Ryan leaves Twins, no effect on Mariners
Scheduling Note: Dave with Groz moves up a day, and can be heard this afternoon at 2:35 pm on KJR.
Terry Ryan resigns as GM of Twins. ESPN’s write-up here.
I’ve heard him mentioned as a possible Bavasi replacement, but Bavasi’s not going anywhere (unless they keep losing like this and the A’s catch them, maybe). So it doesn’t really matter to us.
The short version: the Twins under Ryan did an amazing job developing players their way, often evaluating them on the basis of criteria I totally disagree with (David Ortiz, for instance, run out of the org for not being their kind of player), did some things badly, but given the constraints they worked under, have to be acknowledged as a tremendous sustained success.
Comments
74 Responses to “Ryan leaves Twins, no effect on Mariners”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Maybe things will be more clear after the press conference, but at this point in time it’s also a question whether or not Terry Ryan would even be interested in a GM position somewhere else. He could just be sick of the stress, and by taking a different position within the organization is able to retain a baseball-related job without some of the headaches that come with being the GM.
Not sure I want Terry Ryan as I’m not sure how much of an upgrade he would be over Bavasi. They have similar strengths and weaknesses: both bring a strong ability to build a farm system, both have glaring weaknesses when it comes to evaluating major league talent.
Derek:
I agree that it doesn’t seem likely that Bavasi will be fired soon. What would cause him to get fired, do you think? Will it take another lost season – or just a disappointing start?
And if so, when would they do it? During the offseason, when they are evaluating free agent talent? During the spring, when they are preparing for the amateur draft?
I agree with the consensus here that he is pretty good at developing a farm system but not at constructing a major league roster.
Might this indeed, though, have an effect on the Mariners? Given earlier post about bad free agent pitchers, along with this news, is there any useful speculating to be done that this could influence possibilities for a trade for Santana? The R-L Venezuelan superstars combo, M’s have the money to pay Johan, new Twins GM may want to make a splash and do so by getting a bunch of great prospects rather than paying Johan $200 Million…. Dave has already speculated that Twins might like to get Wlad….
this sounds familiar:
“The team made the announcement official at a 2 p.m. news conference confirming that Ryan is resigning as general manager but staying with the team as a senior advisor.
“I felt a lot of elation when we won, and sorrow when we lost,” Ryan said. “Now all of a sudden the defeats are getting a little harder to take and the wins aren’t as much fun. That’s not a good thing to experience as a general manager.”"
the quote was from the Star Tribune article
Jon Heyman had a column the other day discussing the bind the Twins might be in, with Pohlad refusing to spend money
Dave or Derek:
Assuming Bill Bavasi gets fired, and Antonetti is hired by the Pirates, who would you want to GM the M’s?
I think it’s time for a female GM. Who was the assistant with either Anaheim or the Dodgers that got some ink from Rob Neyer a few years back? Ng?
Yes — Kim Ng. Has been Dodger ass’t GM (also Yankee ass’t GM)
I really can’t see Antonetti wanting to go to the Pirates. That org is a total mess, the city of Pittsburgh isn’t a great place to live, and he is already in a great spot. I could very easily see him staying in Cleveland until he gets the right fit. I don’t believe Pittsburgh is the right fit.
From the sounds of it, the only performance-enhancing drug they’re managing to keep out of baseball is Prozac.
Is Hargrove getting royalties from Ryan for his resignation speech?
13. Probably not, given Hargrove took it from Resignation Speech Mad Libs.
This is my first post on this site, but I have been keeping up with it for a while now, and I have been a very avid M’s fan since their inception.
I would have to ask in response to DMZ’s post as to what Bavasi has done in his tenure with the M’s to deserve a contract extension. As I recall, didn’t the FO state prior to the biginning of the season that Bavasi was on the hotseat, and anything less than a playoff birth would be seen as a failure?
If this season is indeed deemed a failure, as every other season has under this regime, then what would be the justification for signing Bavasi to a new contract? And please don’t tell me it’s because the team has shown improvement this year. I could list countless reasons why he shouldn’t be back next year, but I would just be repeating things you all already know.
