Zduriencik hire can be good and still depressing
I’ve been really pretty nasty about the whole hiring process lately, as I’m sure you’ve all noticed, in particular calling out the people doing the hiring as bumbling fools unfit to decide what to order for lunch, much less pick who to be in charge of the operations of the franchise (Power structures and the GM hunt, Essential problems with the interview process, Target-rich environment, on and on).
There’s been some great discussion on the hire, particularly in the comments to Dave’s last post, Thoughts From Milwaukee which I highly recommend. I feel like many of the people there.
I come to this feeling, unfortunately, a lot like I did about the Bavasi hire — that hiring Zdurincik is about as good as we’re going to get out of the Mariners. It’s actually better than I’d feared, that they’d retreat into the safety of a name former GM retread. Zduriencik might work out great (and we don’t know, any or all of the others would have been awesome, too).
But I want to talk about why this pick is bad for us, in a larger sense than what the GM’s going to do soon.
The M’s organization has viewed advances in baseball knowledge with at best antipathy and often a heaping amount of scorn. This is evident in many of the moves we’ve seen in the last few years, but even removing the Bavasi years and focusing just on the views of the people who were going to make the hiring decision, it’s true. We don’t need to look any further than their comments on the A’s — they’ve continually refused to give the A’s any credit for anything, and gone out of their way to denigrate what Beane’s done even as year after year the A’s have handed the M’s their ass, sometimes on a nice silver tray as the protein course in a eighteen-game season meal of whooping.
At the same time, they’ve looked to the Twins as an example of an organization they admire. There’s nothing wrong with admiring the Twins. They’ve been successful running a team on a shoestring while pretty much discarding baseball research.
But the disdain for the A’s and other smart teams has always been one of the larger and more prominent symptoms of the team’s at time galling arrogance about how smart they are. Chuck Armstrong thinks, more or less, that because he has engineering training that he knows stats, and because they have a stathead on a consulting contract and once in a while ask him questions like “how many more games would we win if we brought Carlos Silva instead of playing Baek?”
It’s crazy. There are, as I think every serious fan of baseball would agree, many ways to put together a championship team. You can look down recent league winners and see some amazing contrasts both in how the teams play but how they were constructed.
The Mariners front office essentially decided that they preferred one way, and therefore that was the only correct path to follow in building a team. And teams that didn’t follow it and were successful were lucky, or cheating, or… I’m not sure what their argument was here.
This drove me nuts.
This off-season presented a chance for the team, and particularly the front office, to take a serious look at itself, where things had gone wrong, and change. Ownership did not change the people responsible for running the team. The people running the team made some noises about opening themselves to new ideas, new approaches, and there was hope.
The hope was that they would finally consider that perhaps they had something to learn from the teams that were getting more from much less payroll, much more from the same payroll, from teams that were using wholly different approaches.
The hope was that they’d hire one of the crazy-competent hybrid GM candidates, the people who are building organizations based on getting all the information they can out of the stats and the scouts, and weigh it appropriately. Someone who can look at a free agent pitcher and say “sure, he’s got a 3.50 ERA, but he got amazingly lucky stranding runners, and he wants $15m a year. Why don’t we take the guy with a 4.50 ERA who got unlucky for $8m and get something shiny for left field?”
This would have been the reason to double the celebration if the team had hired an Antonetti, for example:
– great hire
– clear demonstration that the team at a level higher than GM recognizes where the franchise has gone wrong
Zduriencik to me may check off the first box. But he doesn’t at all mark that second one.
In many ways, he’s what they wanted but did not get out of Bavasi. He’s a scouting and player development guy, well-respected within baseball. I joked at one point that if Bavasi had put on a wig, shaved the facial hair, and dummied up a resume to get onto the long list, he’d have made it all the way through the interview process again.
