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Daniel R Levitt

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  1. Daniel R Levitt

    Branch Rickey

    By Daniel R Levitt,

    This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.
     
    [This one is from Mark]
     
    Had Branch Rickey retired from baseball in 1942, before he ran the Dodgers, before he signed Jackie Robinson, his record as a general manager would still be enough to warrant consideration as the greatest GM in the game’s history. By that time he had already built one of history’s best organizations, winning six pennants and four World Series while completely revising baseball player development and instruction and inventing the farm system model that is still in place nine decades later. When you add in his Brooklyn years, both the building of one of baseball’s best and most iconic teams and his historic and courageous act to integrate the game, it is a relatively easy call. Summarizing Branch Rickey as a general manager is like summarizing Isaac Newton as scientist. Where do you begin?
     
    By the age of thirty, Rickey had retired from his brief playing career and had received a law degree from the University of Michigan. The practice of law did not take, and by 1913 he was back in baseball, where he remained for the next five decades. He managed the Browns for two years, then was “kicked upstairs” when a new ownership group came on, becoming something like a general manager in 1916. A year later he moved cross-town, becoming president of the Cardinals and de facto GM, though the position did not yet formally exist. In 1919 he appointed himself the field manager and filled both jobs for six years.
     
    Most of history’s best GMs have been blessed with excellent ownership that has provided the necessary resources with limited interference. Sam Breadon took control of the Cardinals in 1920, and proved to be the best thing that ever happened to Rickey. After a few years of non-contention, in 1925 Breadon relieved Rickey of his uniform and told him to concentrate on the front office part of his job, player development and scouting. Rickey was not happy, but history proved it to be a brilliant decision.
     
    Branch Rickey first envisioned an organized “farm system” as a solution to the high cost of buying minor league players. A team could instead sign amateur players (for much less money) and then assume the cost of developing the players on teams under its control. At first Rickey’s efforts were (at least) bending the rules, which limited the number of players a major league team could control in the minors. Rickey instead had handshake agreements with many minor league teams that occasionally got the baseball commissioner to take notice. In the early 1930s, after continual lobbying from Breadon and Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert, baseball significantly relaxed their rules on teams’ owning or controlling farm teams, and the Cardinals and Yankees soon had huge farm systems. And, not coincidentally, the two best teams in baseball.
     
    Soon after Rickey created his system, he realized that he needed a cohesive philosophy of scouting, instruction, and coaching. The Cardinals were not signing ready-made players; they were signing boys who needed to be taught how to play. Every part of the game—bunting, sliding, run-down plays, and so on—Rickey wanted to be taught consistently throughout the organization. And Rickey wanted the scouting and player-development parts of the system to work hand in hand. As Kevin Kerrane wrote in his classic book on scouting, “Rickey applied scouting insights to teaching, and vice versa.” Rickey became a legendary talent evaluator, able to make decisions quickly on players. Among other things, he valued speed and youth. No sentimentalist, he tried to trade players before they started to decline rather than after. With his huge farm system, he believed he could fill the holes created when he traded his veterans away.
     
    From 1926 to 1946 the Cardinals won nine pennants and six World Series. Rickey did not have complete control of the club — Breadon hired and fired the managers, for example — and the relationship between the two men had become a bit strained by the early 1940s. When the Dodgers offered an ownership stake and more authority in October 1942, Rickey moved to Brooklyn.
     
    The Dodger team Rickey inherited had just won 104 games. But make no mistake, this was not Rickey’s sort of team. Previous executive Larry MacPhail ran his clubs like a man in a hurry, like he needed to win today because he might not be around tomorrow. As good as the 1942 Dodgers were, only a few good players—notably Pee Wee Reese and Pete Reiser—were in their twenties. But MacPhail had overseen such a dramatic improvement in the Dodgers’ financial position that Rickey had the resources to build the organization that he wanted. He wasted no time getting to work.
     
