Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 704: Mysteries from the Front Office

Episode Date: July 14, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about former Pirates executive Merrill Hess and then discuss stories about former Dodgers GM Ned Colletti from Molly Knight’s new book.

Good morning and welcome to episode 704 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, brought to you by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg of GrantLind.com. How are you? All right. Did I say that we're brought to you by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg of grantlind.com. How are you? All right. Did I say that we're brought to you by the Play Index at baseballreference.com?

No, no, no, but you can never say it too much. No, we are. We are. You're proud to be. Mm-hmm. Great thing that we are. How are you?

Okay. I'm waiting for news from Pluto. Okay. Don't know what that means. Anything else going on? I'm going to get some cool pictures of Pluto today. Can we talk about this email that Mark sent us

about Merrill Hess? Sure. It's not an email show. Did this lead you anywhere? Did you follow up on it? I did, but I'm curious if you did. I have not had time yet. I plan to because it's interesting. So Mark emails, do either of you know the story of Merrill Hess?

While thinking about the Pirates front office this morning, I was wondering how many people it took to run the club back in the 70s when I was a kid and the Pirates were great. I noticed that their front office staff included one Merrill Hess as assistant scouting director. I googled his name and came up with a hit at IMDB since he is Joaquin Phoenix's character in the movie Signs. I also found this oddity at Baseball Reference.

He leaks to his Baseball Reference page, and there is no information there, no birth date, no height, no weight, no numbers, no anything except date of death, which is an odd single detail to have. So Mark says, is there a story there? Who is or was Merrill Hess? And how did he end up with a reference in a movie and a Baseball Reference page that records nothing but his death? Did he ever exist? And I won't be able to probably answer Mark's question because he probably already Googled and got as far as I did. But it is an interesting, well, mainly what's interesting is that M. Night Shyamalan chose him to name his character after. night Shyamalan chose him to name his character after. So Hess had some sort of baseball career in the 50s, but not enough to make baseball reference, which suggests that what probably went to spring training or something like that and got associated with a club somehow.

Yeah, when you see this today, it's usually a player was drafted and then he gets a baseball reference page for that, but he didn't sign and didn't play. So this was pre-draft, so I don't know what the equivalent was, but yeah, maybe he was with the team and didn't end up playing. Yeah, so maybe signed and was injured immediately, or maybe, yeah maybe spring training. It seems to me that spring training is a reasonable guess, likable guy, and he went to camp, got washed out, and said,

I need a job, and they let him sell hot dogs, and he rose his career. Maybe it rose. I don't know. I read his obituary, and it is very slim on his pre-assouting director, assistant scouting director days. It took him four years. Well, it doesn't even say he played. His obituary says he began a career in baseball in 1953. So it's actually quite possible, and this is maybe going to end up being relevant to the topic that we're going to talk about today, but it may be possible that he never played.

In fact, I might guess that he never played, that he just got a job at the Pirates somehow. Maybe he was in the mailroom. And within four years, he was the assistant director of scouting for the Pirates. And what's interesting about this is that he was the assistant director of scouting for the Pirates for 21 years, which means that he never became the director of scouting for the Pirates or for anyone else. He became an assistant director director and that was it he just stayed there he was never the assistant director of player development he was never a special assistant to the gm he's the dwight shrewd of scouting he was he was the assistant director for 21 years and his most prominent media appearance in that time was when he went to prison, to four

Illinois prisons to scout talent. And he said, he was quoted by the AP, we're looking for ballplayers and who knows, maybe some of them are behind the walls. Merrill Hess, assistant scouting director for the Pirates said in a telephone interview from Pittsburgh, we realize that the outside world is not always amenable to giving employment to those who have offended it, but we're not that way. And I don't know if they signed a player out of this. I couldn't find a follow-up in the brief thing,

but I mean, even if they found somebody, it'd be difficult because they'd have to get him paroled because he's in prison. So anyway, so that was, I guess, the most news on him. But his biggest media appearance actually came much, much later. In 2010, when he was 83 years old, he lost his World Series ring. And an 11-year-old girl found it on the floor of a snack bar in a New Jersey ice skating rink. She immediately turned it in. And after much snooping on the internet, searching on the internet, they

found him. They found Merrill Hess. They found out that it was Merrill Hess's on Yahoo Answers. Wow, that's your go-to source. Yahoo Answers. Wow, that's your go-to source. Yes, I have much mocked Yahoo Answers as a baseball reference resource in my life. But she found Merrill Hess, they connected, and he got his ring back. And then he died two years later. So the obvious question is, well, is it just a coincidence that his name was used in signs? And it seems obviously not a coincidence.

