Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 659: The Making of the Modern General Manager

Episode Date: April 17, 2015

Ben and Sam talk to Mark Armour and Dan Levitt, the authors of In Pursuit of Pennants, about whether good GMs have to break rules, how long competitive advantages last, and how good teams go bad.

The plan keeps coming up again And the plan means nothing stays the same But the plan won't accomplish anything If it's not implemented Good morning and welcome to episode 659 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland, joined as always by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives. Hello, Sam. Howdy. And today we are joined by the co-authors of a new book. It's called In Pursuit of Penance.

They are Mark Armour and Daniel Levitt. They also wrote Paths to Glory, which some of you have read, I hope. It came out in 2003, right at the same time as Moneyball, basically. And it's a history book, but it's also very statistically inclined. You will find tables of wins above replacement player in a book that was out before those things were nearly as mainstream as they were today. There is one copy of that book in stock on Amazon right now. It can be yours. But we're going to talk mostly about

the new book, In Pursuit of Penance, which is along the same lines, both books that are very concerned with team building and front offices and what makes teams work and what are winning strategies and losing strategies. So hello, guys. Hey, Mark and Daniel. Glad to be here. It's nice to be here. Yeah, so you guys, leading up to the release of the book, you blogged at the book site, pursuitdependence.wordpress.com, and you ranked the 25 best GMs of all time. And I wonder how you found the era adjustments to be as you were, as you were doing that?

Cause Sam and I talk often about what a great player of the past would do. If you just plopped him down into today's baseball with no preparation, or if you gave him time to prepare, would he be competitive? Would he still be a star? How does that work with, with GMs? Did you try to,

you know, project them into the future? Or did you just say relative to their peers? We did a little bit relative to their peers. I think George Weiss is a good example. George Weiss was, as you know, the general manager of the Yankees late 40s through 1960. And we ranked him number five. And he theoretically could have been a lot higher given that he basically won a pennant every year except for a couple in there. And mainly we didn't rank him higher was because we felt the American League in the 50s was

probably as weak as any league at any time. You had several teams that were completely under financed, under capitalized. You had teams like the Tigers that may have had some money but hadn't really been successful. And so we did look at the competition a little bit. So we did try and adjust a little bit, but it was much more subjective. We didn't really have any formulas for how to project a general manager from one era into another. to project a general manager from one era into another. I'll also add that I think that although this is unprovable, I think Dan and I both believe that the GMs of today in general are just much better.

I mean, baseball operations is much more important, much more sophisticated. I think that if you're a fan of a team and you're complaining about your GM like most people are, you probably have one of the best GMs your team has ever had. And I think it's just a job that people take much more seriously than they used to. I think that the GM used to often be a friend of the owner or maybe a relative of the owner. And back when Weiss was the GM, I think that the Yankees took it seriously and a lot of other teams really didn't.

And I think today it is an immensely important job. It's maybe the most important job in the whole organization. And these guys are generally well-trained, really smart, have huge staffs working for them. It's kind of a different world. Yeah, you, it does seem like you run into a lot of children of people who have already been mentioned in this book, in this book. Like you're reading about a guy and then four chapters later, you see his child is in a position too. And, and you're right. It's not just that the GMs are more professional, but the staffs that they have are incredibly more professional. I mean,

it used to be, what, about six guys in baseball ops and they were mostly pals. And now there's what, about 35 on a baseball ops masthead. Is that about right? Yeah, I think that's right. right i mean probably in the 50s it was you know a handful four or five and and that probably was true even up until the 70s and now i think especially in the last 15 years i think things have have really really exploded so so what is the uh i guess the equivalent to that question that we have batted around on the show before about whether a player from the past would be able to compete? If you gave the average GM of, you know, pick your number of decades ago, today's baseball operations support staff, could he be a modern GM or just intellectually and, you know, educationally, were those guys just no match for today's crop? You know, to some degree, the job has just changed so much, it's almost impossible to answer that. I mean, a guy like Joe Brown of the Pirates or Jim Campbell of the Tigers in the 60s effectively ran the entire organization, both the front and the back office.

effectively ran the entire organization, both the front and the back office. And, you know, you didn't have this to where you have today, where you really have a team president that acts as the CEO and the GM is really more of just a pure baseball operations guy. So the job has really changed. That being said, I think some of the, you know, the smartest guys from the past would have done well today. the smartest guys from the past would have done well today. As Mark was saying, I think that the organizations that really fell behind were ones where the GM was not really a serious hire. It was a friend of the owner. It was an ex-player that the owner felt like he wanted to have in

there. But that there were a number of good GMs from the past who would probably succeed just fine and may actually, because a little bit broader perspective, offer a little different picture. But again, a guy like Jim Campbell from the Tigers may be more comparable to actually, you know, like a team president today as opposed to the actual guy running baseball ops. Yeah, a guy like Bob Howsam, who is kind of one of the stars of our book, he ran the Reds for many years and built the big red machine. One of the things that he did – I mean this is – he was the GM at a time when there was no free agency and there was a draft. So he was somewhat limited in what he could do compared to today. There was no real quick fixes. And he basically built the team by being a great trader.

