Shore wrote:

mcare89 wrote:

Shore wrote:

smitty wrote:

Shore wrote:

Doll Is Mine wrote:Shore, do you think I can run the Phillies?

No idea who you are, or what your skills are (relevant skills, I mean).

I'm certain you could do it. All we have to do is have someone teach you everything there is to know about baseball in a day or so.

And Shore. You first said you there are multiple posters here who could be a good big league GM. Now you are saying none of us know nearly enough about any poster here to say they can do it.

Make up your mind dude.

My mind is made up.

Just like we don't know if Utley or Howard or Rollins or Halladay or Ruiz or whomever will get hurt, we can be pretty sure that AT LEAST one or two 33 to 36 year olds will get hurt during the year.

I don't know WHICH of our "thirty-something to sixty-something males who follow baseball rather extensively and can formulate a thought into words reasonably well on a recurring basis" have experience and talent at management, executive management, leadership, finance, marketing, development or whatever would be their calling card, but I'm comfortably sure that there are some.

Why not the 20-somethings? I've won multiple championships on OOTP, so I assume I'm just as qualified.

Seriously, this is a ridiculous notion. You say in one post that these are elite, billion dollar organizations, and then say without knowing anyone on this boards qualifications, say somebody here could run one.

It's like saying that if I've successfully managed a restaurant, I'm now qualified to run Apple.

I'm saying they are elite billion dollar organizations that SHOULD be much more demanding of their executives. But they are not. And they are not efficient at identifying management. As it stands, several posters here could, IMO, do AT LEAST AS WELL as the clowns that have been put in charge in many situations. Including ours.

I don't care about Strat-o-matic or OOTP experience. I'm talking about business. Management. Identifying those areas where your organization is elite, and maximizing the value of those assets. Identifying those areas where you suck, and calling a spade a spade, and fixing it. Hiring WELL. Developing. Managing people. Managing assets. Learning from other organizations where you can. MEASURING. Having a fucking plan, that everyone in the organization knows, because it's pounded into their head.

The OOTP thing was a joke, I realize this, but it's almost as ridiculous as what you're saying.

Those buzzwords all sound great, but it's putting way too much stock into recent results without taking into effect the direction of the organization for the last 5 years, which was from the top down "Win another championship."

It seems like they have a plan to me. The noticeable trend about this year's signings was nothing long-term, and nothing expensive. Coming into the year, it was pretty obvious that the plan was to see if we could squeeze one more run out of the old core, and if not, don't do anything that will harm us long term, and start trying to build a new core long-term. The farm system is starting to show signs of development of new young talent (Franco and Biddle for starters).

It's easy to rip the major league results this year, and fair, but I don't think it's necessarily a lack of organizational philosophy, but the result of organizational philosophy for the last five years. When you go all out to win a title, you pay the price later. We all knew this then, and I'm pretty sure we were all on board then.

dajafi wrote:I think there's some truth to the idea that "management is management," though there's a limit. Where I think Shore and McNeal and others are correct is that Amaro failed--and more importantly, continues to fail--in what's sometimes referred to as SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats). To do that well might not require having played, or even having worked in an FO.

Just talking about 2013, amaro doesn't seem to grasp that the team's sole remaining competitive advantage is its big payroll... so he'll fail to take on salary for better prospect return. Today's problem is the fruit of yesterday's opportunity missed: he needs the prospects because he didn't see the opportunity of spending more in the draft and internationally back when the rules enabled that without consequences. I could go on: he recognized the weakness of his aging offense too late (2011), then was foolish in trying to address it (ever since).

Managers have to be egotistical enough to pursue their chosen course with total commitment, yet egoless enough to change when the facts dictate doing so. That means recognizing sunk costs and not throwing good money after bad. If its true that Amaro won't trade Papelbon--that he's going to lock himself into the declining years of a fastball reliever who's not getting any cheaper--it will confirm, for anyone who still doubts, that his analytical capacity is really lacking.

I think if smitty has a point, it's that functioning as a baseball GM probably entails more than content knowledge: it's trust among peers, bosses and subordinates, and an understanding of the culture of the game informed by experience. Jack Welch might be a great owner/boss of a GM; I wouldn't want him making trades or draft picks.

My point is not that Amaro did or did not fail. The Point is that if there is indeed some awesome manager out there who could step in and be a good baseball GM without any experience in baseball at any meaningful level they don't post here.

Shore says there are 800 people registered here and 5 or 6 of them must have all the qualities it takes to be a good GM even though they have zero experience. There just must be. We just don't know who because we don't really know anyone else here. But there is GM material out there I just know it.

I don't agree.

And again. Our former prospects are all over the top prospect lists of other teams so I'm not sure where the we didn't spend enough on the draft and that's why we don't have any young players comes from.