This is a player who, well, M. Night Shyamalan is fairly well associated with Pennsylvania. More Philadelphia than Pittsburgh. And so it would be better if he were a Phillies assistant scouting director. But I still think that the geographic proximity is too similar to miss. This is a story about a player, a baseball player, who flames out and then ultimately wins the world by hitting a thing with a baseball bat. And the fact that there's both a baseball theme,

a Pennsylvania connection, and M. Night Shyamalan, who just always loves to be so super clever, makes me think that it had to be intentional. And it makes you wonder why. I thought there must be some great Merrill Hess story that had him stick in M. Night's mind. Yeah, and this was well before losing the World Series ring. Yeah, oh yeah, well before losing the World Series ring. Oh, yeah, well before losing the World Series ring. And I couldn't find anything that would rise to the level of memorability 30 years later. It's conceivable, although not in any way suggested or confirmed,

that M. Night Shyamalan met him at a club, at a team day or something. Maybe he signed a baseball. Maybe they were friends. Maybe they probably... I'm sure that somewhere in his life... Do I think this... Do you think that there... How many human beings would you estimate

it would take to connect M. Night Shyamalan with random pirate's front office guy from the 70s? I mean, friend of a friend? Friend of a friend? Is that too close? Friend of a friend of a friend? Is that too close? Friend of a friend of a friend? If we didn't know about the character in science? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just random, random Pirate's front office guy. How many connections do you think? Or how many chains, links in that chain on average? Four. Four? Oh, I think much fewer. Like, I bet you... I guess if they're both in Pennsylvania.

If they're both in Pennsylvania, right. I would bet that a friend of a friend of a friend would be the average. And so it certainly isn't a stretch to think that maybe his dad and Meryl went to church together or something together. I don't know. So we don't know why. There's no obvious way in the record that Merrill Hess earned this other than existing. However, I'm going to,

just in my head, I'm going to write a narrative where Merrill Hess saved M. Night Shyamalan's kitten from a tree when M. Night was eight years old or something like that and that he did earn it in a way that was personal and

escaped not only the public record but the obituary writers as well. The obituary writer does not mention that he is the name of a character in science as it wouldn't. Well, if anyone knows anything more about Merrill Hess or if you're M. Night

Shyamalan, email us at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. No? Don't want to know more? Definitely the first part. All right. Okay. You can email us, M. Night. Okay.

All right. All right. And that's our show. No. I wanted to talk about Molly Knight's book, which came out today. Best Team Money Can Buy. Okay. You haven't read it, I assume.

Nope. I think it was shipped to my New York address for some reason. Yeah. I've been with you. You haven't had time. I did read it. And one of the reasons I read it is because while I also don't have time, I was so engaged by it that I read like 220 pages in an afternoon. And so that's most of the book.

It's very engaging. It's very crisp. There are good details on every page. There is wonderful access. And it's, I don't know, frankly, it's a baseball book. I haven't really read a baseball book that was so lively in a long time. So it's good. I recommend it. But I want to specifically talk about one of the central characters in it, Ned Colletti. And Ned Colletti is an interesting GM to talk about because he is actually arguably,

like you could almost make the case that he is as much of a baseball outsider as any stat head, any guy who came from Wall Street or whatever is. In a way, he didn't play. He was never... He's like Merrill Hess. He was never in uniform. He was... His baseball background is... Well, actually, let me...

There is an index of Ned Coletti references, and one of the references is baseball background up. So I'll just flip to page 39. He basically, some people know this, but he basically started as a press flack. He was the PR guy for the Cubs. a press flack. He was the PR guy for the Cubs. So he went from, you know, I mean, one of the least baseball-oriented jobs in the entire front office to GM. And so in another scenario, he could have been hailed by our types as a hero, as an outsider hero who came in and just worked his way up despite not checking the traditional boxes of a baseball GM, except that Ned Coletti was in a lot of ways the most old school GM of his era and held on to a kind of a pre-money ball resume longer than almost any team did.