He was kind of like the – sort of when you romanticize about being a GM when you're a kid, you think about sort of fleecing all your friends by making better trades. And that's kind of what he did. And he was just smarter than everyone else. He just understood player value better than other people did. Or when I say he, I mean he and his staff of experts. And I think today that would be much harder because I think that the median GM is just much smarter than he used to be. I think it's very difficult to just make a series of trades and make your team a lot better.

When I say a series of trades, I'm talking about trades where money is not a key factor. You're just saying, I'll trade my third baseman for your shortstop. And Howson just won all those trades. And another example of that is a guy like Cedric Tallis, who built the expansion Royals. Again, that era, you really couldn't, you were limited in terms of being able to sign amateurs,

like pre the draft area or sign major league veterans after free agency. And he did a number of trades to build the team, a bunch of great trades. Amos Otis, they got famously for Joe Foy. And basically, the Mets were trying to turn Otis into a third baseman because that's what they wanted. And Talis and his staff recognized that there was an opportunity here. They were looking for players that other teams undervalued. And again, today, I think it's much harder to find those guys. And you look at a guy like Talis, too, and he just had a great staff. He had four future general managers with him. He had John Sherholtz there, who was just a young guy, but he had Lou Gorman and Herc Robinson and Sid Thrift. So some of these guys just really

built great staffs, and those guys would probably be successful in any era. So you alluded to that era where there was, just after the draft began in the mid-60s, but before free agency began in the late 70s, it was sort of interesting to read about it and see how different it is. Because like you say, there wasn't really a place for the Yankees and the Dodgers to flex their muscle. You couldn't go out and sign all the best amateurs anymore, and the poor teams weren't yet shedding all their good players. And so it makes for a very interesting little decade of history in assessing these front offices. Do you have a favorite decade or era of history as far as where you think the strategy

and the gamesmanship and the intrigue within the job kind of presents the richest experience of assessing front offices. Yeah, that's a tough one. You know, I think that the era you just talked about is a really, you know, certainly a favorite. I mean, I was a kid then, so maybe that's part of it. But, you know, that's a pretty good era. I think the era, you know, the era that you're in is always sort of a difficult thing to judge. But it seems to me in the last dozen years or so, one of the things that's sort of happening is that the rules in terms of – or the opportunities in other countries have certainly changed a lot recently. The international spending limits have changed a lot recently. They may add

an international draft. I think that this is an interesting era because for a lot of the teams, and this is especially true probably of the big, the teams with big pockets, they just have to be prepared for the game to change right out from under them. And so it's kind of interesting to watch some of the teams adjust to that, especially teams like the Red Sox and the Dodgers and the Cubs, the teams that have the money. Well, and as we talk about in the book, I mean, the context of these rule changes, whether it's the free agency of the draft or the smaller ones today, just limiting the total amount of money you can spend on the draft and the compensatory draft picks being much harder to get for losing free agents and how that's causing teams to have to change their strategies just to adapt to that. So, you know, I think where there's changing rules and

teams have to adapt to it and how they how different teams adapt differently is what makes various very, you know, things interesting. I think that the late 70s and early 80s is interesting just as different teams reacted differently to free agency. And then the whole influx of Latin American players, especially sort of from the Dominican Republic in the late 70s and early 80s, and how some teams understood the value of that, and other teams were much slower. An era I liked was sort of the Branch Rickey era. Well, I guess that was a long era. But in the 30s and even before, where there just seems to be this undercurrent of part of strategy is cheating

or is getting away with things that are questionable. So there's all these instances where Branch Rickey has reached a secret agreement with another club where they will be able to reacquire a player at a later date, or the club promises, or Ricky promises that he won't take a guy in the Rule 5 draft, but then he takes him anyway. And it kind of got me thinking about current analogs like with service time manipulation and things like that, where it's borderline unethical, but it's part of winning the game. So is there this, would you say that there's a constant in being a front office person is sort of skirting the lines of ethics and

