Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 540: The Braves Fire Frank Wren

Episode Date: September 23, 2014

Ben and Sam discuss the Braves’ decision to dismiss GM Frank Wren.

You saw who we are, Jenny Wren. Good morning and welcome to episode 540 of Effectively Wild, a daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, brought to you by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg of Grantland. Ben? Yes. You have something to say to me? Hi, Ben. Hi.

How are you? Okay. I enjoyed you? Okay. I enjoyed you on Hang Up and Listen today. I had my best. No, I thought you were very good. Thank you. I particularly liked at the beginning of the show when they said that Ben Lindbergh was going to be on to break down all the pennant races. Because that's just not what you know how to do.

That's exactly, yeah. because that's just not what you know how to do. That's exactly, yeah. When Josh emailed me, he offered to send over some topics, and I said that would be great because Sam and I don't talk about actual baseball when we can help it. Yeah. I was wondering when he said that if you knew who was actually in a pennant race currently. Did you know, Ben, that the Red Sox aren't having a good year?

That's true, yeah. It's odd because they were good so recently. The other thing I noticed is that you did a very common podcast tick, which I notice in almost every podcaster. I don't notice it in you when we're podcasting. And I don't think, well, I don't know if I do it when we're podcasting, but I also think that I do it when I go on other people's podcasts. And that podcast tick is saying a fact and then tacking on at the end, right? So you said there's nothing wrong with joan assessment is he's a he's an above average hitter right or no how did you say he's above average hitter right like that

right yes right i think i picked that up from nate silver and what everybody does it every single podcast does the other thing that every every podcast does this is the single most common podcast tick is uh somebody says something somebody else says something and then the first person goes i think that's right which is such a like i don't know it's like it's like i i feel like there's something selfish in saying that i think that's right it's like like, you've talked, I will validate you. Yeah, you're almost appropriating the point. Yeah, it's like, it's almost like a retweet. It's almost like a manual

retweet. That's right. I think that's right. I think that's right. Anyway, I enjoyed the show. I actually have like two minutes left, so as soon as this is over,'m gonna rush back and listen to the rest of it you'll have to listen to my slate plus segment on derrick cheater too

is that really you did the slate plus i did oh can you send it to me i don't have it can you just say it can you say all the words? Sure, yeah. We've talked about Jeter. You know what I think. Yeah. All right. I should probably just become a Slate Plus member. Yeah, we probably both should. This podcast today is brought to you by the Play Index at baseballrofins.com

as well as Slate Plus. It's only $5 a month or $50 for the entire year. You get access to ad-free podcasts, no page... What do you call that page? You get everything on one page. No pagination for articles as well as extra Slate Plus topics for your favorite as well as extra Slate Plus topics for your favorite podcasts. So you can also email David Plotz for the best possible price. He will give you the best deal available.

All right. I hope Josh Levine is listening. Ben, let's talk about Frank Wren. Okay. Before we do, though, I should mention that the auction for Matt Elber's GameUse pants is over. And there was no movement whatsoever over the final day of bidding, despite my plugging it on the podcast, mentioning it in the Facebook group. There were no bids on the final day of bidding. So there were four bids in total, three of them by the same person.

I assume they were auto bids. And the pants went for $31 after a list price of $25. So whoever snagged those pants for $31, I think you made a pretty good buy. This makes me worry that nobody's actually going to go sign up for Slate Plus. You could have had pants for a fraction of the price that it would cost you. I mean, that's a good deal just for pants, right? I mean, just pants for $31 is not a bad deal. And when you add in the fact that these are game-use pants by podcast legend Matt Albers,

you would think that those would appreciate in time. Yeah, I was hoping that somebody would get them for us. Me too. Well, we don't know. Maybe the winner is secretly sending them. And I will note that Carmen C., podcast legend, let us know about one of Colton Wong's teammates in the Cardinals minor league system, James Ramsey,

who also signs with Bible verses, which is not uncommon. A lot of players do sign with Bible verses. Some do. And so Carmen, I guess, charged me with the task of validating these Bible verses to see if they were legitimate. They were legitimate. All of them were. And sort of showed a little bit of,

there was a lot of variety and some wit, I would say. One of them was 1 Corinthians 9.25. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever, which is about the most applicable Bible verse you can get for a baseball player. That's much better than all the other ones. I remember Josh Lukes is particularly ghastly because it's like a martyrdom Bible verse. Let's see if I can find it. But it's like, oh, it looks like Josh Luckey's Twitter account has shut down.

He had it on his Twitter bio. And it was a martyrdom, Bibleverse. It was like about how everybody wants to attack him, but he doesn't mind. Right. Yeah. Protesting. All right. Frank Wren.