We had a bunch of pretty damn good prospects. I'm not sure over spending for them would have helped us all that much.


This is a pretty fun discussion.

dajafi wrote:Today's problem is the fruit of yesterday's opportunity missed: he needs the prospects because he didn't see the opportunity of spending more in the draft and internationally back when the rules enabled that without consequences. I could go on: he recognized the weakness of his aging offense too late (2011), then was foolish in trying to address it (ever since)

I agree with the former to the extent he controlled it. But let's not forget with the latter they lost to the World Champion offensive juggernaut Cardinals by one run. Could have easily buzz sawed the next two rounds and radically changed Amaro's reputation

Thereafter, he tried to patch up the core, which hasn't held up well. We'll see how those returns for Pence and Victorino shake out. Glad they kept Brown and didn't splurge on a free agent bat. To me the real work begins now

Fair enough, Grote. If they'd raised another flag everything would look different.

I'm talking more about managing the decline of the championship core. We always knew a downturn was coming as those guys hit their mid 30s. I think more could and probably should have been done to prepare for that.

But you're right in that what happens next--when I think the course of action is pretty clear to anyone paying attention--is the bigger deal.

I could be GMs

Bucky wrote:I could be GMs

You are the one guy who probably could preside over a fire sale as you have experience with fires and stuff. Plus the diet Mountain Dew would come in handy when trying to woo a Free Agent or Cuban Defector.

Argument seems silly to me because when it comes right down to it, an executive is there to make money for the business which the Phillies are obviously doing. Transferring from another industry to baseball would not work at all. Walmart just needs to make money; it does not need to win a single championship every year in a fair environment against 29 other companies to be considered successful.

Well that's not exactly true, is it? First, the team is making less money this year than last and made less last year than the year before. So, by that measure, things are not good for Amaro. And, second, Walmart competes every day and every year against a lot of competitors and its shareholders expect Walmart to beat its competitors on an even more consistent basis than a baseball team.

I would rather have MattS running the Phils than Amaro. I'm sure there are other smart people on this board with a low number of posts who just stopped posting because of the inside jokes, memes, and occasional stupidity.

If Amaro posted on this board as BigCardinal, I'm sure he would say tons of stupid shit that would lead others to believe he'd be an awful GM.


To reiterate someone's earlier post: Baseball is far from an efficient market, and the 30 current GMs are surely not the best 30 people at GMing. (Although I'm too lazy to actually write 1000 words on why this is... opportunity cost, how valued GM skills are outside of baseball, what it takes to get into a front office job, etc.)

"occasional" stupidity

Where do all the smart posters go when they stop posting here?

BETSON'S

Andrew Friedman, who is the GM of Tampa and has been since 2005 when he was all of 28 years old, is a pretty good example of what Shore has been talking about, someone brought into a baseball organization without extensive experience in the MLB environment, and who has managed to be pretty successful despite his non-traditional background.

Friedman, like Wade, played college ball but was neither good enough to be drafted nor did he have his heart set on a sports management career. He parlayed his finance degree into increasingly lucrative Wall Street jobs with Bear Stearns and MidMark Capital. He met one of the new owners of the Rays, they hit it off and was offered a position within the organization which he accepted despite the hit to his annual compensation. His first job was as Director of Baseball Development but it was as evident from the time he was hired that he was the likely GM as it was here when Amaro joined the front office. Two years later he had the job.

Doubtless his time as Director of Baseball Development enabled him to become oriented to his new environment, and Gerry Hunsicker was probably tasked with mentoring Friedman, but the reason he became the GM of Tampa had absolutely nothing to do with possessing some secret knowledge only leathery baseball lifers can aspire to. Shore may have been exercising some hyperbole (no one would want 97% of message board posters anywhere near an MLB front office delivering W.B. Mason supplies let alone offering harebrained suggestions) but his point is spot on. Effective management is a transferable capability and there are doubtless people reading this thread who could sit in Amaro's chair and do a better job. In some regards, Amaro is an anachronism. GM jobs are increasingly going to relatively young business/management school graduates who have not spent large chunks of their careers playing, scouting or in player development.

Doll Is Mine wrote:Where do all the smart posters go when they stop posting here?

Ask FullCount.

Hypothetically some people somewhere -- possibly someone who signed up for this board despite not liking inside jokes -- could be a better GM than one of the current GMs working today. l'm sure there are plenty of people out there. Of course there are. But there is absolutely no evidence that it is true for any particular person who has never done it, but it is possible. Maybe MattS would be a great GM. Or maybe he'd waste too much time arguing with WIP hosts on twitter. We don't know. We need some good GM prospect analytics. Maybe MattS can devise something to determine the characteristics of a good GM prospect. Until then, we can only speculate about who out there has the talent and ability to step into a GM job and be successful (once they have all of their blind spots taken care of).