    Rickey could not do much with the war going on — all his players were in the service — but he worked on building his farm system to be ready. In 1943 alone the Dodgers signed Rex Barney, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, and Ralph Branca. Over the next couple of years Brooklyn added Carl Erskine and Clem Labine, two other mainstays of Dodger teams to come.
     
    The most important event of Rickey’s career, of course, was the signing of Jackie Robinson in October 1945, the first step on the road to ending the Major Leagues’ decades-long prohibition on dark-skinned players. Rickey has been justifiably praised for this courageous and ethical act and his related decisions to sign other black players in the coming years. But more than that, Rickey dramatically improved his team, and in a short time had dramatically improved the quality of play in the major leagues. When Robinson was signed it effectively opened up a huge new source of talent, the biggest new pool in history. As baseball soon discovered, there were dozens of good players, some of them among the greatest players ever, ready to sign cheaply with the first team that asked them. By the end of the 1940s eleven black players had made their debuts in the Major Leagues, eight of whom ended up playing at least five full Major League seasons. Among them were three Dodgers—Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, and Don Newcombe—whose extraordinary play helped define an era and one of history’s most beloved teams.
     
    The integration of the Dodgers went relatively smoothly, thanks both to the tremendous care taken by Rickey and his staff, and the ability and character of these three players. Rickey traded away several southern players during and after the 1947 season, but most of these deals were classic Rickey moves that helped the ball club. In December he dealt Dixie Walker, one of the team’s best and most popular players, to the Pirates, a deal many have interpreted as an indication that Rickey wanted Walker off the team. In fact, it was a great baseball trade: Rickey acquired infielder Billy Cox and pitcher Preacher Roe, who played huge roles on the coming teams. Eddie Stanky was dealt the following March, allowing Robinson to move to second base and Gil Hodges to play first, another very solid baseball move.
     
    After losing a pennant playoff in 1946, the Dodgers won NL pennants in 1947 and 1949 and then lost in 1950 on the season’s final weekend. Unlike the prewar teams, by 1950 the Dodgers had several good players in their twenties and more on the way. In late 1950 Rickey began to sense that his position had weakened with his partners and decided to cash in his stake and take a job running the Pittsburgh Pirates. Walter O’Malley bought Rickey’s share and gained control of the club. The core of talent Rickey left behind won four more pennants and the 1955 World Series. The acolytes he left, including Buzzie Bavasi and Al Campanis, built on Rickey’s foundation to create and maintain baseball’s model organization for another four decades.
     
    Rickey was 69 years old and taking over a team that needed a slow, patient overhaul. The Pirates signed a few bonus babies that did not bear fruit, but he slowly began to improve the organization one player at a time. When owner John Galbreath finally let Rickey go, after five years, the team’s assets included youngsters Roberto Clemente, Bill Mazeroski, Dick Groat, Bob Friend and Vernon Law. It would take another five years for the Pirates to win a pennant, but Rickey certainly did his part.
     
    Rickey never really stopped working. He played a leading role in trying to form the Continental League, a third major league that did not quite get off the ground. In 1962 the 81-year-old took a job as a senior adviser to Cardinal owner Gussie Busch, which proved awkward for GM Bing Devine and everyone else. Rickey left after the 1964 championship.
     
    He died a year later, leaving behind an unmatched resume in the game. As a general manager he dramatically changed how teams find and develop players, and what players are allowed to play the game. His place as the greatest GM in baseball history is secure.

    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.
  2. Daniel R Levitt
    This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.
     
    John Schuerholz spent 26 seasons as a big league GM, winning 16 division titles, six pennants and two World Series. In Kansas City he oversaw that franchise’s only World Series. After moving to Atlanta he took over a team that had lost more than 90 games for four consecutive years and won the next 14 division titles (excepting the truncated 1994 strike season) and five pennants. Schuerholz displayed an uncanny knack for retooling his team, knowing which holes could be filled by integrating prospects and which needed outside solutions.
     
    A Baltimore native, Schuerholz left his junior high school teaching position to join the Orioles front office in 1966. Two years later he became an administrative assistant with the expansion Royals and worked his way up to farm director in 1975, and Vice President of Player Personnel in 1979. Finally, in October 1981 the Royals named him GM, promoting incumbent Joe Burke to president.
     