Mm. So the Braves fired their general manager today, Frank Wren, who had been there for seven years, I think. It's the third GM fired in the last few months. And the Braves, of course, it's been a disappointing season for them. They're going to finish under.500 quite possibly. They're way, way, way out. They were eliminated from even a potential wild card spot yesterday. And Wren was fired fired so let me ask you

a few questions about frank rand um first of all going into yesterday where would you have ranked frank rand of the 30 gms in major league baseball middle of the pack somewhere maybe i didn't think of him as notably good or bad yeah i always thought of him as a good gm i would have probably put him uh slightly slightly ahead of the median although like maybe i would have guessed uh 11 11 to 14 maybe which is good especially in this day and age however i do wonder whether i'm i'm lake wobegonning thing and whether at this point i think of two guys at the bottom and maybe three or four at the top and everybody else i think of as generally smart, and so they would all be between 11 and 14 in my mind. There might be a lot of guys that I would rank 11th.

But generally, though, Frank Renz seemed like he was a smart guy. He seemed like he had a good front office. He seemed like he made some really great moves on the margins. Seemed like he had a good front office. Seemed like he made some really great moves on the margins. And even the moves that turned out poor were often justifiable or, if not great moves, certainly not expected to turn out as badly as they did. But the thing that really strikes me about Frank Wren is this. When I wrote a piece in June on the 16 teams in baseball that could purport to be the

hottest team since X date, remember that article? Yeah. So like at the time, for instance, the Nationals had more wins than any team in baseball since May 30th, but the Pirates had more teams than anybody in baseball since May 29th. So they could both say that they were the hottest team in baseball since an arbitrary date. And the Braves had a very strong position in this game. Not only do the Braves have the most wins in baseball since 1991, which Frank Wren can't really claim credit for, but they had the most wins in baseball since April of 2010. So that's 2010, 11, 12, 13, 14.

That's almost a five-year period. All of it under Frank Wren, that they were the best, arguably the best team in baseball. I mean, that's pretty impressive, right? So the thing is, though, that they also didn't win a single post-season series in that time.

And they always seemed to be a team that was the third or so best in the league. They never seemed like they were the best team in the league. They just always felt like a team that you projected to win 87 and they would win 89. And then they would lose in the first round. And so I want to ask you this. first round and so i want to ask you this do you think that there's any skill um well or is there any lack of skill in being unable to create a 98 win team or is a guy who basically what i'm saying is if a gm wins more games than anybody in baseball but without ever being clearly the best team in baseball over that five-year stretch is it a deit? Do you think that he has come up short? Is there a process

in play that went astray? Or did he do just about literally everything he could have done? I think in baseball, if you are good enough to make the playoffs in most years, that's really all that anyone can expect. I think in certain sports, in basketball, for instance, it's not enough to just be a middle-of-the-road team that makes the playoffs because lots of teams in basketball make the playoffs. Because in basketball, making the playoffs is not the same as it is in baseball. In baseball, if you make the playoffs, you have close to an equal shot of making the World Series and winning the World Series as anyone else in the playoffs. Whereas in basketball, you do not. You have to be one of the best teams generally to have a real shot of winning. And so you have all these teams that are kind of stuck in the middle somewhere where they're just good enough to make the playoffs, but almost certainly not good enough

to advance far in the playoffs. And that's not a good place to be in baseball. You don't really have that. All you can ask, I think, particularly of a team with a payroll where the Braves has been, which is almost exactly where the Braves payroll has been for a decade or more, which at the beginning of that time was one of the higher payrolls and is now not. I think having a team that wins, you know, 90-ish games or projects to win something like that is all that you could realistically expect of them. And I think they've done a lot of things well. And I know you can point to some isolated, very bad decisions and very ugly contracts that the Braves have handed out

during Ren's time with the team, most notably BJ Upton's and Dan Ugla's. But there is really a lot to like about the foundation that he put together. I mean, this is a team that is very young still and managed to lock up a lot of its young guys and has a lot of productive young players who figure to be there for a while. I know that they've kind of collapsed this September, but they are, I think, as well positioned as most teams to be competitive for the next several years. So it seems to me that that is something to be praised and admired and celebrated.