Moreover, the finalist list reinforces that worry:
– LaCava was fine, but he’s not a known hybrid-y guy
– DiPoto was fine, but he’s not a known hybrid-y guy
– Ng is a cipher
– Zduriencik is a scouting-side guy
I freely acknowledge that the team had a terrible time getting permission to talk to candidates and getting the candidates interested (which is another stunning indictment of them, but that’s a seperate argument). And that we have to throw up our hands on Ng a little. But there was no finalist who could have for certain turned the organization somewhere new, or someone who would have taken the M’s organizational strengths and helped meld it with an improved analysis side.
There’s the letdown — whoever the new GM is, we know that the people above them didn’t take this opportunity to do some serious thinking about what they’ve wrought. You could go ask Armstrong right now if he’d reconsidered his opinion on the A’s success, and I’d bet you pennies to dollars that he’d say the same thing he’s been saying for years.
As Dave’s said, they’ve decided to stick to their guns and shoot for becoming a well-funded Twins franchise, and if we’re lucky, the M’s look like the 90s Braves, or the good version of the Mets. And that’s okay by me. I have a ton of respect for what the Braves did.
Maybe Zduriencik is going to survey the franchise in the next week and decide to spend some money putting some serious technology people together to build some tools, get some quality stathead analysts hired and figure out how to make them a part of an organization that could badly use them. I don’t know.
But I worry that that’s not going to happen. I worry that even if he thought of that and decided that that was how he was going to run the organization, he’d have an impossible sell to Armstrong (why does the team need to beef up anything on that side of the house when they’ve received so little value from it in the past?). And I know that’s not rational, that the GM’s going to have the freedom to build their own staff and their own organization.
Again we’re back to that worry: that the Lincoln/Armstrong Return to Community means exactly that, and that Zduriencik’s brilliance may well be limited by the team’s unwillingness to back him financially in drafting players. Or that they won’t sign off on contracts that make sense, or will mandate extensions for their favorite players, and on and on. Because, and I hesitate to bring this up again, there’s years of evidence that they’re no good at evaluating deals. Sure, Armstrong was there to veto a Washburn dump, but where was he when we signed Washburn? Or any of the horrible deals up to the supposed hands-off 2007 off-season?
Certainly almost every GM operates with some degree of managerial control, but one of the greatest lessons of the Twins and A’s success is that the ownership gave good baseball people the freedom to operate as they should. Reading Moneyball, you’re probably struck as much by how unfettered Beane was allowed to operate within the financial bounds given him. He wasn’t told “You can increase payroll by $250k to improve the team but you have to get at least one good prospect back if you trade a current starter…” And the Twins have much the same latitude in baseball decisions.
Will ours? The evidence of this off-season points to them wanting to be more involved, and that’s bad.
And it points to the HoChuck brain trust as not having learned much from these last few years, and that’s bad too.
I wish Zduriencik all the success possible — I am, above all, a great fan of the franchise. And I’m wary of finding the downside to every decision, and in being too critical from being beat down these last few years. But what this season and the hiring process have shown us about the organization as a whole is worrisome. What if Zduriencik fails? Will they hire the super-super-Bavasi, the guy they thought they were getting when they got the guy they thought they were getting in Bavasi?
And if he succeeds, will they feel vindicated? Even more confident their renewed involvement was the key to success? What does that look like?
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74 Responses to “Zduriencik hire can be good and still depressing”
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I want change too, and I was enraged when I’d heard that we didn’t even interview Obama. But, DMZ, man, you say things like there “was hope,” like it’s past tense, like the hiring of Jack Z, while not terrible, is mediocre at best, and that’s not true. I do agree with you in the sense that I think there were better candidates, but you just never know. This article is a little to pessimistic for me. Maybe Jack Z will turn Seattle into a powerhouse, he grows some talent from the inside, he gives us another Edgar, homegrown talent that Seattle fans can rally around. Look, I know Jack Z isn’t Beane Jr., but Armstrong and Lincoln once pulled a team out of their ass that won more games than any team EVER, maybe there was enough room in their incompetent anuses to pull out an elite GM, too.
