very hopeful that Armstrong's departure will be a big positive for the org. I do not think Lincoln enjoys losing, and I think he'll try to find someone qualified for the Prez role.
Z is clearly no Billy Beane, but there's no final verdict yet that he can't be good enough to make us into a winner, with all the resources this team has. I was personally thinking he'd surely be a goner after this debacle of a season, but he has survived, and now has the chance to put it all together. We will have a definitive answer soon about his qualifications for his job.
Baker's end game is to do his job as a reporter and commentator, and exhibit a spine in a town not known for confrontation or brutal honesty in its journalists. Sports isn't a democracy, there isn't going to be a public vote to depose Howard Lincoln...but I do think Baker sees his responsibility as holding the team's leadership accountable for their actions, given how much public funding and trust has gone into supporting the Mariners.
What did Curto have to say? I must have missed that.
Not only does office friction happen, G, it SHOULD happen!
Any office that runs frictionless FULLTIME, is not running very hard, very long.
The point is to find the right high-quality motor oil to reduce the friction. Sometimes its a staff party, sometimes it's a retreat, sometimes it's a heated argument.....but when the friction occurs, the critical question is how you get past it. Sometimes heads gotta roll. Such happened here.
Any organization with no friction simply indicates one filled with "yes men" (and women).
Here's the question of the moment about Z, now: We've stumbled, bumbled, out-smarted everybody, played our cards just right (take your pick) to make the best LT bodacious signing over the last several seasons (considering the health and age issues related to Hamilton and Pujols), can he parlay that into a 5 year winning formula?
Were Z receiving very public "votes of confidence" from upstairs, then I would worry. But right now, I think he should be able to see that he has 5 years of a ripping Cano. He can't buy next year's pennant paid for with his young talent. It doesn't happen that way. What he can do is put the organization in the best place to win one (or two) over the next 4-5 years, while Cano is still Cano and Felix is still Felix.
That's what I want to see out of him.....
...I've met enough baseball execs already (in limited time on the inside) to confirm that baseball men are very...very nice people for the most part.
I am far less intimidated giving a presentation of my ideas to my employer than I thought I'd be as a 20-year old independent analyst (back in the early 2000s), and everyone I know who has come back from other interviews and such tells stories of how nice these folks are.
Zduriencik seems like a type-A person. The fact that he wants to do things his way and is not particularly nice about that shouldn't be read as bullying even if it is a bit unusual in the modern game of baseball...but I don't think baseball clubs are like F500 companies when they're most effective. I think a ballclub with a good front office should be a bit like a think tank. You still need one leader running the operations department and he still needs to be the boss with final say...but think tank analysis works better than the way they're describing Z here.
http://www.lookoutlanding.com/2013/12/7/5187320/zduriencik-armstrong-lin...
That's all that's left of its trace...
...and your general feeling that Blengino did not know when to relax a bit and accept that sometimes other people might disagree with your analysis...my uninformed guess is that this is correct. That Blengino is saying Z knows not one iota about stats to get back at him for not listening to his brand of statistical analysis. I've known too many sabermetricians over the years whose first response when someone disagrees with their analysis is to assume they just didn't understand it. I think Blengino was marginalized because he, too, is type-A and defines his happiness on feeling like he gets to do things his way...on people agreeing with him...and he wouldn't give Zduriencik the last word. The boss always has the last word. You can't go blasting your boss every day because they don't like your last report.
No doubt all of this is a more balanced view than the first impressions of the article suggest. Baker's article, trying to make a powerful point, was in no way balanced or nuanced. There was ZERO attempt to account for the complaints in a way that might temper one's view of Lincoln, Armstrong, or Zduriencik. Wedge, et al were Gene Autry. The M's front office were the guys in black hats.
I have worked as a lower level manager at a Fortune-500 company, not at the level of many of you, but the nature of my position put me several times a year in a working relationship with high-level national executives, and more often with regional executives. Understand, business is not my gig. I was doing what I had to do to support a family, not what I loved to do.