While Bavasi and Mac both seem to be nice guys, IMO they both need to go immediately after the season is over, and that is my hope. It is my firm belief that as long as Bavasi is sitting in the GM seat, this team will never be more than mediocre at best. Has anyone in here heard any rumors or have any inside info as to whether or not these guys are going to be retained?
And someone please tell me why Bill Bavasi deserves an extension of his contract for wasting all the money he has the last few years? That’s what I thought. . .
Please, get Terry Ryan on the phone after the season. Hell, get anyone on the phone with a pulse after the season to be the GM of this team!!
#14: hahahahaha, oh lord. Someone please post a Resignation Speech Mad Lib!!! If someone did that, it would make my day!
Big thing is that M’s ownership should at least consider Terry Ryan. There doesn’t have to be a reason other than the fact that it hasn’t been a run of division titles and playoff success here recently. If you have the opportunity to at least explore hiring someone who can help bring success to your firm, you owe it to yourself to look at it!
It seems that the Twins have done an excellent job developing pitchers in their system, but I think their record developing hitters is much more spotty. I’d quibble with the assertion that they should be “acknowledged as a tremendous sustained success,” given that they haven’t really made much noise in the post season. Of course, in the scope of budgetary constraints, it is all relative. In the grand scheme of things, though, it seems like Ryan’s tenure will be best remembered for their ability to develop pitchers, which of course, is very valuable; I just don’t think his impact will be much beyond that.
considering is all very well, but if the timing is wrong (ie Ryan wants to decompress or something) there isn’t much you can do about it– which leads to things like Leyland deciding he is ready to go back to managing after Hargrove was signed.
#17: More than that, a guy like Terry Ryan can bring this franchise the CREDIBILITY it has so badly lacked since Pat Gillick was driven out of town.
driven out of town?!
Yes driven out of town, the reason why he resigned as general manager probably due to Lincoln not giving him extra money to play around with to improve the team, and because of that, he pretty much knew he couldn’t ever make the World Series with the M’s.
Not that I’m a big fan of Bavasi’s skills as a GM, but I’m not sure that Stand Pat is who you should be looking to as a better option.
so he was lying when he has said both before and after he was here that there was always money available at the trade deadlines, and that he never spent it because there wasn’t ‘a match’ …
Yes driven out of town, the reason why he resigned as general manager probably due to Lincoln not giving him extra money to play around with to improve the team
I think you have Gillick confused with Piniella, and Lincoln confused with Gillick, and giving money confused with using it.
I think Gillick resigned because his ship was going down and he knew it. Then you have the matter of him being paid by the Mariners, basically until the Phillies hired him. When he still held some power in personnel decisions. Driven out of town? Pretty much a ridiculous statement based on no facts. Then again you also said he wasn’t given enough money to play with when the M’s have a consistent top 10 payroll and the M’s somehow lack credibility because Bavasi is the GM.
It’s the reason that Piniella left also, and it’s also one of the reasons why Pat Gillick left. Another reason was Gillick figured out at the end of ‘03 that this team was getting old and wasn’t going to win a World Series any time soon and didn’t really want to be part of a rebuilding process, that and he had also painfully missed out on the playoffs 2 years in a row with some good teams.
But really what made everything go downhill were Lincoln’s binding budgets, which turned off Lou Piniella, and at the very least Jeff Nelson and Carlos Guillen on the players side. And it was also these binding budgets that really couldn’t allow Pat Gillick to improve the team the way he wanted to at each trading deadline, that’s why he couldn’t find the right “fit” every year.
This isn’t to say that Gillick is a genius of a GM or Howard Lincoln isn’t committed to winning (although making money seems to excite him the most), but whatever Howard Lincoln and friends said and did in 2002-2003 were probably huge reasons why Gillick, Lou, Nellie, and Carlos all left and wanted to leave in some way or another.
So in a lot of ways it was Lincoln and the ownership’s binding budgets that started to send things downhill and turn off a lot of people.