Moneyball resume Longer than almost any team did And so now that His career with the Dodgers As a GM is over And now that we have this book In particular that Takes us deep inside it, we can sort of assess What the heck he was doing

Why he was the GM, how he did as the GM And whether there will ever be another GM Like him And I don't know if we will, but that's what you could do. So, uh, and I don't know if we will, but that's what you could do if you read the book. I don't know if we will cause Ben hasn't read the book, but I do want to tell you my three, the three favorite,

my three favorite, uh, Ned Coletti anecdotes in this book. Okay. Yeah. All right. Anecdote. Number one,

uh, on the first day of spring training before the 2011 season, when the Dodgers were neck deep in McCourt muck, Coletti addressed the team with a barn-burning speech he hoped would inspire them into battle. In the early 1500s, famed explorer Hernan Cortes set out from Cuba to conquer Mexico for the Spanish crown. Coletti said that, according to legend,

when Cortes arrived on the shores of Veracruz, he ordered his frightened men to burn their ships as a means of giving them confidence and scaring the Aztecs, the message being that Cortes believed his men would so thoroughly dominate that when the job was complete, they would leave on their enemies' ships.

So that's his big inspiring speech. Do you know the problem with that speech well they they killed lots of people no no that is what else that's not why they burned the ships the they burnt he burned the ships because his he was afraid his cowardly men were going to sail away he basically kind of. He forced them into a corner essentially where they couldn't flee. And it was not as a means of giving them confidence. It was basically a means of saying, well, you can fight for me or you're going to die. And so then so that's the big problem. The secondary problem is that I'm going to keep reading. Three years later, Coletti

sat the Dodgers down on the first day of spring training for his annual pep talk. He told the same story, only this time he got mixed up and replaced Cortez with Alexander the Great. Players looked at each other in disbelief. When Coletti left, the room erupted in laughter. Within weeks, the guys had t-shirts made that said, The guys had t-shirts made that said, burn the ships on the front with ATG for Alexander the Great on the back. During the 2014 season, it was not uncommon to hear players yell,

burn the ships before taking the field. What Coletti didn't know was that Cortez didn't burn his ships as a motivational tool. He did it so his terrified men couldn't retreat. I wonder how many players were present at both of those TED talks a lot of turnover these days it depends if this was a whole org meeting which there's that's the one time of year when you have an entire org meeting then probably 100 or so if not probably like i don't know what would you guess four four? Yeah, but enough. All you really need is one. One who remembers and can tell the others. Yeah.

Yeah, kind of. Although, on the other hand, I talk to a lot of baseball players lately, and I don't feel like they'd be that into my Cortez history lesson. So I'm looking, let's see, Juan Uribe was there for both d gordon was there for both probably unless he he might not start of the year andre ethier was there for both matt kemp was there for both clayton kershaw was there for both so good a good number yeah playing chad billingsley probably there for both so plenty. Kenley Jansen might have been there for both. So that's one.

And ideally, we'd talk about what the lesson of that story is. I don't know if there is a lesson in that story. Be a better speaker. Or maybe not. Maybe it's better for them to have that shared in-joke. Maybe he did it on purpose. They got t-shirts out of it. They got a team rallying cry out of it.

It worked, right? Yeah, because you sort of do want your player, like you know that you're, as a boss, you know your players are going to, they're going to find something to set you apart from them and to, I don't know, dislike you. Everybody hates their boss at some point, right? And so if you can do it in a way that is totally benign and like loose and casual and just kind of makes you look a little bit like a goof like it's it's it's actually quite good to play the fool sometimes as long as you know in in the right situation so uh so yeah maybe he's a genius yeah good all right so ned colletti executive of the year all right wow

ernan cortez gets his own separate entry in this he gets an index entry yeah between between stan conti and jim crane all right story number two when the giants won the world series in 2010, Ned Colletti, the front office, the GM of the Dodgers, cried with joy. And of course, Colletti spent a long time with the Giants. The Giants, as an organization, had never won a World Series in San Francisco during his time there. It was a hugely significant time for the city, for the organization, for the clubhouse attendant who had been there since, or the clubhouse manager who'd been there since their first year, for the announcers who'd been there for 20 years, for everybody, right? And for Ned Colletti. And I don't have a, but I can also see that it's something that maybe, I don't know, do you think that it matters? Does

it matter that your GM doesn't have a bloodthirsty hatred of division rival? Does it matter at all? I think it would be hard to have that because you've got to talk to them and work with them and there's a collegiality among front office people and GMs a lot of the time. There's a little GM fraternity. They all experience the same challenges and the same criticisms, and they have to help each other out in certain ways while also trying to beat each other. So I don't think there's usually that much animosity among teams,

unless there's a hack or something, in which case maybe. But otherwise otherwise I don't think most people who work for teams have the same just emotional reaction that fans do in that sense. They might have it, as you're saying, to the success, to the winning, but not the anger. Players though do. I mean, players hang out together off the field. They have friends. They've known each other. There's professional courtesy. They go to each other's bowling tournaments and all that sort of stuff. But also, as we see in other stories in this book, most notably the pool jumping scene in Arizona, they do also hate each other. And almost all the things you said about front offices also apply to teams. They face the same criticisms.