Upwardly mobile executives, from my vantage point, are kind, supportive and helpful when it suits their purpose, and they are brutal, even ruthless when that suits their purpose. They are what they have to be at any given moment. They are all people, though. They have personal characteristics that color their job performance and their treatment of people along the way. Many, many different sorts find ways to succeed in the world of executive management. None of this paragraph is news.
But while I can sign off on the general soundness of the article in describing such people, I'll bet most of you who have at least rubbed shoulders in such an environment have run into plenty of executives who are textbook cases of the Peter principle, that people are often promoted one level beyond their competence. And when you get several of them together in a team that wields significant power, bad things, VERY bad things can happen. And because they have power they can for a time avoid the consequences of those bad things. But ultimately the truth will out, the house of cards collapses, and the regime falls.
Forgetting the politics of it, if you can, look at Obamacare.
I agree that time will tell how accurately Baker's hit piece portrays Jack Zduriencik. The article itself does not cinch it's argument. But if indeed Zduriencik is in over his head, the kind of things this article exposes are consistent with that.
Lincoln/Armstrong are the easy targets in this. The accusations reinforce the narrative many of us have come to believe over the years. The portrait of Zduriencik, however, exposes a fault line among the fans of Seattle, those who are disposed to be favorable towards him, and those not so disposed. Here the narratives diverge, and the article will be read differently by the two camps. Accusation is not proof.
Let's see where this goes over the next few day. Powerful men, when their regime is threatened by poor performance, go to great lengths to shift the blame.
edited to add:
Regarding the line of argument that "the boss is always right," technically this is true so long as the boss is the boss. If Zduriencik's bosses put him in the position of being a "Yes" man or a dead man, of course with his rookie GM status he had no choice but to comply. If Blengino was under the illusion that his boss, under tremendous pressure from above, was going to serve up his career as a sacrifice to protect him, he was of course badly mistaken.
Honestly, one of my key complaints about Lincoln/Armstrong has always been that they ran the only competents that ever worked for them out of town. It has been clear for a decade that they neither like nor tolerate pushback.
The tone in any organization flows from the top and we've known how terrible Lincoln and Armstrong are for a long, long time. Gillick left because of it but was a gentleman about it. Pinella was a little more direct when he left because of it. Jeff Nelson had the audacity to talk about it openly on a golf course and was promptly traded because it. Thiel wrote about it at length but never got the quotes that Baker got in this article. The scary thing is that those things happened over a decade ago. Lincoln has got to go.
"More than two dozen people who spoke to The Times say any manager — and the players under him — will fall short of success without a halt to ongoing interference from Lincoln and whomever succeeds Armstrong, who will retire Jan. 31."
"Look at Obamacare"
Best line of the day. :)
Gotta love having a blog attorney on retainer :- )
It's a devastating counter, too. So the perpetrators of the first half of the regime are proud of their work, eh? ...
Baseball orgs operate much more according to Theory Y than do F-500 companies, especially Japanese companies. And that's a great thing.
That doesn't mean that the workplace-uninitiated get to read --- > Theory Y as IQ = 90, of course.
Only thing I'd add: If and when a Walt Jocketty smiles about a Jack Zduriencik "being in over his head," that doesn't mean what a USSM poster assumes it means. Jocketty isn't referring to how easy it is to trade Franklin Gutierrez and Jason Vargas to Zduriencik for JJ Putz, or how easy it is for Scott Boras to sell the Mariners an expensive client.
Relating to people, forseeing land mines, maintaining coherency in a crisis, there are a lot of things that Peter Principle types run into. Few of them have much to do with whether Raul Ibanez hits 29 homers, or Michael Morse gets injured.
My sense, and I freely admit it is only an intuition, is that Jack's problems are related to the expansion of his duties to the full gamut of a GM job. Precisely what aspects might be the problem area, I have no way of knowing. Like you suggest, I can't imagine it's the X's and O's.
Someone with Zduriencik's experience is not likely to be a buffoon. Surely he brought real, demonstrated skills to this job. It's not like the M's hired him in a vacuum; they consulted with people around the league on who they were getting. But what he didn't bring was a demonstrated ability to handle the full responsibilities of a GM. Doesn't mean he COULDN'T handle it. Just means he HADN'T yet handled it. Certainly someone GM'ing for the first time would encounter some rough years while he got his sea legs on the job. Making some fundamental course corrections early on would be par for the course. Unfortunately the M's needed a birdie from their new GM, not a par, because they were 20 over par for the tournament, so to speak. Me, I would never have hired a rookie GM to turn this team around after Bavasi.