Bavasi’s not going anywhere
I’m afraid you’re right because of the nice run in the middle of the season. On the other hand, a stadium that’s empty in April and September and 84 wins, 8-10 games out of the playoffs might not be enough to save Bavasi’s job. Would you really call this season a success? This is especially if they make any effort to look at his actual moves this year rather than the W-L record (unless they think Vidro was a huge success)
Sooo… skipping most of the comments…
Why is Bavasi returning? I don’t know. Ask the owners.
What would it take to have him leave? I also don’t know. I’ve tried to give up guessing at these kind of issues. I was entirely convinced Hargrove would get canned for a while, and it turned out that was… well, I’m not sure what that was. Bad information, partly.
We’ve written a lot on Antonetti and why he’s awesome, and I’ve written a lot on Kim Ng and why I’m a fan of hers.
Would the M’s hire them? Who knows. Until Bavasi quits or is given his papers, though, I’m not going to spend much energy thinking about it.
#26: Just remember though, aside from when the Mariners expanded payroll before the 2000 season, this team never signed any high-priced free agents from the open market before Sexson and Beltre. And the Mariners during that 2001-2003 stretch always seemed to be one impact player away from being a World Series worthy team.
Namely a power hitter, but Lincoln and the ownership never wanted to go the extra mile with that and instead stuck strictly to their $90 million budget.
This is why many people in the organization from 2002-2003 started to get turned off, including Piniella and even Gillick. Yes, the team had a Top-10 payroll. But they didn’t have a Top-10 payroll necessarily to win, they had a Top-10 payroll as a strict business plan and to keep guys like Edgar and Dan around longer for good P.R. It was never all the way about winning a World Series, and that’s why the exact number of the Mariners composite salary has nothing to how committed Howard Lincoln was to winning.
Maybe he did have a Top-10 payroll and still does now, but he never wanted to take any risks and go the extra mile to win for the sake of winning. Howard Lincoln only wanted to have a good enough record to get asses in the seats. Hence why Lou, Pat, Carlos, and Jeff all requested to leave.
Can Bill convince Twins new GM Bill Smith to trade Santana to the M’s?
Carlos Guillen was traded away and replaced with a more expensive player. That is not exactly the way to build your credibility.
#26: Just remember though, aside from when the Mariners expanded payroll before the 2000 season, this team never signed any high-priced free agents from the open market before Sexson and Beltre.
This is a very silly statement, easily disproved, and you should know better.
#29: It’s a successful failure. Successful because the team improved and the team has a pretty decent nucleus now to be at .500 the next few years. But a failure because if the way we played against Anaheim this year is any indication of anything, it shows that this team is lightyears behind the Angels player develpoment and front office and coaching staff while we continue to throw money at grossly overpriced players.
Personally, I would not like to have this team always be 5 steps behind the Angels. Hence why even though the record has imrpoved, some feelings (namely Bavasi’s) will need to be hurt to make this team better.
I assumed he didn’t mean Carlos Guillen, because that’s a horrible argument, though I didn’t figure out who he meant.
Based on the remaining statements, I think he did mean Carlos Guillen. It certainly could not have been David Segui.
#26: Ichiro came to us through post, Jeff Nelson, Shigetoshi Hasegawa, and James Baldwin were not really players that commanded a ton of salary in the free agent market if I recall correctly, Bret Boone came to us cheap in the open market, and Jeff Cirillo came via-trade.
Boone ended up signing a ridiculous contract with us, and we gave Cirillo a new contract once he got here, but unless I’m mistaken about Baldwin, Nelson, and Hasegawa, this team never signed a Type-A free agent off the open market. Certainly we never signed a very expensive one and we always seemed to stay away from the Scott Boras clients.
#33: And who trade Guillen and replaced him with Rich Aurilia? Not Gillick.
traded*
You’re arguing that all the players who would contradict your stance don’t qualify under your criteria.
Arguing that Ichiro somehow doesn’t count because — while he was a top-tier free agent that the team paid a ton for — he was posted is an absurd assertion.
The M’s paid tons of money for free agents. That they didn’t sign what you consider a top-tier open-market FA that would have been in that year’s highest salaries doesn’t make your view valid.