legality? Or are there particular eras, particular front offices who were sort of most, I don't know, I guess I want to say most able to take advantage of, but maybe a better way of saying is, is a skill of a GM being willing to do what the other guy's conscience won't? Well, that's interesting. I mean, you know, I think the teams, I think today the things that a lot of teams do, and I especially look at teams like the Yankees and the Red Sox and the Dodgers, the teams that have money. And I especially look at teams like the Yankees and the Red Sox and the Dodgers, the teams that have money. Clearly, the rules that have been put in place in the past decade or so, which have been either to have slotted draft picks. And I'm thinking especially of the international measures they've put in place now to sort of stop these teams. It seems like they always figure out a way to spend their money, right? That, you know, you can say, well, if you go over this amount of money in year one, then you can't spend anything in year two. And then the teams figure, okay,

well, we're already over. We might as well just spend, you know, a bazillion dollars this year. a bazillion dollars this year. And I think that teams, I think that eventually they're just, it's like the major league sort of hierarchy is trying to plug all the holes in these rules to keep the Red Sox and the Yankees and the Dodgers and other teams from having anywhere to spend their advantage. And they're going to keep finding more holes and I think that they're going to keep plugging up behind them.

That's what I expect is going to happen. But I think what you say about Ricky is true. I think most people think – most people know that Ricky invented the farm system or created the farm system or whatever. But what a lot of people don't know is that the farm system that he created was essentially illegal at the time, and that a lot of what he had to do was keep sort of pushing the envelope and pushing the envelope, as well as lobbying for rule changes

to make some of this stuff more allowed. I mean, certainly I think one tries to take advantage of the rules as they are, Certainly I think one tries to take advantage of the rules as they are, but I don't think that we have found that one needed to sort of go over the line in order to be successful. I mean, Jacob Rupert, the Yankee owner who had Ed Barrows as GM for many years, I mean, they lobbied hard to change the farm system rules. And once the rules were changed, they went out and built the best farm system out there. So I don't know. I mean, it's hard to know, but I think clearly one needs to look for, to try and take advantage of the rules as well as one can.

So you date the birth of the modern general manager or something resembling the modern general manager to about a century ago. You point out that the first person to hold the actual title was not until 1927, but the role was sort of standardized before then. So how has the shelf life of a competitive advantage changed since the birth of the modern GM? I mean, obviously, people have always floated from one team to another. And so, you know, ideas spread that way. But how much longer or shorter? How long could an advantage last at that time compared to now? I think that the shelf life's gotten shorter. But part of that is just because the economics between the teams, I think, other than sort of maybe a brief period there in the 90s, has gotten much tighter.

I mean, in the 30s when the Yankees did their farm system, there was no way that a guy like Clark Griffith in Washington could build a farm system to the same level as the Yankees, simply due to the amount of money that the Yankees could spend on buying these teams. And then they hired the best scouts. They could go out and pay more for amateur talent. So, I mean, the Yankee advantage, because of their scouts and their farm system, lasted for something like 20 years. You know, just sort of as another one we talk about very briefly in the book is the stadium boom, where, you know, you had teams like Baltimore and Cleveland that gained this sort of five-year advantage being the first ones to build the new stadiums. They

actually were, you know, on the top, the two of them were in the top three in revenue for much of the 90s and in payroll. So they had that short window, then everyone else built a new stadium. So it's, you know, part of it depends on what the advantage actually is, but I do think the shelf life has gotten much, much shorter. Yeah, I mean one of the – maybe the biggest advantage ever that anyone ever gained, if it wasn't the farm system, it was integration. And I think that it is – the lengths that teams will go to now to find players is sort of extraordinary compared to what it used to be um that it wasn't that long ago it was you know 80 years ago that teams were really just driving around in station wagons and finding a bunch of white guys and that was really you know that was basically all of the major leagues and now they're going to curacao to find um xander bogarts and spending a lot of

money to do it i don't think it's likely that there's ever going to be another advantage to that level that suddenly you're going to find you know unless they start playing in baseball in china and somebody could get there first and open up a camp. I suppose that could be a big advantage. But yeah, it's hard to imagine. I guess if somebody just discovered a cure for elbow injuries or something, maybe that would be a big thing. But the secret would get out, I guess. Yeah.