    The Kansas City team he inherited had won the AL pennant in 1980, but slipped below .500 in the strike-shortened 1981 season. In one of his first moves he hoped to fill a couple of needs for his mostly veteran team by swapping several young players for Vida Blue and outfielder Jerry Martin. The team rebounded to 90 wins in 1982, but Blue and Martin proved a distraction in 1983, as a cocaine investigation dogged them and other players. After the season those two, along with stars Willie Wilson and Willie Mays Aikens, pleaded guilty and were sentenced to three months in prison.
     
    Rather than try to rebuild his aging rotation with veterans, in 1984 Schuerholz introduced a trio of young starters: Bret Saberhagen (20), Mark Gubicza (21), and Danny Jackson (22). For 1985 he acquired veteran catcher Jim Sundberg to help his young staff acclimate, and in conjunction with offensive mainstays George Brett, Frank White, Willie Wilson, Steve Balboni and Lonnie Smith (the last two great trade acquisitions by Schuerholz), Kansas City won the franchise’s first and so far only World Series.
     
    Over the remainder of the 1980s, the Royals remained at the margin of the division race but could not capture another title. The team made some astute draft picks, such as Bo Jackson, but Schuerholz also made what he considered his worst deal, swapping David Cone for Ed Hearn, and some suspect free agent signings towards the end of the decade. By this time the Royals executive suite was becoming a little unwieldy; the two owners were not in complete agreement, and Burke remained tangentially involved as well.
     
    In October 1990 Schuerholz joined the Atlanta Braves as GM with full authority over baseball operations. He inherited a franchise coming off a last place finish that had not been relevant for some time. Nevertheless, the team had a solid core of young pitchers: John Smoltz, Tom Glavine, and Steve Avery, plus outfielders Ron Gant and David Justice. As he had back in Kansas City, Schuerholz went to work to support his young hurlers, acquiring four solid defensive players: Sid Bream, Rafael Belliard, Terry Pendleton, and Otis Nixon. Pendleton had a great hitting season and won the league MVP, and the Braves won their first pennant since 1958 before losing in the World Series. With pretty much the same line up the team captured the flag the next year but again fell short in the World Series.
     
    Schuerholz was not typically a participant in the big name free agent auctions, but prior to the 1993 season, the Braves rocked the baseball world by signing free-agent Greg Maddux, the 26-year-old ace of the Chicago Cubs, to bolster a pitching staff that was already the envy of the league. Maddux responded with the second of his four straight Cy Young awards.
     
    The Braves could not have maintained their success for a decade without a continual influx of talent. The team that won the World Series in 1995 was much different than the one that had lost four years earlier: five of the eight position players, two starting pitchers, most of the bench and all of the bullpen had turned over. When the Braves lost the World Series in 1999, five of the eight position players, two starters, and all of the bench and bullpen were different from the champions of 1995.
     
    Schuerholz made several impressive trades to keep his team competitive, but more importantly he continually addressed aging and ineffective players with internal solutions (if available) as opposed trading his prospects for aging veterans. Good teams are often reluctant to give significant roles to untested players. The Braves of the early 1990s had several veteran journeymen that needed replacing within a few years. What set the Braves apart from other great teams of the past generation is their willingness to give regular roles to the jewels of their farm system. When Terry Pendleton or Ron Gant needed replacing, Schuerholz did not trade his young talent for veteran solutions. In 1994 the Braves gave starting positions to Javy Lopez and Ryan Klesko, and within two years both Chipper Jones and Andruw Jones were key players. Later still, Rafael Furcal, Marcus Giles and Adam LaRoche claimed jobs.
     
    Schuerholz often liked to note that the Braves on average turned over ten players on their roster every year. “One of the key responsibilities we have as general managers is managing change effectively,” he said. “I think it’s true in any business. We exist in an environment where change occurs in a bizarre fashion at a bizarre pace. We have to keep our antennas up and keep our minds open. We have to understand that change in inevitable, especially in our business, where we rely on human beings to perform physically, and we have to be able to manage the changes that are required in an effective manner.”
     
