The postseason for the New York Mets has barely begun, but there is already word that Theo Epstein will not be the new President of Baseball Operations for the club. The news didn't strike me as much of a surprise, for many of the reasons that Joel Sherman delineated in his article. Epstein has made a lot of money in baseball and can continue making plenty of money doing whatever he pleases. After winning titles in Boston and Chicago, Theo is looking for a different challenge than repeating that achievement in another city. It always felt like quite a long shot.
Beane is the A's titular head of baseball operations, but clubs that deal with Oakland say that GM David Forst is the main man. Beane has many other interests, including being an in-demand public speaker and owning a piece of two European soccer teams.
Beane turns 60 next March. That certainly doesn't disqualify him from the job, but I personally don't believe that fixing the New York Mets is a short-term assignment. It's one thing for Steve Cohen to share his desire for the Mets to become an east coast version of the Dodgers. It's quite another to enact all of the organizational change required to make that a reality. It's not simply about making some intelligent trades and a few good draft picks.
There is so much work to be done here, and it will require years to see it through. Several years, not just one or two. It's hard for me to imagine Billy Beane wanting to invest that kind of energy and time at this stage of his life simply to have a chance to win a championship. If that was truly important to the man, he would have departed Oakland a long time ago. These days, running a ball club is way more than just a full-time job — not just during the baseball season but year-round. I have my doubts that Billy Beane, after stepping away from the day-to-day grind of running a club, wants to dive back into it.
I could be wrong, but the only way it makes sense to me for Beane to take on this job is if he has an excellent GM working underneath him who can handle a good portion of the responsibilities. That could very well work, with that GM poised to take on the top job in the future. But that requires bringing in two critical hires at the same time. I can't help but feel I'd rather have one person come in who is younger and all-in on the work to be done.
Much has been written about how difficult it is to helm a baseball operation in New York. I have covered that subject myself more than once. The city is, by far, the largest media market in the country. All of these media outlets are in constant competition to draw ears and eyeballs to their offerings. While the Mets fanbase is plenty bruised and battered, it remains one of the most loyal and passionate. Any new PBO will have to endure constant second-guessing of everything they do. That part of the deal is challenging enough.
The job's difficulty is compounded by years of neglecting the ground-level work necessary to build a winning organization. I touched on this in a post I wrote back in December — which feels like a million years ago now. The idea of ground-level work came from a post that Bill James had on his site about the hiring of Jared Porter (this was before the accusations of misconduct and Porter's firing). I thought that James had managed to summarize quite nicely why teams like the Wilpon-led Mets could never seem to sustain success beyond a year or two:
...Theo [Epstein] used to talk about seeing baseball with both eyes, the scouting eye and the analytics eye. But there's another way to think about an organization, which is ground-level and top-level operations. Everything the fan SEES, everything they talk about on talk shows, everything that people like me in the public eye discuss, that's all top-level stuff.
The top-level stuff is important, but it's. . .what, 40% of what makes an organization work, maybe? An organization can't succeed if they trade away young players they should have kept and keep young players they should have traded away. They can't succeed if they have the wrong manager and they make player decisions that waste tens of millions of dollars.
But what people who don't work in the game don't understand is, 60% of what makes an organization successful is the ground-level work. The ground-level work isn’t one thing; it’s a million things...
...It is WORK, in other words; it is organizing work so that everything gets done. It's ground-level work; that's 60% of why organizations succeed. ...there are "Ground Level" organizations, and there are "Top Level" organizations. You can't win by doing one or the other. Some organizations—the Angels, the Mets, the Red Sox before the current owners bought the team—focus on the Top Level stuff, and let the ground-level stuff run on auto-pilot...
...But if you do the top-level stuff perfectly, absolutely perfectly, you’ll still fail most of the time if you don’t do the ground-level work. I don’t know how well Jared will be able to do the top-level stuff. He’ll have to prove that over time. But I know that what the Mets mostly have needed, over the years, is better attention to the ground-level work. And I am 100% certain that Jared Porter is the right man to take on that challenge.
Unfortunately, we're never going to get a chance to find out if Bill James was correct about Porter being the right man for the job. His personal failure to grow past an adolescent understanding of how men should behave towards women has taken whatever talents the man possessed out of baseball. However, what still rings true in what James wrote is that the level of ground-level work ahead for the new PBO of the Mets will be enormous. Yes, a good deal of work will have to be delegated to talented people underneath the PBO. However, it will still require constant attention and unflagging energies to affect the necessary change.
Of the four Mets manager possibilities being discussed at current online and on television.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I look for these things in a manager.
1. "Success" in a similar MLB managerial position while on others teams prior. How the candidate responded to those teams challenges and how he intuitively responded to them in order to turn things around for the better.
2. Number of years "experience" he has had. This Mets team needs someone with solid experience at this position. The "no experienced managers" simply are learning on the job really, and it did not work here of recent. A manager who does not need a computer printout (or handheld) every minute of every game to make all their decisions in a timely and wise manner. A manager who relies upon his visceral instincts because they have worked often prior for him.
Sidebar: Analytics?
I have never (not one time really) seen analytics work well when widely used over the course of a season. Baseball is not trigonometry. It is not Einstein's "Theory of Relativity" or Plato's "Theory of Knowledge". It is not always accurately definable by statistics or equations. A manager has got to have a good understanding of his players, inside and out, their thinking ways. What makes each one sort of tick, and what motivates them. Are they hitting the ball well of late, can they be relied upon in any game type situation. Does that player normally rise up to the occasion. There is more to be considered than just the analytics.
I can see using analytics once in a while maybe, but it should never be thought of as a kind of "baseball bible" and be solely relied upon for decision making purpose.
3. Personality. Can the manager relate well to his team of players or is he, well, a sort of stiff or smart ass pompous guy, a dugout distraction or a menace. Is he understanding of his players, they are human too. He's tough when he needs to be, and practices (always) an open door style of office.
4. Someone who can see where his team is at right now, and make player personnel opinions or changes that are relevant and listened to by his superiors. Someone who can instinctively take his team to a much higher level of play overall, easily.
5. A managerial baseball visionary. A baseball and people wise and older man. Someone a team can respect.
6. A quiet leader type (not necessarily an introvert by any means) one who does not care if a bunch of media attention is bestowed upon him or not after a victory or loss. Someone confident who gets things done. A manager who is glad to share his team's successes (regardless of how large or small) with all his players. A team first approach.
6. This next one is very important one.
Someone who after twenty or so years of managing, still loves the game of baseball with all his heart. It's in his blood and he cannot ever deny it. Someone who can laugh, smile, have fun, and keep things in perspective. Someone who can take the heat of the media storms that NYC sports always delivers each season, and still remain himself.
My pick between the four managers being mentioned currently online would probably be Bruce Bochy. I think he makes the most sense for this team right now. Players like him.
Ideally, I would love a manager here with experience who once played for this New York Mets organization. But I am not certain that anyone out there now would have the necessary experience to do this. This team cannot afford any more "on the job trainees" for this position. It truly needs to win now.