Sure, Zduriencik sold them on his plan, and that plan coincided with what Lincoln/Armstrong wanted to do. But it didn't mean he had the overall chops and experience to pull it off without taking the first five years to sort through his own personal adjustments to the job.
Add in Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum above him, and clearly Zdurencik faced, and still faces tremendous hurdles. Sometimes money can buy you out of them; sometimes it can't. He can still retrieve his regime, but this article is going to make it much, much tougher.
Yeah. The worst.
You're describing SABR-Lock, Matt: The inability to believe that any analysis other than the one (currently) SABR-generated isn't a result of ignorance.
Math is, of course, a less than subjective endeavor. SABR is, largely, an effort to quantify all of baseball into a series of mathematical solutions (oWAR, dWAR, UZR, etc). Add up all the formulas, pre-season, and you get the winner. But fantasy baseball isn't real baseball and it sounds like you're describing Blengino as a guy who couldn't escape SABR-lockup, therefor anything outside that bubble must be a result of ignorance. When Z agreed, it was because modern baseball analysis was as simple as the Pythagorean theorem, and as undeniable. When Z disagreed, it sounds like Blengino saw it/sees it now as ignorant response to the truth of the numbers.
But even a guy named SABR-Matt knows that there is some subjective nature to baseball analysis. Perhaps Blengino was locked into the numbers, and unable to see beyond them.
The funny thing is that Z's strength has been in drafting talent.....before you can really SABR-tize the kids. He hasn't been very successful in trading for/signing guys. Raul and Branyan were successful, and Raul's ultimate success is arguable. Beyond that, you give him Guti, which is a limited success.
Maybe the real Z is an old-time baseball guy, but one who got hired in a flurry of SABR-info.
But he really hasn't been successful operating in either format. Exploring "market inefficiencies" didn't work for him. And last year he built the most inflexible roster in the game. Only the collapsing bats of Ackley and Ryan and Smoak forced his hand to make it more flexible.
I think it is clear that Z is best at drafting young talent. I hope he now trusts that skill set and doesn't prematurely rid himself of the players his best skill allowed him to acquire.
Well this explains a lot. From the Casey Kotchman extreme to the Nelson Cruz extreme.
A couple small points:
It used to amaze me in researching Al Qaeda how everybody seemed to know bin Laden first hand. I thought half the guys were lying to impress. It took me years to realize it was a simple function of the size of the organization.Which is to say: A baseball franchise is nothing like an F 500 organization. It's tiny, a mom-and-pop operation. One result of this is that everybody knows everybody - there aren't many layers and hence not many filters and everybody rubs shoulders with everybody else. Some of those shoulders don't offer themselves to cry upon. Some are downright hostile. It can make for some pretty chilly offices.
Lincoln is unusual in that he's effectively the franchise owner but he most notably does not have the experience of other owners. That is, he didn't make a fortune doing something. He's an employee. Same with Chuck.
Baker did plenty of trench work to produce this piece. You can bet that in addition to what's on the page there are hundreds of pieces of evidence that couldn't be included because of space limitations or they seemed off or unprovable or whatever.. You don't as a good reporter, which Baker clearly is, use someone's criticism if it's a one-off. He's probably been gathering string on this piece for years. Also, you can only build a fully rounded piece if you have equal information from both sides. The M's declined to cooperate, which is their right and is more normal than I wished, but it leaves the piece unbalanced through no fault of Baker's.
I've written stories critical of individuals or companies or politicians who would not be interviewed. What happens in those cases is that you are compelled to do even more reporting to make your case. A good reporter, Baker, in this case, would lean over backward to be fair.
Two quick items: 1) Baker’s column rings 100% true with my experience, & 2) every sports team in Seattle needs to be ready for his new role
— Mike Curto (@CurtoWorld) December 8, 2013