Except for Ed Wade. There is plenty of evidence that he would be the worst GM working if he was running another team because that is what happened to him twice before (give or take an Omar Minaya or two). And that is where this discussion started, with someone saying that he missed Ed Wade and a few of us mocking that person and Shore came to his defense. Or something. He never mentioned Ed Wade that I remember except to use him as an example of an incompetent GM. So maybe not his defense. To be honest I guess I never really got why this tangent developed. Maybe he just opened the most recent post and responded to that. Or maybe most of us are on his enemies list and he has no idea what the previous discussion was about. Maybe I'm on his enemies list and he'll never read this. He probably had no idea why I bumped this thread. I've bumped this thread a few times before over the last few years. The first few times we were all laughing at the negativity. Now those who were negative are patting themselves on the back. Bumping threads is a funny game.

/smitty

Also, by that logic that any random team's message board has a bunch of people who would be better than a GM, logic says few if any of the GMs actually deserve their jobs. Unless Amaro just happens to be far and away the worst, catastrophically overrated by the same people (Wade, Gillick, Montgomery, etc.) who presided over a great run of baseball.

But anyway...what of it. I think a bunch of you could read a basic journalism book and outperform most of the beat writers, but that really has no place in a discussion on, say, how Gelb compares to Martino.

FullCount wrote:Andrew Friedman, who is the GM of Tampa and has been since 2005 when he was all of 28 years old, is a pretty good example of what Shore has been talking about, someone brought into a baseball organization without extensive experience in the MLB environment, and who has managed to be pretty successful despite his non-traditional background.

Friedman, like Wade, played college ball but was neither good enough to be drafted nor did he have his heart set on a sports management career. He parlayed his finance degree into increasingly lucrative Wall Street jobs with Bear Stearns and MidMark Capital. He met one of the new owners of the Rays, they hit it off and was offered a position within the organization which he accepted despite the hit to his annual compensation. His first job was as Director of Baseball Development but it was as evident from the time he was hired that he was the likely GM as it was here when Amaro joined the front office. Two years later he had the job.

Doubtless his time as Director of Baseball Development enabled him to become oriented to his new environment, and Gerry Hunsicker was probably tasked with mentoring Friedman, but the reason he became the GM of Tampa had absolutely nothing to do with possessing some secret knowledge only leathery baseball lifers can aspire to. Shore may have been exercising some hyperbole (no one would want 97% of message board posters anywhere near an MLB front office delivering W.B. Mason supplies let alone offering harebrained suggestions) but his point is spot on. Effective management is a transferable capability and there are doubtless people reading this thread who could sit in Amaro's chair and do a better job. In some regards, Amaro is an anachronism. GM jobs are increasingly going to relatively young business/management school graduates who have not spent large chunks of their careers playing, scouting or in player development.

I don't think Andrew Friedman spent much time on message boards.

But this is a good post. I never said GMs must have a lot of experience in baseball to be successful or there were deep dark secrets that only old timers possesed. .A lot of new GMs are pretty young. And some of them have only minimal experience before they are hired as a GM. But even Friedman spent two years learning the ropes inside the organization and making his bones.

There may be guys who read the threads here or even who post here who could eventually be a big league GM. When they reach that point, they could quite possibly do a better job than Amaro as Amaro is far from a hall of famer.

But that wasn't what was presented. In my view there is no way anyone who posts here (and this was what shore was saying a poster, not some big shot executive who might read some stuff here or something) could jump into any GM seat and do a good job. I don't believe anyone would survive a week. It's a ridiculous notion.

Matt S was a poster here. He now works for the Nationals. That's damn fine work. He would not be a good GM right now i would bet. He might be at some point. He is the closest we have to someone being a good GM at the big league level. Calvin Ball works for CSN or something. I guess he's next closest.

No one can jump straight into being a GM job without any front office experience in my view. But again, I could be wrong.

steagles wrote:

The Red Tornado wrote:based on what? From what Ive heard Amaro has been good with the contract side of things.

this is based on his comments to media outlets and WIP. i don't think he has any idea of the intricacies involved in pitching at the highest level, nor do i think he has any appreciation of what it takes to get up every 5th day and stand out on an island, where you are essentially alone.

i think this might manifest itself in signing a guy like oliver perez, who is a tremendous talent, but who doesn't seem to have all his mental faculties in order.

i think this might manifest itself in drafting pitchers like colt griffin, who arerespected for their velocity, but show no signs of having decent secondary pitches, and also have no stomach for pitching over the course of an 8 month season.

i think this might manifest itself by dealing with pitchers as if they're football players. rub some dirt on it, walk it off, and get back out there.


basically, to me, ruben amaro comes off as a meathead who is dangerously oblivious to the mental side of pitching.

wait did people think I was a clone account of this dude for a while? wtf

You didn't manifest yourself.

phdave wrote:

bump