They have the same jobs. They know what each other's going through. There are times when they hate each other. I mean, when something, some action precipitates it, if there's some kind of beanball war going on or something. But there are division rivals who don't hate each other, I think. You see them talking to each other, I think. You'd see them talking to each other on the bases and before the game and that sort of thing. So I think it kind of flares up from time to time. Yeah. And this was a team that Coletti actually helped put together.

Specifically, they were his guys. They were guys he drafted. A lot of those guys were guys that he was involved. He was in the draft room when they picked him, or he was in the meetings probably when they were developing him. This might be a special circumstance. It also feels like a little bit of a special circumstance in the other way, though, because it's the Giants and the Dodgers. It's not like it's the Giants and the Padres or the Giants and whatever other team Coletti might have, could have come from. It's not the Giants and the Cubs or the Dodgers and the Cubs. It's the Giants and the Dodgers. But I say good for you, Ned Coletti. You're a human. Sure, yeah.

Even though some people say you're not. I see nothing wrong with that. I don't even think it's surprising or even all that rare. All right, last one. This is my favorite story in the book. My favorite story of any kind in the book. The Dodgers had bullpen issues. This was 2014. You remember last year. Yeah. They had spent a ton of money on had bullpen issues. This was 2014.

You remember last year. They had spent a ton of money on their bullpen. They had like five former closers and a closer in their bullpen. Blue Shield of California. Blue Shield of California, right. And yet it turned out to be a horrible, horrible unit. A good team in many ways undone as the year went on by their bullpen, a $270 million team with one of the worst bullpens in the league.

And so at the trade deadline, they were trying to get Joaquin Benoit. And so I'll read some parts here. Coletti had come so close to trading for Joaquin Benoit in July that San Diego's front office thought it had a deal. Benoit was pitching great. He had a great year for San Diego last year. He'd been dominant for years and was dominant that year. And he was, I think, signed for one more year.

And so as a guy who had proven he had the psychological metal to handle the ninth inning, Benoit remained on Kledi's radar. When the Chris Perez and Brian Wilson signings blew up, and he knew the bullpen would be a liability in October, he tried to deal for Benoit at the deadline. But the Dodgers analytics department thought it was a bad idea. The 37-year-old Benoit's shoulder was on the verge of exploding, they argued. It was just a matter of time.

And Coletti had gotten the Dodgers bullpen into this mess by overpaying for former closers. If Benoit did get injured, Los Angeles would still be on the hook for over $10 million, plus whatever prospects they gave San Diego. Had they learned nothing from recent history? Coletti disagreed with their assessment of Benoit, perhaps because he knew he would be blamed

for failing to trade for reinforcements who could shore up the bullpen. Stan Kasten, who was Coletti's boss, may have been in the game for a long time, but he had shown a willingness to listen to the opinion of the new school stat heads and embraced the idea there was no such thing as too much information. He sided with the geeks, and the deal was nixed.

Padres officials were left with the impression that Colletti couldn't pull the trigger because he didn't have room in a bullpen already crowded with veteran relievers he couldn't cut. So the embattled GM made no moves at the deadline and told reporters he felt good about his club. And then, first postscript, the Dodgers analytics department was proven right immediately. Benoit reported shoulder soreness two weeks after Coletti had tried to trade for him. He pitched five innings in the last seven weeks of the season.

All right, so then you remember the postseason, right? They had no bullpen. When they left Kershaw in too long because they had no bullpen, Kershaw got hit. When they pulled Granke and let the bullpen have it, the bullpen got hit. Everything came down in a lot of ways to that bullpen. And so on the flight back to Los Angeles from St. Louis, he laid into one of the employees who he believed had blocked the trade thanks for having my effing back on Benoit he was overheard saying to the man

the nerds had been right but in that moment it didn't matter to Coletti that he traded for Benoit he could have said he had done something to try to help the bullpen and could blame the failure on the club's bad injury luck uh so I think that's a good anecdote yeah because he was widely criticized for not having done something yes at the time and so you can kind of understand from his perspective why he would have wanted to have done something even if the something hadn't worked out which is maybe a reminder that when we talk about certain GMs who are trying to save their jobs or their GMs, their jobs are in danger. And we wonder sometimes whether they are acting with the club's best interests in mind. So maybe if he had gotten this review of Benoit

from his analytics people who were right in this case. And if he had had the power to push it through anyway, if he hadn't been overruled, then he would have been doing it for his own benefit, really, more so than the team's. And that must happen sometimes. Yeah. Beware of GMs trying to save their jobs. One more thing I want to say, and then we'll talk a little bit.