It does. It seems like the secret to most of these teams, though, is really general competence. I mean, there is more than anything, it just seems like you cannot undervalue competent people. Because they all have a plan, they all have baseball knowledge, they all have an incentive to win. And the ones who have good people around and a process that is solid and people who do their jobs well and aren't actively screwing things up seem to be the ones that do well. It's much more than a secret. It just seems like there's sort of a Procter and Gamble

mentality that succeeds well in baseball throughout the years. You know, one of the things we like to talk about is what I'll call a way, you know, really started by Branch Rickey and the Cardinal way where you standardize everything throughout the organization and you make sure you have competent trainers and coaches and managers throughout the organization. You look at the teams that are doing that today. Bill Newcomb, who was the managing general partner of the Giants, really started trying to get back to the Giants way. Brian Sabian did a great job jumping on that.

The Cardinal way today with the way they're bringing their young pitchers through the system from the lower minors all the way through. So I agree with that. And to the degree you sort of create a whole organizational structure of competence all the way down and you standardize things. And, of course, there was, you know, the Dodge way and the Oriole way. And so I think there's something to be said for creating that kind of a cohesive environment. Pats to Glory was very explicitly about how great teams were built. And In Pursuit of Penance is more about how they were built than how they fell apart. It's probably better reading,

less depressing reading to read about teams on the upswing than on the downswing. But I am almost more interested in the dissolution of great teams than I am in how they were built because as you point out, there are certain patterns and principles and it seems like these smart teams are actually smart

and they have figured it out to a certain extent. And they are doing things that lead to success. But inevitably, it ends. So what kills good baseball teams? Well, I think that the thing I was going to add to your last point, the thing you were talking about last, I think is very applicable to this, which is that I think that you said that having competent people and just having intellectual know-how is sort of the key, and I agree. And I think one of the ways that comes through is a team that's sort of willing to adjust to new facts on the ground. And whether that could be some either rule change or whatnot changing in the game,

but also changing information about the organization that you have. There's obviously a lot of luck in the game. I mean, you think you can build this know, build, build this great team, but if, you know, the people get hurt, people don't develop the way you thought, even though through no fault of your own, it just didn't work out. And you need to sort of be smart enough to figure that out, to see what's, what is not, what's going to happen,

but what is actually happening. I think it's – I think most people that have studied a team like the Phillies have said, hey, they are falling apart and maybe they should have seen this coming. It wasn't really that the people that are observing the Phillies don't seem to be as surprised as the Phillies themselves that this happened. And I think that they didn't adjust to what was happening in front of their eyes. I think maybe the Howard contract was bad. And I think people knew it was bad. But I don't think anyone really thought it was going to be this bad. I don't think people thought he was going to be a below-replacement player, you know, two years into the deal.

So some of that is just really bad luck. But you have to sort of adjust to that. I compare that to a team like the Red Sox, who seem to, the last couple of cycles, have seen what's happening in front of them and have been willing to blow it up pretty quickly and in such a way that they don't have a lot of dead money. I would just add one thing that I think too, I mean, just sort of the natural order of things in the sense that, you know, if you're on top, you're getting lower draft picks. People are picking off all of your best, you know, assistant

GMs and farm directors. So there's sort of a, once you're on top, A, you're drafting lower, but B, you're kind of a target for people looking to restaff their own organizations. Yeah. And that's something that we've talked about this winter with Andrew Friedman leaving the Rays, for instance, we've wondered how much will that hurt the Rays or, you know, is the fact that the rest of the front office has been working with Friedman for years now and is still the same group that put those teams together you know did whatever principles Friedman instituted in this organization do they just carry over to the next group and it seems like in your book there are teams where that is true you devote a whole chapter to the Dodgers who went from Larry McPhail to Branch Rickey to, you know, Vasey, and it was just decades of smart GMs who, to a certain extent,

passed the baton to each other. But then in other places, you know, the one GM leaves and it's done. It's over. So I don't know whether that is, whether, you know, tutoring the next generation or the replacement is maybe an underrated aspect of general managers. Yeah, it's especially interesting now because I think when Friedman was running the Rays, he had much more so than say Branch Rickey. Friedman had lots of high-level executives working for him because it's a much more of an organization. It's much more like a business.

When you lose the CEO of a business, there's probably people that have been there for a decade or more that have just been in every single meeting that he's been in. Whether or not they can replace him or not, I don't know. But at least he looks like Andrew Friedman. He talks the same way. So I think it's more likely that that could happen. I think it's possible also that Friedman saw that they didn't have nearly as much talent as they had five years ago as well.