You were using your hang up and listen voice. Was I? I guess I'm stuck on my guest voice. So the Dodgers, if they lose in, say, the division series this year, after losing in the LCS last year, we'll probably hear about how Ned Coletti is on the wobbly chair. We might hear that Don Mattingly is on the wobbly chair. Are there any other teams out there? Well, first, two-part question. Will that be justified, given that the Dodgers are operating in such a different stratosphere than the Braves are? And second question, is there any other team, if the answer is yes, is there

any other team where you think the expectations could fairly be to do more than just win 88 to 92 games every year? For the Dodgers, I mean, we've heard that about Coletti even before this current ownership group was in place, if they win, as it looks like they will, a very low 90s number of wins and then make it into the playoffs, I don't think that alone is necessarily enough to say that a guy should be fired if they don't win the World Series. But you could maybe make a stronger case that he that his performance is

not quite as strong as ren's was i think i would probably subscribe to that case but uh other teams that have that expectation i mean other than do the tigers at any point do the Tigers failure to bring one home for their old million-year-old owner? Maybe, but I wouldn't recommend that. No. I think it would be difficult to improve upon Dave Dombrowski significantly. Yeah. So going back to Frank Wren, we talked before. Actually, it was in fact.

Did we talk to Mark Smith on this show? Yes. After the extensions? I think so, right? Because he wrote the annual chapter where he told them to sign all those extensions and then they did. So he wrote the annual chapter and basically identified the Braves as a team that only lacked one thing in their front office and that was the ability to sign all the pre-arbitration extensions that were all the rage

and they followed that up by signing pretty much everybody on their team who was any good except for Jason Hayward and who was young to an extension. And in fact, even some people who weren't very good like Chris Johnson, got extensions. And so that seemed to quiet the one criticism of the front office. I guess, I mean, going back to Upton and Ugla, because those seem to be the two moves that are most associated with their, I guess, downfall.

Although their downfall, geez, Ben, they were a half a game out of first at the trade deadline. Their downfall is like seven bad weeks. Right. I mean, it's very, very conceivable that this exact team could have, the exact team in the exact situation could have very easily won 52% of their games instead of far fewer over the last seven weeks

and be ahead of the Giants and the Pirates and getting ready for the wildcard spot right now. Sure, yeah, I picked them as a wildcard team and that looked like a solid pick for most of the season. John Sherholtz, the team president, said that, I'm reading his quote, I would say it was cumulative. I can't tell you exactly what period of time,

but as we began to examine things in our farm system, in our scouting department, and on our major league club, it was a cumulative thing. I can't give you the exact date. And so Sherholtz says that he saw a need to alter the culture of the organization as early as this summer when the Braves were still leading the National League East, which, if true, leads you to believe that there was perhaps something going on behind the scenes that we don't know about, that it

wasn't just purely a result of their failure to make the playoffs, but it was, you know, something we don't know about, something about the team's process that they were not comfortable with. Right, and most of the pieces that are sourced about this termination mention things along those lines of people in the organization who had left, people below Ren at the sort of player development or kind of director or lower level leaving. Sherholtz also said, quote, and this was music to my ears,

quote, it is our goal to find that Braves way again and invigorate it. Which incidentally, if you're wondering what the Braves way is, the reference in my piece about ways from earlier this summer, the reference that I found to the Braves way is, the reference in my piece about ways from earlier this summer, the reference that I found to the Braves way, the most prominent reference, was to their scouting manual, which is the sort of generic way that a lot of teams get the team way into the public. So they had a Braves way used in the farm system,

which explained what was expected of managers and coaches in the minor leagues. It told how the fundamentals should be taught to minor leaguers. Quote, every organization has a manual explaining how to do relays, rundowns, and cutoffs. We just added a little more to it. Bobby wanted cohesiveness throughout the organization of how we do these things and why we do them that way. Our ultimate goal was to be a winning organization, the best farm system in baseball. We prepared ourselves for success, even though at the time it seemed ludicrous.

We knew if we got talent and we did it this way, we couldn't be stopped. So that's all pretty generic, so I can see why Sherholtz feels like they need to find the Braves way again and invigorate it. But anyway, yeah, all the pieces indicate that this is not just about results.

However, it seems to go along with the results. I mean, if they were on their way to winning 96 games, we don't believe this would have happened, right? Probably not, no. I mean, almost certainly not. It's practically impossible to think that they would have.

If they had clinched yesterday instead of getting eliminated yesterday, Frank Grant would not be fired. I would not think so, no. And more, this is one of those paragraphs where you suspect that the beat writer knows just a little bit more than he's including in the piece. So this is another hint that that's what it's about. Some Braves officials have said the team suffered from a lack of veteran leadership after failing to acquire any players with personalities like David Ross, Eric Kinski, Martin Prado, Tim Hudson, and Chipper Jones. Guys willing to step up and call a team meeting if necessary,

or to straighten out a situation with another player individually behind closed doors. So I guess any GM who's looking at this situation should probably realize that clubhouse chemistry, if nothing else, plays well for your superiors. Yeah. So this is now three GMs fired in months. Remind me, what was your hypothesis for why no GMs were fired for so long? And does this kill your hypothesis or does it fit nicely with it? Well it I mean I acknowledged in the article that obviously GMs were going to be fired at some point and that there were many of them who seemed to be coming to the end of contracts and that there