During discussions with Clayton Kershaw for his extension, the new owner's bunker had been open for two business days when it became the setting for the biggest contract offer in American sports history after Coletti led Kershaw down the tunnel for his

impromptu sit down with ownership and his agents. Coletti learned that he wasn't needed for anything else. That'll be all, Ned, he was told. The door closed. Despite being the team's general manager, Coletti was shut out of the conversation. His loss of power was an open secret in the clubhouse. So this is what I want to talk about lastly with him. Coletti is, like we said, he had a very unconventional resume for a GM, and he did not have the authority that a playing career might give to you. He didn't have the authority that a thick statistical background might give you. He was a guy who got promoted because he was good at his job every step of the way. was a guy who got promoted because he was good at his job every step of the way.

Something about him made people confident about him, about his ability to do the job, about his ability to lead. I read the sort of embarrassing parts, but there are also parts where you go, yeah, I can see it. I can see why you'd see this guy as capable of leading an organization. And he's still there. He's the senior advisor to the president, right? Which might just be kind of a, maybe they just kind of created a position for him, but probably not. They must think he does something, right? The book strongly implies that

they just created a position for him. He's going to be in the broadcast booth next year. a position for him. He's going to be in the broadcast booth next year. So he's, in a lot of ways, he's the equivalent of the late round draft pick who doesn't have the tools, who's not tall and projectable, who doesn't throw hard, who's not particularly athletic, who doesn't come from a baseball lineage, and has to earn his promotion every step of the way with performance. He's the guy who's 24 and in high A because nobody's invested anything in him. And he's hitting 379 with a 685 slugging percentage and still we're like, yeah, well, he's old for his level. And you just don't want to believe in him. And he has to earn it every step of the way. And he did. He earned it from a job

that is absolutely not on the list of answers to how do I become a GM. The answer to that is not become a PR guy. And yet he earned his way from that all the way to the top of one of the premier organizations in the game. And ultimately, I don't know if his failure to do the job better or to keep his job is a vindication for the idea that you should come from a traditional background. Perhaps he would have been taken more seriously by new ownership or by everybody, by you and me. I don't know if he had had some of those boxes that he could check off that we expect from our GMs, or maybe in fact, those boxes turned out to be really important. Maybe the fact that he wasn't very good at his

job. Maybe he made bad moves because he didn't have those tools at the end of the day. I'm not really sure. I don't know what the lesson of Ned Colletti is. I don't think he was a very good GM. Peter Principle? Yeah, it might actually just be the Peter Principle. I mean, what I described is basically the Peter Principle. And that's what happens to most of the non-toolsy, low-round draft picks who earn their promotions every step of the way.

Normally, they hit AA or AAA, or they get into the majors, and it turns out they're quad A guys. But most of them do hit their level of their own incompetence uh and maybe that's all maybe that's all we're talking about is this is a guy who just got promoted until he couldn't do it anymore uh i don't know i'm not sure i don't think he was a very good gm and i'm not sure why he wasn't a very good gm and uh that's it that's my whole story I look forward to reading the book I look forward to reading any book I haven't opened a book since I got here

I miss books by the way I don't think either of us really saw the Home Run Derby last night I watched a tiny bit of it in between being out of the house but in the one glimpse that I got of it,

and I know that it was very well received, the new format, spiced it up, added some sort of excitement to it, which was lacking before. But in the one moment that I was watching, the batting practice pitcher, or the home run derby pitcher, was a guy named Bob Tewksbury, and he was throwing to Josh Donaldson, and he was a former hitting coach who helped Josh Donaldson become Josh Donaldson. But Bob Tewksbury was spelled T-E-W-K-S-B-A-R-Y. So you're saying that there's another Bob Tewksbury in baseball?

There's another Bob Tewksbury in baseball. There are two Bob Tewksburyys in baseball with one letter different. It is not a name you run into in non-baseball situations. Not at all. It's very strange. It's like a video game character created to get around a player not being in the Players Association or something. It's like a knockoff Bob Tewksbury. I enjoyed that.

And he also was a – he pitched to Donaldson? He pitched to Donaldson, yeah. So he also throws strikes at a slow speed. Yeah. Like Bob Tewksbury did. They're basically the same pitcher. Pretty much. Okay, so podcast at baseballperspectives.com.

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