We’ve discussed the responsibility of trading Guillen before, but to say it’s Bavasi’s issue neglects, at the very least, the complexity of the situation and the organization and Gillick’s role in that off-season.
So Tom, your argument is that the team was never willing to really spend money when Gillick was the GM, and now, with the same group of executives above, the team suddenly is willing to spend money with Bavasi as the GM?
If so, what changed? If Gillick wasn’t able to persuade the owners to fork over the necessary cash, and Bavasi was, wouldn’t that mean Gillick wasn’t up to the job? When you’re in charge of part of an organization and depend on an allocated budget, part of the job is that you have to advocate for your budget to make sure you get the resources you need.
What about John Olerud, he was kind of a big name free agent when he came to Seattle from the Mets.
Well, the money we paid for free agents accumulated a little bit and added up towards that $90 million budget, absolutely. And I do agree that the $90 million payroll in 2002 would be equivalent to having a $100-$105 million dollar payroll now.
But I’m just telling you, aside from Ichiro who we paid a ton of money to receive in post, this team never got that big power hitter or ace pitcher we desperately needed in trade and especially not at free agency that would’ve pushed the payroll up close to the likes of the Yankees and would’ve maybe gotten that team to a World Series. We never were willing to go that “extra mile” to win.
Tom here is arguing post-2000 acquisitions only, so Olerud wouldn’t count.
#43: The thing that really changed was that the team was suddenly losing at an unbelieveable rate in 2004 and fans weren’t showing up, and the front office was desperate to try to win again quicker instead of go with a full-fledged rebuilding process. It was a certain paranoia, especially after the previous 2 years, that suddenly this franchise would become the Pittsburgh Pirates or Kansas City Royals and become incredibly cheap, even though that was probably far from the case.
Hence, why we signed up Beltre and Sexson for huge amounts of cash.
#44: I’m talking about the years after the signings leading up to 2000.
#47: Or at least, get the reputation of becoming ridiculously cheap.
Okay, so now you’re arguing that the team didn’t spend for ‘that big power hitter’ or ‘ace pitcher’ in free agency or trade.
Which is also not true. Just in 2001, they had free agents in Sasaki, Sele, and in a trade they took on Martin. In 2002 they traded for Jeff Cirillo, who was making $6.5m and paid Boone $8m, and Boone was at the time an elite player.
You just don’t have a leg to stand on. They tried spending money on these things.
You know, it’s funny. Everytime I sit down at my desk to listen to Dave and Groz, something comes up. My boss just stuck his head in the door and wanted to talk about USC/Nebraska.
I’m mainly trying to talk about 2002-2003 after Boone and Cirillo were here. This team during that time was always 1 or 2 good players away from being a World Series worthy team. But the front-office was never willing to be flexible to get those 1 or 2 players.
That’s what I’m trying to get at. . .
from the 2003 trade deadline:
“We’d have liked to have done something. We were hopeful something would happen,” Gillick said. “But nothing happened.”
“We did have (financial) flexibility,” Gillick said. “We had some very substantial proposals on the table. We want to assure you that we had a number of discussions going, and two or three were of a serious nature.”
and can we lay to rest the ‘Nelson was traded because he shot his mouth off about the deadline’?
Since Bavasi is staying, does that mean McLaren gets fired to show that the team is “doing something” to fix this year?
Or does Mac stay, with the explanation that he did a great job under the circumstances, and that he gets a year to start from scratch and help build the team from spring training?
Or does the PR machine crank out the “wow, it was a great, unexpected season and we’re going to build on this year’s success?”
#52: That quote is partially about PR, I guarantee it.
#53: His mouth probably had something to do with it considering he got traded to the Yankees less than 48 hours after that quote came out. The issues Nellie had with the front office did get resolved eventually, hence why he came back in ‘05, but at the time I’m all but sure he got traded because he shot his mouth. Because the idea of trading Nelly beofre the quote was a “pie out of the sky” type of thing.
In other words, my mind’s made up, don’t confuse me with facts.