could be a flurry of these moves but it it was still, I think, the longest stretch without a firing that I could find going back quite a ways. And so I think it's somewhat significant. And we've seen other GMs that seem to be in shaky positions have those positions reinforced, like Sandy Alderson, who today, as Ren was being fired, got a three-year extension, or Jack Zarensik, who got an extension in Seattle. Those were GMs who— Dayton Moore. Dayton Moore has two years left on his— and had their chairs straightened. So I think while that streak of no GM firings was not going to continue indefinitely, I would venture to say that it's still a real trend or at least that a GM hired today

has a better chance to hang on for any length of time you could quote than a GM who was hired, I don't know, 20 years ago would have? We should note that Wren himself got a contract extension in the spring. And so that's always, whenever you hear about a GM's contract extension, it's always very important to remember that contract extensions mean very little. They don't get paid very much. It's easy very important to remember that contract extensions mean very little. They don't get paid very much. It's easy to cut loose.

So they extended him for, quote, it was believed to have been two years, according to Dave O'Brien. And it didn't matter. They fired him after one. That's interesting. A two-year extension doesn't guarantee anything. Even though it's not a ton of money relative to what players make, it's something. It's not money that you would gladly throw away for no reason.

So you'd think that at the time, at least, they must have envisioned that Ren had a future there? Probably. I don't know. I mean, I don't know that that's true, to be honest. You think they just give up two years fully intending to let him go at the end of the year? Well, no. If they fully intended to let him go at the end of the year, they would have fired him then. However, I don't think that two years means anything.

Two years, it's like you get a rolling two-year, like when I covered schools, the superintendent had a rolling three-year contract. And it was basically a poison pill in his contract that he negotiated at the beginning that all the superintendents did this, so that when they fired you eventually, you get severance. And that your severance was the last two years of the contract that they were cutting short. I think this is different. I don't think that it's a poison pill so much as it's just a way of keeping the GM. It's the standard industry practice to operate on a multi-year deal as a GM so that you don't feel like a lame duck, so that you feel like you have some security in the position. And to, in fact, go to a one-year deal is the statement.

the position and to in fact go to a one-year deal is the statement and you you occasionally will hear about a gm who's or maybe a manager too who's working on a one-year deal and is pissed off about that because he knows that that's a deliberate statement from the team that you don't have anything uh underneath you right now so i'm not sure that a two-year contract implies that a whole lot changed. Some changed, obviously, or they would have fired him, but not proof of anything to me. Yeah. Well, so what does this tell us then? This does not tell us that, I mean, are the Braves in a worse position than we thought they were a month ago? Is there anything worrisome about their future, looking at their roster and seeing a bunch of young guys who are mostly locked up long-term and pretty productive?

Is there any reason to be more pessimistic about the franchise than we might have been six months ago or two months ago? Or are you still feeling pretty confident about the Braves' future? Well, I never really appreciated how strong their present was when it was happening. And so I think I always had a lower take on the Braves than they merited. And so maybe now they've come down to where I thought they were. But no, I mean, I think that they're still the likely second place team next year in the NLEs. And of course, they have people in place who could be presumably perfectly fine replacements for Ren. They have assistant GM John Capalella, who's been mentioned as a GM candidate anytime anyone has talked about

GM candidates for the last several years. Or for the last several seconds. You just did it. Yeah, right. So you hit your mark. Yeah. So i mean you you'd have to figure that having someone like that in place already makes it perhaps a little easier to make a change there was some speculation that they might look outside the organization too perhaps they will conduct a full search rather than just appointing an in-house replacement. But either way, they can count on getting someone competent. So don't despair Braves fans, I suppose. You know, I think I have three GMs' phone numbers, and I'm not allowed to call any of them.

It's not as though I have their phone number and I can call anytime I want. But technically I do have their phone numbers. And now it's only two. That's too bad. Yeah, actually, I think I spoke to Hart, or I spoke to not Hart, who's in charge now, but Ren at some point this spring. So I guess he's off my call list too. Or maybe he'd like to hear from us now. Maybe he needs someone to talk to. Yeah, he could just listen to us for 35 minutes a day. Maybe he'd like to hear from us now. Maybe he needs someone to talk to. Yeah. He could just listen to us for 35 minutes a day. He could.

We've been pretty nice to him today. I always liked the guy. I mean, I always liked him as a GM. I always liked his GM. Yeah, me too. All right. Okay. So we'll be back tomorrow.

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