    A comparison to the Cleveland Indians of the 1990s under general manager John Hart (now Schuerholz’s GM in Atlanta) is instructive. Hart built a great team in Cleveland that blossomed in 1994-96, but as holes emerged he seemed reluctant to fill them from within the organization. Over the next few years he dealt such players as Sean Casey, Danny Graves, Jeromy Burnitz, Albie Lopez, Brian Giles, and Richie Sexon, often acquiring a veteran player who proved less productive than a possible internal solution.
     
    One of the reasons the Braves magnificent run eventually ended is because the farm system could not continue to produce stars the way it had in the mid-1990s, putting additional pressure on Schuerholz’s trades and free agent signings. Nevertheless, even in 2002 and 2003, twelve years after Schuerholz’s first division title the team was still winning 101 games a year.
     
    After the 2007 season Schuerholz was named team president, and he promoted Frank Wren to GM. After a few mediocre years, the Braves returned to the postseason in 2010, making it again in 2012 and 2013. After missing the playoffs in 2014 Schuerholz dismissed Wren and made Hart the GM.
     
    The Atlanta Braves from 1991 to 2005 enjoyed one of the most impressive runs of success by a franchise in baseball history. The team has been underrated because they navigated through the post-season unscathed only once, but Schuerholz’s maneuvering that kept this team at the top for fourteen years is truly remarkable. When added to his legacy in Kansas City, Schuerholz clearly merits a ranking among the best ten general managers ever.
     
    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.
  3. Daniel R Levitt
    This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.
     
    Along with our countdown of the greatest 25 GMs in history, we occasioally plan to write about some people who did not make our list (as well as other topics related to baseball operations and front offices). Calvin Griffith is not eligable for our Top 25 because we chose to not include people who also owned the team (although despite his successes in the 1960s he would not have made the list in any case).
     
    When Calvin Griffith formally took over the Washington Senators in late 1955 after the death of his uncle Clark, he became the last of the family owners to act as his own general manager. After more than half a century, many writers have a tendency to wax nostalgic on these owner-operators. In fact, these men, who had no outside source of income, often ran their clubs on a shoestring budget and spent much less on scouting and minor league operations than the wealthier franchises. By the early 1950s some of these teams were spectacularly unsuccessful. Somewhat astonishingly, Griffith proved an exception—at least for a while. During the 1960s the Twins were one of the American League’s best clubs and led the league in attendance over the decade.
     
    The organization that Calvin inherited evolved into an extended family operation. Brothers Sherry, Jimmy and Billy Robertson and brother-in-law Joe Haynes all held down key executive positions within the system. And all had grown up around baseball and were competent at their jobs.
     
    But Griffith was very much in charge and immersed himself in all aspects of the team. Until the travel got to be too much, he personally saw in action nearly all the players receiving large amateur bonuses or acquired by trade. When he felt his managers were not being aggressive enough getting his young phenoms into the lineup, he forced the issue with future stars such as Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, and Rod Carew. Another time, when he thought the coaching was subpar, he kept his manager but revamped his on-field staff with expensive, big-name coaches. Because Griffith spent most of his energy concentrating on the baseball side of the operation, he neglected expanding or pursuing additional revenue sources, a shortcoming that exacerbated his lack of non-baseball resources.
     
    Griffith was a unique blend of bluster, naiveté, and baseball smarts. Before formally joining the Senator organization in 1942, he had honed his craft working in the minors as both a manager and front office executive, and by the early 1950s was helping his aging uncle run the team. During his long apprenticeship Griffith had learned the baseball business but could never generalize beyond the lessons of the time and place in which he learned them. Once the environment changed, Griffith was lost. He also remained surprisingly unpolished, which caused further difficulties in the 1970s and 1980s as he was forced to deal with increasingly sophisticated fellow owners, players, agents, and press.
     