These quotes from a previous post lead me to think Robo Ape is looking for gloves:
Might I suggest ebay?
🙂
I agree with Derek and was not able to put it into words.
I look being a fan of a team like Theodore Roosevelt looked at Patriotism:
In short it is okay to not support the leader if he is not doing what needs to be done for the good of the rest.
Have Linc/Arm done that? We won’t know for a while, but it at least LOOKS like a step in the right direction.
I think that hiring a fresh GM who many in the business feel has enough experience, contacts, leadership, scouting, teaching, listening ability to become a good GM was definitely a switch from the norm around here. I also think that this will be the last GM that Armstrong and Lincoln will have much sway over. Vindicate their flawed views before they retire, I don’t have a problem with that. Lincoln will be 69 before the season starts and Armstrong (searches produced his wifes name and a phone number but no DOB, age etc.) These 2 didn’t look in the press conference like people who are going to be around in another 10 years. I think this is their swan song hire anyway so what does it matter?
Yeah. Zduriencik is gonna be given four or five years at least. Even the most rabid stats fan is gonna give him that. That puts Lincoln at 74, and he’s likely to give the reins over at that point…
Bavasi couldn’t find a bad move he didn’t like but did rarely make a decent one…Did favors for almost as many different people as his team had fans, but no favors for his team.
IMHO, given who was making the GM decision this was the “likely” choice they would make given the final 4 that were announced. Something different, but still in the same mold that they’re familiar with.
The positive I see is that at least the hire wasn’t a completely boneheaded decision. Z has a good record of drafting players which is definitely promising.
We can say all we want good or bad, but realistically outside of the positive I stated above, all we can really do is sit on our hands and see what he does in the off-season to start his tenure. We may very well know sooner rather than later how fortunate/doomed we are depending on those moves.
Ooo! A LTRFTP!
Maybe part of that is because the analysis that USSM, Lookout Landing, and other like-minded blogs have been doing these last few years have shown that their ways work and Howard The Chuck’s ways don’t.
That’s certainly not the intention here: the hope I was talking about in that section was the hope that realization had dawned on the leaders. It’s certainly not all hope, and not all hope for the franchise.
Forgive me, Derek et. al., but in your otherwise reasoned analysis of the hire, I see too much of the desire for heads on pikes. It seems like the main reason you’re depressed about this hire is not in the opportunity cost lost by it–again, many candidates refused or were denied permission by their organizations. The main reason is that you seem to be wishing that Armstrong and Lincoln would get publicly shamed and humiliated, that they would appear in a press conference and say “I’m sorry, nerds! You were right and I was wrooooong!”
Not to caricature your viewpoint any more than most of us are caricaturing the thought process that led to the hire. It’s satisfying in a dramatic-arc way to imagine Howie and Chuckie playing golf with Dr. Zhivago here, sniggering over those stupid statheads and their websites and their music, and agreeing privately that they’ll buy Silvas until all those fake fans who don’t buy enough garlic fries will just take their fantasy teams and go back to their mom’s basements. But that line of thinking produces rabid fury, and the accompanying false dichotomies: it gets us thinking that the situation won’t truly be resolved until Howie and Chuck are run out of town on a rail, and we get a big satisfying TV picture of them tearing up as they shamble away.
Regardless of their faults, Lincoln and Armstrong are reasonably intelligent businesspeople. They have to put a positive gloss on what they do, and they have to steer the ship not only with confidence towards the future, but with apparent confidence in the decisions they’ve thus far made. Ship’s captains have to do it and team presidents have to do it. If an ownership change occurs, we’ll get our coveted comeuppance. Until then, I, like Dave, think that the Zhivago hire is cause for hope. If our main beef with it is that we still just don’t like the team executives, then I think we’ve gotta get some sunshine.
Typical Idiot Fan,
First of all, nice Strong Bad reference.
