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| This blog entry is just an excuse for a silly baseball .gif |
NO ONE has ever accused Jeffrey Loria of being indecisive. Once he decides changes need to be made with the Miami Marlins, it’s damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. That his “fire, ready, aim” approach to running a Major League Baseball franchise actually resulted in the Marlins winning a World Series in 2003 should gall every baseball fan to the core. More often than not, of course, MLB’s greatest shyster comes off looking like a buffoon. His club crashes out and Loria’s response is simply to slash and burn, often stripping the payroll of the club down to among the lowest in the majors, with predictable results. Loria is something of a pariah to his fellow owners, as well, having mooched off the MLB’s revenue sharing while crying poor mouth, all the while profiting handsomely from it while he was also going about conning and bilking local politicos into ponying up an estimated $2.4 billion for the atrocity that is Marlins Park – a facility built in keeping with the club’s owner in terms of bombast, tackiness, and artifice.
Quite a few baseball writers I read, and think highly of, made it a point in the preseason of picking the Miami Marlins to be in the World Series at season’s end. The Lose was quite skeptical of such predictions. Yes, the Marlins had developed a nice nucleus of talent during their latest foray into the badlands, but I could think of 5-6 NL clubs off the top of my head with more talent, so the Marlins even making the playoffs seemed like it would be a challenge. But also, the Marlins’ history of rash, and often irrational behaviour, led me to think that the organization wouldn’t make the sorts of moves necessary in-season if/when it started not going so well. This is an organization that signed every free agent imaginable in one off-season, stunk the following season, and then traded every single player they had signed the previously signed. This is the organization that once gave away a starting outfielder to a pennant contender (who promptly was the NLCS MVP) and demoted another to AAA because of his twitter feed. When push comes to shove in Miami, stupidity takes over and the operation folds up like the house of cards that it is.
And it wasn’t going so well here early in the season for the Marlins, but it was the sort of run-of-the-mill bad start that a lot of teams go through. The offense was struggling, there were some injuries on the pitching front, the Marlins were a few games under .500 but it’s nothing you can’t overcome with a few good weeks strung together. Patience should have been the order of the day in Miami – but Jeffrey Loria doesn’t do patience. After all, he’d invested a fortune in this club in the offseason! He’d signed Giancarlo Stanton to the richest contract in MLB history! (A contract which, like everything else Loria does, withers under scrutiny.) Nope, it was time for some swift, decisive action – firing manager Mike Redmond, whom he had just hired a season ago – and then compounding the disaster by instilling GM Dan Jennings in the position.
Jennings has a long track record of success in the player development area. He is part of the reason why the Marlins aren’t even more of a disaster on a regular basis. On the managerial front, however, he can point to working with a high school club in Alabama 30 years ago. That’s it. The excuse put forth by the Marlins is that Jennings knows the organization, and its players, better than anyone since he’s the one who assembled the cast. What’s more likely the reason is that the notoriously stingy Loria is still paying two former managers – Redmond and the mercurially loquacious Ozzie Guillen – and didn’t want to pay for a third. This bit of cheap chicanery is straight out of the plotline for a Disney movie. There hasn’t been a stunt in Major League managerial hirings quite like this since the day that Ted Turner hired himself to manage the Braves.
And while I don’t necessarily think you have to have a résumé lined with managerial and coaching experiences to qualify for the job, there is a huge difference between the on-field and the off-the-field, day-to-day operations of a professional sports franchise. One of the reasons why so many collegiate coaches fail in the pro ranks, for example, is that lower-level success entirely depends on talent development. But in the pros, everyone has talent, and the contribution of a coaching staff involves much more tactical acumen and more efficient human resources management. It’s a long season, and you have to manage your personnel appropriately to get through it.
The role of an on-field manager was famously discounted in Moneyball, where Billy Beane seems to call all the shots, but you haven’t seen Billy Beane put on a uniform and try to run the clubhouse, now have you? Over the course of a season, the in-game tactical moves of a manager may seemingly not matter much – I think the WAR value it’s been calculated at falls in the 1.0-1.5 range – but no sport on the planet lives within the margins of error quite like baseball, where the difference between a great team and a terrible one is one more win a week over the course of a season. Both the Nats and the Cards were done in, in part, by the Giants in the playoffs because Bruce Bochy managed circles around his inexperienced foes, both of whom made horrible decisions with their pitching staffs at critical junctures. The job does matter, and not just anyone can do it.