*sigh*
of course, although Jeff doesn’t seem to remember it now, he was on the trading block well before he said anything about management, and he even confirmed on arrival in NY that week that in talking to Cashman he’d learned that the Yankees were asking about him before the deadline, and the trade was under discussion.
Well, Ichiro was signed prior to 2001, so that’s one right there.
Before 2002, I don’t think the team really thought they needed to do much tinkering.
So you’re really talking about the off-seasons following 2002 and 2003, seasons in which the Mariners won over 90 games, so the need for significant improvement wasn’t really that obvious.
Or does the PR machine crank out the “wow, it was a great, unexpected season and we’re going to build on this year’s success?â€
This one gets my vote.
Ah, that’s the no-brainer to say that about ANYTHING. I’d say it even if I were to DFA Sexson and Turbo, dump HoRam and Weaver, and bring in RR-S, Campillo and Morrow.
#59: Well, we didn’t make the playoffs and it was an aging team, so something probably needed to be fixed. . .
#58: Yet, nothing got done until Nellie shot his mouth.
This management team thought it was a good idea to trade Soriano in order to get HoRam, in the offseason.
If they’re willing to make that kind of a move in the offseason, I’d prefer they not even have a phone line CONNECTED around the trade deadline, when everything is even mor overpriced.
#33: And who trade Guillen and replaced him with Rich Aurilia? Not Gillick.
You cited Carlos Guillen as an example of a player who left because of “Lincoln’s binding budgets.” That is an untrue statement. Carlos Guillen had no say in leaving the team. He was still under team control. The team decided to get rid of him (following his legal and chronic injury problems). The team did not trade him to save money, because they replaced him with a more expensive free agent. The budget had nothing to do with it.
re 64
I think a simpler explanation than “the front office was being cheap” is that “the front office is being incompetent.”
Re: 65
With the acquisitions on Parrish and R. White, the future does not look to bright either…
62 – Making the playoffs is a lousy measure of success, because whether you succeed or fail is largely based on the strength of the other teams you your division.
Making the playoffs in the 2006 NL Central is something roughly half of all teams could do, while making the playoffs in the 2001 AL West is something usually only one team in all of baseball is good enough to manage in any given year.
Evan: Eh?
Do you want to type that last paragraph again, because I don’t understand clearly what you mean.
68, I think Evan is talking about the number of teams who would post a win-loss record similar to the winner of the ‘06 NL Central as opposed to the number of teams who post a record similar to the ‘01 M’s, who won at a .716 clip.
The Twins under Ryan, as I’ll remember, have a far more distinct personality than other teams. I’ve always associated them with:
1) Smart, aggressive farm-system development. (For a time, it seemed that they were bleeding Quad-A outfielders — Brian Buchanan, Chad Allen, Mike Ryan, Michael Restovich, all the way back to Butch Huskey)
2) Unwillingness to be dragged into premum free-agent bidding wars, even to retain their own
3) Bizarre fealties to weak slap hitters — Denny Hocking, Pat Meares, Luis Rivas, Cristian Guzman, Nick Punto, Jason Tyner. (This actually goes all the way back to guys like Randy Bush and Gene Larkin, who got way more playing time than their talent warranted because their were “Twins types of players.”)
I, and I think everybody would be curious to see what Ryan could do with a bigger bankroll.
DMZ, can you give us a specific reason, or a source, as to why you so firmly believe Bavasi will be back next year? I’m just not so convinced, and I hope you’re wrong.
I can’t speak for DMZ, but his position would make a lot of sense with no source, and the only specific reason being that if the M’s ownership hired and fired and ran the team in a rational fashion, a metric fuckload of other decisions would’ve made differently. With that context, the fact that it seems reasonable, or at least possible, that Bavasi won’t be back next year is itself a good reason to expect he will be.
3) Bizarre fealties to weak slap hitters — Denny Hocking, Pat Meares, Luis Rivas, Cristian Guzman, Nick Punto, Jason Tyner. (This actually goes all the way back to guys like Randy Bush and Gene Larkin, who got way more playing time than their talent warranted because their were “Twins types of players.â€)
Part of this perhaps had to do with playing in the Metrodome.