Second of all, I think you misunderstand; I take no issue whatsoever with anyone disagreeing with the ways Armstrong and Lincoln run the team. My only point is that a winning ball club is a winning ball club, and if the M’s can have sustained success under Zduriencik, it doesn’t make any sense to begrudge two guys just because they run the business differently than you would. I want a winning team. If Zduriencik makes us a winning team, then Kudos to Armstrong and Lincoln for hiring him.
If so, their head are gonna explode if Beane applies money ball to health care. Stathead approach to health care, indeed….
I’ve never figured out a good way to respond to people reading things I’ve written in a certain way. The intent of the post is to talk about the M’s as an organization, and why there’s room to be both interested and hopeful about the hire and disappointed that the team didn’t make a clear break with their past failings.
I went to a lot of trouble to talk about the reasons, and make the distinctions pretty clear, and if I still didn’t succeed, I don’t know what else is to be done. I don’t see heads-on-pikes there, or a desire for the M’s to supplicate or admit that nerds were right (and where does that come from?).
But I don’t know that reassurance or clarification ever really helps in these matters.
“I want to talk about why this pick is bad for us.”
Well, that sums up the USSM experience quite nicely.
Are we having fun yet?
DMZ it seems like you have, in fact, figured out a good way to respond to people reading things you’ve written in a certain way: clarify your intended focus. The article itself may not have needed the clarification, it may have been my reading of it that was wrong. But nevertheless, your clarification actually does put my mind at ease about it.
It totally does. I may see heads-on-pikes because I’m conflating your views with the echoes of the choir, so I’m sorry if I’m doing that. I like this blog because it is eloquent and fluent in the baseball parts of MLB. I don’t read it for the dittos of the commenters, so I guess I’m not sure why I chose to dress it all down as one.
Sorry, man!
A well-funded Twins organization could contend for World Series rings. Actually, a well-funded organization of any philosophy could contend, because the secret to baseball success turns out to be twofold:
1. Draft and sign the right guys.
2. Get them to produce in the majors while they’re cost-controlled.
If you don’t pull talent into the organization, you can’t win. By FAR the cheapest way to do that is via the draft. It can be done through free-agency, but the margin of error is so small that one Carl Pavano can cripple you.
If that talent doesn’t develop into major-league players, you can’t win either. By FAR the cheapest way to do that is to hire the best minor-league coaches and instructors you can. You can of course pick up major-league players from other organizations, but the margin is again very thin.
As an A’s fan, the scariest thing the Mariners could do is step up tomorrow and announce that they’re spending the equivalent of Richie Sexson’s last yearly salary to hire the very best scouts, coaches and instructors (away from other jobs, if necessary); that they’re beefing up their medical staffs at the minor-league level; and that they’re asking a consulting company to analyze their minor-league pitching practices over the last decade, in consultation with the medical staffs, with a view towards preventing the horrific batch of injuries that Seattle pitching talent seemed to be prone to.
Nothing stats-based there – it’s all scouting, teaching, fundamentals melded with an eye towards using advances in medicine – but it could revolutionize their industry.
Imagine if Seattle could improve their “success rate” on pitchers by even a small amount. That’s one extra cheap, major-league 4th starter each year – or about $10M on the free market with a considerably higher risk of getting zero back – that they’d have over other teams. If nothing else, they’d save money and put a better product on the field. Who wouldn’t want to do that?
Derek,
In an ideal Internet, this sort of conversation is exactly the discourse comment streams would provide. (Though admittedly if comment streams became too civil it would be drastically more difficult to determine who is or is not “gay”.)
Not to necessarily lump Diplomatic Shark’s opinion with my own, but from these threads I’m inclined to think we both read your post the same way. Your clarification was helpful in addressing the issues I took. Thanks.