It’s also a craft, and a good number of guys have put in the time to learn that craft. Loria’s hiring of Jennings makes a mockery of that craft, and some of its proprietors have been none too amused.
And neither are the Marlins players amused, apparently. Their response to this move was to promptly go into an 8-game losing streak and fall into last place in the NL East. Professional athletes who have no respect for the coaching staff generally respond to it by finding a way to get them fired (that shift in authority, and inability of an individual to adjust to it, being another reason why so many lower-echelon coaches fail at higher levels). Good luck with that, now that the guy who should be doing the hiring and the firing is holding down both jobs. They are professionals being subjected to the Mickey Mouse whims of their front office. And I had the same opinion about Stanton signing that mega-contract to play for the Fish that I did when Redmond took the manager’s position a year ago: if given your druthers, why on earth would you ever agree to work for these guys?
Instead of vying for the playoffs, Florida’s Fish are threatening to do something I didn’t think possible this season – dislodge the Philadelphia Phillies from the National League basement. The Phillies are so devoid of talent that Jeff Francoeur is starting in the outfield. Phillies GM/Captain of the Titanic impersonator Ruben Amaro, Jr., meanwhile, struck this understanding pose when asked about growing disconnect among Phillie Phaithful:
“They don’t understand the game. They don’t understand the process. There’s a process. And then they bitch and complain because we don’t have a plan. There’s a plan in place and we’re sticking with the plan. We can’t do what’s best for the fan. We have to do what’s best for the organization so the fan can reap the benefit of it later on. That’s the truth.”
– Ruben Amaro Jr., Philadelphia Phillies GM
Jeez, Ruben, why stop there? Why not just say that all the fans should get a job? Philly sports fans may be irascible, but they are also loyal, knowledgeable, and surprisingly patient. Look at what they’ve had to put up with. The Phillies have lost more games than any team in the history of sports, the Flyers haven’t won a Stanley Cup in 40 years, the Eagles have never won a Super Bowl, and the 76ers have devolved into an assault on the senses. And apparently, ‘the plan’ in Philadelphia involves taking a 101-win team in 2011 and razing it to rubble over the course of four years. You should always be wary of GMs on bad teams who talk about ‘the plan.’ Usually, that means they have no idea what they’re doing. But bitching about the fact that the fans bitch is usually a good way to get yourself fired – as if there weren’t already plenty of reasons for the Phillies to do that, anyway.
Now that Kevin Towers has been axed in Arizona, Amaro has shot to the top of the list of Guys In Pro Sports Whom I Wonder Why They Still Have a Job. Amaro came along at the tail end of the Phillies’ build-up to winning a World Series, to which he responded by handing out some wonderfully large contracts to players like Ryan Howard in appreciation for their outstanding careers – a sentiment you can understand, of course, but the problem was that the Phillies were already among the oldest teams in the league when they won the World Series, and that core of talent was never supplanted by any youth. (The Phillies’ drafts over the past decade have been atrocious.) Burdened with old, past-their-prime, broken-down players with immovable contracts clogging up the payroll, the Phillies have continued working from a position of weakness, doing dumb things like trading away potential cornerstone Hunter Pence for pennies on the dollar because they didn’t want to pay the luxury tax thanks to all of the dead weight on their bloated payroll.
What both Loria and Amaro share is a delusion that just because their teams won World Series championships on their watch, it means that the two of them know what they are doing. The Florida Marlins more or less lucked their way into winning in 2003, while a whole lot of the organizational building in Philadelphia happened under the auspice of former GM Pat Gillick. Now, winning titles does give you some cred, and also gives you a little leeway when it comes to keeping the fans happy, but only to a point. It’s not 2003 any more, nor is it 2009. You’re always judged in sports by what you do now. Championships matter, of course. The old adage “flags fly forever” is certainly true, and I’m going to like seeing that third championship banner flying out in center field in a few weeks when I go to see the Giants play the Mariners at Phone Company Park. But just because the flag is flying, it doesn’t mean you can wrap yourself in it.
