Where Have All the Bad GMs Gone?

Baseball

By TIM MARCHMAN
May 9, 2008

Many an older baseball fan will, while bending an elbow, be happy to tell you how and why their beloved sport has been on the decline since they were young, in clinical detail. With all respect to those fans who, as a class, have done more than their bit to teach me about the game and how to enjoy it, they're generally wrong. Ballplayers today are far more skilled than they were in the 1960s, playing a faster and more intricate game before much larger and better-informed crowds. Herman Jacobs, author of an immortal (if obscenely titled) piece in the Onion, summed it up best when he wrote, "I tell ya, they didn't used to make 'em like they do now."

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Eric Risberg / AP

San Francisco Giants general manager Brian Sabean talks on his phone during their spring training baseball workout in Scottsdale, Ariz., Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2008.

There may be no real reason to long for the days of relatively slow players in heavy wool uniforms playing what would look to modern eyes an awful lot like a rather leaden and uninspired sort of game, when we can simply enjoy watching Chase Utley and Kosuke Fukudome play ball beautifully. But we can mourn the passing of one figure from baseball's past: the idiot executive. Who today can match Minnesota operator Calvin Griffith, of whom the late owner Bill Veeck once wrote, "Calvin always seemed so stupid that you almost felt sorry for him"? What front office can match Boston's of 50 years ago, which Veeck preferred to deal with strictly by telephone because it wasn't "easy to make the kind of deal you were able to make with the Red Sox over the years without laughing in their face"? Here, at least, they truly don't make them like they used to.

Even 10 years ago, no one could have made a similar claim. In those days, inept executives ran riot. Detroit general manager Randy Smith traded everything that wasn't nailed down for brittle Texas slugger Juan Gonzalez, and offered him a $140 million contract for no evident reason. Pittsburgh GM Cam Bonifay became a legend for such moves as signing waiver-bait first baseman Kevin Young to a $24 million extension, and snagging shortstop Pat Meares — coming off a string in which he had failed to reach a .300 OBA in two of three years — for $15 million. Tampa Bay's Chuck LaMar, Kansas City's Allard Baird, and even the Mets' Steve Phillips — who, admittedly, won a pennant — were all truly magnificent, setting the table for long stretches of futility with their bizarre and nonsensical trades and signings. They did their part to ensure that baseball fully lived up, in this area, to its proud legacy.

Today, though, a glance around the league is disappointing, even frustrating. San Francisco's Brian Sabean — who made his team into a laughingstock with his perplexing strategy of signing elderly reserves to pricey long-term deals, who signed Barry Zito to what may be the single worst contract in baseball history, and whose neglect of, if not contempt for, his farm system has left his team fielding players under-qualified for Triple-A — flies the flag high. He is a true throwback. Past him, though, no one is genuinely bad at his job. It's a shame.

Since time immemorial, there have basically been three types of baseball executives: those who know what they're doing; those who don't, and colorless time servers, functionaries of no particular inspiration, who are capable of winning when they have some money or luck into some talent, and lose when they have neither. There are plenty of the former in the game today, from Boston's Theo Epstein to Arizona's Josh Byrnes, and plenty of the latter as well. (You could perhaps class Mets GM Omar Minaya among them.) Where, though, are the middle dwellers, the true fools?

To cast the problem another way, try to name a terrible GM in baseball other than Sabean. There are, to be sure, uninspired executives. Toronto's J.P. Ricciardi, Houston's Ed Wade, and Seattle's Bill Bavasi, for instance, all frequently make laughable moves. They trade valuable prospects for expensive veterans even though they have little chance of winning, sign free agents for too much money, release strong hitters for no reason, and so on. But none among them are so bad that you almost feel sorry for them. They're merely unimaginative, and predisposed to take the safe bet. None are truly easy prey for shrewd operators in the Veeck tradition. None are inclined to do something such as signing a backup shortstop to a four-year contract, or making a washed-up Mo Vaughn their starting first baseman.

This depressing paucity of genuine, flagrant ineptitude likely has something to do with the alarming outbreak of parity in the league. Epstein, Byrnes, Oakland's Billy Beane, and their peers may be sharp as all get-out, as truly an improvement on their predecessors as Utley and Fukudome are on theirs. But without true nitwits upon whom they can practice their dark arts, there's no way for them to display the full range of their talents. Forty years ago, a canny executive could run a team near the top of the league just by getting a rival near an open bottle of whiskey. Today, he has to work for it. There's always the hope of tomorrow, at least: Sooner or later some GM will be fired, and one can presume that Steve Phillips would not turn down a job if one was offered to him.

tmarchman@nysun.com