    By the late 1950s Washington was finishing last in American League attendance every year, usually by quite a distance. When Minnesota's Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul came calling to entice a move, Griffith was more than ready to listen, and the Senators moved to Minnesota for the 1961 season, causing the AL to put a new expansion team in Washington.
     
    The Twins had jumped to fifth in 1960 after three consecutive last place finishes, and the franchise Griffith brought to Minnesota was laden with talent. Many of the players had been signed as amateurs: Harmon Killebrew as a bonus baby (1954), Bob Allison (1955), Jimmie Hall, Jim Kaat (1957), and Rich Rollins (1960). The Senators organization was also at the forefront of signing Latin American--particularly Cuban-- players, a talent source that was especially attractive to the Griffiths because it was inexpensive. Legendary scout Joe Cambria helped deliver several extremely talented Cuban ballplayers to the franchise, including Camilo Pascual, Pedro Ramos, Zoilo Versalles, and Tony Oliva.
     
    Just before the start of the 1960 season, Griffith made a great trade with Bill Veeck and the White Sox. He dealt 32-year-old Roy Sievers for two young players, Earl Battey and Don Mincher, plus $150,000. Over the next five years, as the youngsters matured Griffith shrewdly reinforced his team. He traded for key pitchers Jim Perry and Jim “Mudcat” Grant (forking over about $25,000 in the latter deal) and purchased two veteran relievers, Al Worthington and Johnny Klippstein. Griffith wouldn’t spend beyond his relatively meager means to build a winner, but he wasn’t looking to pull money out of the franchise—he wanted to win and would do everything he could within his financial wherewithal.
     
    In 1965 the Twins won 102 games and the American League pennant. After losing a seven-game World Series to the Dodgers, the young and talented Twins appeared poised for many years of pennant contention. To Griffith’s credit, he had also assembled one of baseball’s more racially mixed teams. Many of the team’s stars were African-Americans or dark-skinned Cubans.
     
    Nevertheless, the Twins failed to capture a winnable American League over the next three years, principally because of a dramatic and unexpected drop-off of some of the team’s top position players. Griffith did his best to compensate, promoting Rod Carew in 1967 and trading for Dean Chance. The Twins won the new AL West in 1969 under manager Billy Martin, but lost to the Orioles in the ALCS. Griffith fired the mercurial Martin, and helped by a 19-year-old Bert Blyleven, the Twins won the division title again the next year.
     
    As the core of the team aged, however, Griffith could not replace his stars. And while he smartly traded for Larry Hisle in 1972 and stole Lyman Bostock as a late round amateur draft pick that same year, Griffith’s scouting and player development machine was only slowly recovering from the death of Haynes in 1967 and Sherry Robertson in 1970.
     
    The team played roughly .500 ball over the five years from 1971 through 1975, but attendance fell off significantly—from third in the league in 1971 to last by 1974--and Griffith lost around $2 million. When free agency came in 1976, Griffith was ill prepared to meet it, both financially and because he had a league leading 22 unsigned players.
     
    In the first few years of free agency the Twins lost Bill Campbell, Eric Solderholm, Larry Hisle, Lyman Bostock, and Tom Burgmeier. Griffith was also forced to trade Blyleven and Carew before they became free agents, though he engineered a nice return for both (including $250,000 in the Blyleven deal). Griffith slashed his payroll to the league’s basement, so when the team flirted at the edges of contention in 1976 and 1977 Griffith could claim a profit. Nonetheless, Griffith had little chance of competing without outside resources, a more enlightened approach to additional revenue sources, or a rebound in attendance.
     
    The opening of the Metrodome in 1982 did little to help. The Twins again finished last at the gate and bottomed out on the field with a record of 60-102. After continued financial struggles and flirting with moving the franchise, Griffith finally gave up and sold the team in 1984. He left behind the nucleus of the 1987 world championship squad, including Kirby Puckett, Kent Hrbek, Frank Viola, Tom Brunansky, Gary Gaetti, and Greg Gagne.
     