Well, I think also part of the job inflation of GM now being president of baseball operations is a way to try and keep the good lieutenants, right? I mean, Brian Sabian gets permitted to, what, executive vice president so that Evans can be GM in San Francisco. So I think that that's another way that people are trying to deal with it. So you talk about the transition in ownership of the Yankees from CBS to George Steinbrenner. And there was a quote, I guess, from a Yankee spokesman, no, a CBS spokesman at the time, who said, we came to the realization, I think, that sports franchises really flourish better with people owning them rather than corporations. And Ben and I have pretty much

given our opinion about almost everything you can possibly have an opinion about on this podcast. But I think we're both kind of still in the dark about what makes a good owner. It's not something that I've seen a lot of work on or that Ben and I have put a lot of work into. And I always do sort of wonder which owners are good owners and what do they do that makes them good owners. So now that teams are worth like, you know, infinitely more almost than they were back then, is the people better than corporations rule of thumb still true, do you think? And more generally, or I guess maybe more specifically, what makes a good owner in this day and age? Well, I think that most owners are corporations now. I would just say that I think that what makes a great owner is one thing that has not changed very much at all.

You know, we talk a lot in the book about Jacob Rupert, who owned the Yankees from 1915 to 1939. And he did a couple of things. One is he made sure he picked the best guys. I mean, I think the first thing is you want to pick a great GM. He picked Barrow. He then picked Weiss. He was part of when they picked both, you know, Hall of Fame managers, Miller Huggins and Joe McCarthy. And I think the other thing that he did is he let them do their job, but he never relaxed his pressure on them. I mean, they knew they had to win. He was clear that he would support them both monetarily and, you know, at league meetings to let them know that they had to win. So I think it's picking the

right people and staying involved, but staying involved at sort of just the right level and knowing how to support the team. And I don't think that's really changed much. I think that's the same thing a guy like, you know, Bill Newcomb was doing in San Francisco, you know, or Bill DeWitt's doing in St. Louis. Yeah, I think DeWitt's like the perfect – he strikes me as like the perfect owner. He seems to be pretty involved, but I think he lets his guys do the job.

I think that he's involved in the sense that he wants to make sure that there's a cohesive strategy. And as long as everybody is sort of on the same page, he doesn't really – he got rid of Jockety several years ago. And the main reason was just that Jockety wasn't, didn't seem to be on board with the strategy that he wanted everybody to employ. But for the most part, there's just no drama with the Cardinals. I mean, you never hear anything about any sort of infighting. Like they, they all seem to be on the same page. And this, and I think that's, that's to do it. That's very much like Rupert was. You never really hear any intrigue or gossip or drama with the Yankees the whole time he was there.

I think that could be – I think if I was a Cardinal fan, I'd be pretty happy with my owner. I'd be pretty happy with my owner. Lastly, what do you think front office personnel are worth? Or what would you pay your front office people? Because there's been some suggestion that maybe front office people are drastically underpaid if you think that they are responsible for some number of wins above replacement front office per year. And given what teams pay for wins these days, maybe there is some advantage to be had by the team that is willing to just spend a much larger percentage

of its annual outlay on getting the brightest people in their baseball operations department. Do you think that's true? Or is the fact that, as you wrote at the Hardball Times recently, baseball operations departments are being overrun with competence, is there just no significant upgrade to be made there? Well, I think there's clearly a difference between the best GMs and those at the bottom, although I think it's closer than generally people think. But it's pretty much a free market. generally people think. But it's pretty much a free market. And I think that the baseball owners,

the fact that Friedman got such a large contract, I think they understand, you know, that if you want the best GMs, you're going to have to pay something and that having a good GM gives you a much better chance of winning. I don't think either of us have ever really tried to put a value on it. I know we've seen a few studies on what the numbers are, but I think that the free market and these owners who want to win so badly, I think it's sort of reaching its natural level. One thing I would add is, and I don't have an answer for this because I don't really understand how the money actually works, but it does strike me that these front offices, although I think Dan and I both believe that

there's a tremendous amount of work that goes on in baseball ops now, I do think that the guy on top is getting not just the lion's share of the credit, but also the lion's share of the money. They pay Friedman a lot, but they probably have a lot of people making $25,000 a year working for the Dodgers. All right. Well, the book is called In Pursuit of Penance.

Mark Armour and Dan Levitt have worked together in the past on other books. They have had accomplished careers as baseball writers, as solo artists also, and have been very heavily involved with Sabre. So check out their work. Check out the book. Guys, thank you for joining us. Appreciate it very much. My pleasure.

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