Reese Kaplan -- Let's Rebuild From the Top Down

Call it premature or call it some advanced planning, but what kind of candidate do the Mets need to find to take over as president of baseball operations and as general manager?  It’s abundantly clear that the current braintrust is not getting it done and without even taking into consideration the off-the-field incidents, the on-the-field results of the players obtained (and not obtained) indicate that a total new direction is needed.

If we consider the general manager slot first, what exactly does this person do?  Well, the conventional wisdom is that he (or she) is in charge of baseball player transactions which include contract negotiations, trades, duration and placement in the majors or the minors.  The GM also must hire the coaches who are charged with developing and maintaining player skills, as well as the on-the-field manager whose duties range between motivation and press conferences.  Sometimes the manager selected is particularly good at one of these skills but poor at the other.  Sometimes he is bad at both.  On rare occasions he excels with the media and with his own players.  Of course, Mets fans have not seen this Halley's Comet of positive skills in quite some time.  

A GM’s duties fall into four primary areas.  First, he must deal with the players themselves.  Then he must reign over the front office.  He now must also contend with the ramifications of good and bad on social media.  Finally he must oversee the team’s public relations arm (which often ties very closely to the social media trends).  

Now there’s a corresponding role usually called a POBO -- President of Baseball Operations.  While in the past the GM was also responsible for a great many non-player related issues, the trend lately has been to split these duties into two separate and distinct sets of duties.  The POBO will negotiate things that have to do with the cost of running the business of baseball.  Everything from vendors who do work on behalf of the ballpark, the tax and human resource side of benefits, and even considering things like travel costs will fall into a more straight business role which has less to do with the players and more to do with the benefit to the bottom line.  

It was a trend in the past that former players would work their way up through the ranks to assume the role of GM.  That experience does still exist with, for example, Jerry DiPoto in Seattle, a former big league pitcher for the Mets and other teams whose career ended prematurely due to effectiveness and injury.  He ascended into the GM role first in an interim capacity with the Diamondbacks, then the full title with the Angels.  He’s been in this same role with the Mariners now since the end of 2015.  

Today, however, the more likely path people take towards this front office responsibility comes in the sports management and business curricula of graduate schools around the country that help prepare the eventual GM for the kind of negotiations and obstacles they would encounter on a regular basis.  If you look around the league (starting with the Mets’ own front office), you will see folks like Omar Minaya, Steve Phillips, Sandy Alderson, Brodie Van Wagenen, Jared Porter and Zack Scott in charge of this multitude of player-oriented areas when they have not come up as players in the majors.  

As an example of the modern approach, both the Texas Rangers’ Jon Daniels and the San Diego Padres’ A.J. Preller got their training in the Ivy League where coincidentally they were roommates at Cornell.  The Astros’ Jeff Lunhow did his undergraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania and the Tigers’ Dave Dombrowski started off at Cornell as well.  Rick Hahn of the White Sox has dual graduate degrees including one from the Harvard Law School.  Are we seeing a trend here?  The Mets’ current (and presumably) outgoing GM, Zack Scott, has no graduate degree and earned his bachelor’s in math at the University of Vermont.  It would seem that one of these things is not like the others.  

So the Mets have some research and interviewing to do if indeed they are seeking a new GM and a new President of Baseball Operations.  Finding someone with a good resume for the job is important, but past success is no guarantee of future efforts that yield the same results.  Sometimes it is worth taking a risk on a less well known commodity who has creativity and good thought processes.  Sometimes it results, unfortunately, in Brodie Van Wagenen.