Yes, agree, but that might be part of the problem. Most business, including game consoles, is not zero-sum. If you have a good plan and execute it well, it doesn’t really matter if a competitor also has a good plan well executed. In fact, their success might just expand the overall market, and if the two of you have significantly different approaches, you might not really be competing for the same customers anyway (e.g. how much do the demographics for the Wii and XBox360 really overlap?).
But baseball is a zero-sum game. Every game one teams wins means another team loses a game. If the M’s and A’s take different approaches, they can’t both expand into different markets. There’s no “the M’s are #1 in games-won-by-family-friendly-players and the A’s are #1 in games-won-by-sub-$80M-payroll-teams.” The same approaches to “normal” business do not directly translate to baseball.
I agree. In fact, I’ve often wished that someone would put humility aside and post specific analysis of their good and bad endorsements. Could be player moves (many examples to cite here), team endorsements (weren’t the Rays picked at the start of the year?), trade analysis, freely available talent they identified that panned out elsewhere, and so on.
I know this stuff is all buried here somewhere, but haven’t seen it consolidated anywhere in an “I Told You So” post. Who’s auditing the auditors?
Expanding on JM Hawkins thought about baseball being a zero-sum game unlike most businesses, this brings to mind one of the criticisms of Lincoln-Armstrong in the past (fair or not): that they do *not* view baseball properly as a zero-sum game, but more like other businesses, content to compete to fill seats without as much (enough?) regard for wins-losses.
I used to be solidly in that camp. Now, I’m not as sure of that position/criticism. I do know, though, that as long as Lincoln-Armstrong stay strictly on that side of the business and stop meddling in what I agree is a zero-sum business of baseball operations, we’re a helluva lot better off. What resonates most in Derek’s post for me is the resignation that that won’t happen, and the meddling will continue regardless of whether this is a good hire or not.
Sorry if this has been noted [it’s been noted]
I don’t think DMZ, Dave, or USSM in general is arguing against a different way of doing things possibly having success. What Derek is trying to bring up here isn’t that Zduriencik is capable of doing his job well and bringing success to the team run by Howard The Chuck, it’s that if he does bring success it’s going to be DESPITE Howard The Chuck.
While Dave has brought up some very good points about why there’s hope for this hire (and Coach Z did a good jorb there at the press conference making us feel better about him), even he is guarded against being too optimistic unless certain other conditions are met. Howard The Chuck have been very public about a couple of things (that Derek mentioned) which should concern us all. Their track record has also been spotty at best and they’ll never admit their flaws. Nothing about them has forced us to trust that Chuck Armstrong, in his own words, is the right man to choose the next GM. Nothing about them has forced us to think that Howard Lincoln is anything but an egomaniac who constantly blames a strong and loyal fanbase for not coming out to watch a bad baseball team. Their meddling during Pelekoudas’ brief tenure is further proof that the only people who think Howard The Chuck are reliable are Howard Lincoln and Chuck Armstrong.
Dave earlier also mentioned “results based analysis”, which is what you’re doing. You’re claiming that the ends justify the means. Generally speaking, if the Mariners win a World Series Championship, any one of us would be pleased as punch. However, if we won the World Series with 5 Silvas, 13 Bloomquists, and a bullpen of 7 Julio Mateos, we’d know that that team was the most improbable fluke in the history of sports and you could never recreate success with such a configuration. Thus, while the fluke got us what we wanted, a fluke should never be what we’re shooting for to win. Intelligent, well-executed plans for short term and long term success are what sustain not just franchises, but dynasties. Throwing crap at the wall and hoping it sticks is an absurd way to win, no matter how happy it makes us.
[deleted, staggering amount of lies]
From reading and listening to Ng I refuse to believe that she didn’t have a clear plan and that she didn’t blow the others away in the interview. That tells me that she was just there because they said they wanted to go in a new direction and had to have her there. But they had no intention of it. We all have doubts about their competence, and the one hope I had that they had learned anything was “Would they take a risk?” They didn’t. The Magoo Effect continues. Lawyers