    In September 1978 Griffith’s legacy was marred by his appearance at the Lions Club in Waseca, Minnesota. In what he thought were off the record comments, Griffith disparaged nearly everyone, but most incendiary were his racist comments regarding the reasons for moving the franchise to Minnesota. Griffith may have put together an integrated team, but he was also the product of a franchise and era that for many years had segregated seating in Washington’s Griffith Stadium and was the last team to desegregate its spring training accommodations in Florida.
     
    In his first 15-years at the helm Griffith masterminded the turnaround of one of baseball’s most hapless franchises and oversaw one the American League’s better teams of the 1960s. When Minnesota initially proved to be the financial bonanza he had hoped for, Griffith spent the additional revenues building a pennant winner. He purchased players, included money in trades, and paid top salaries to his stars. But as the economics of the game changed, Griffith had little to fall back on except his baseball intelligence, which left him and the Twins constantly struggling on the field and at the gate.
     
    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.
  4. Daniel R Levitt
    This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.
     
    After the 1996 season Florida Marlins owner Wayne Huizinga—angling for a new publicly financed stadium–asked general manager Dave Dombrowski what it would take to produce a winner the following season. Dombrowski didn’t prevaricate. He told his boss that he would deliver if allowed to take the payroll from around $31 million (in the lower third of the league) to roughly $44.5 million (near the top). Huizinga told him to go for it, and Dombrowski went to work, pulling the levers masterfully. In the end he overspent his projection by a couple of million but brought South Florida a World Series champion in only their fifth season of major league baseball. Once in a while you really can deliver on demand.
     
    When he first took over the Expos in mid-1988, the 31-year-old Dombrowski was the youngest GM in baseball. Three years later he moved on to Florida where he assembled the World Series champion before salvaging a respectable return when forced to dismantle it. Finally, in Detroit, his third and current GM job, he rebuilt a struggling franchise, delivering two pennants and a recent string of division titles. Overall, Dombrowski’s won-loss record as a GM is less than stellar because he spent much of his time building up from the bottom. But at his two stops of any length, Dombrowski turned hapless franchises into winners with staying power—though only in Detroit was he allowed to execute on his longer term plans.
     
    When Dombrowski told his eighth grade teacher as part of a student survey that he wanted to be a big league GM, she told him, “I can’t put that down. Nobody wants to do that.” But Dombrowski was persistent. His college thesis at Western Michigan was titled “The General Manager: The Man in the Middle.” After graduation, White Sox GM Roland Hemond appreciated Dombrowski’s passion and brains and gave him a job. A decade later he was in charge of the Expos.
     
    Immediately after taking over in July 1988 Dombrowski pulled the trigger on a couple of trades, showing that he would be aggressive despite, or possibly because of, his youth. The next year Charles Bronfman, the original Expos owner, was thinking of selling, but wanted one more crack at a championship. Accordingly, with the team in contention at mid-season, Dombrowski made a couple deals for veteran pitchers, one of which turned out regrettably when he included a young Randy Johnson in a deal for ace pitcher Mark Langston. The Expos finished 81- 81 for the third consecutive year and many of their best players, such as Langston, Hubie Brooks, Pascual Perez, and Bryn Smith, left as free agents. They also failed to sign their first round draft pick, catcher Charles Johnson.
     
    Bolstered by three rookies in 1990—Marquis Grissom, Larry Walker, and Delino DeShields—Montreal overcame its free agent losses and jumped to 85 wins. Rule 5 pickup Bill Sampen led the team in victories; free agent pick up Oil Can Boyd started 31 games with a 2.93 ERA; and Dombrowski acquired Moises Alou in a midseason trade. For his efforts Dombrowski was named UPI baseball executive of the year. Unfortunately, the team dropped back to 71 wins in 1991, despite a similar lineup (though Dombrowski had swapped Tim Raines—past his dominant prime–for Ivan Calderon and Barry Jones before the season).
     
    As the 1991 season dragged on, Dombrowski grew more frustrated with his financial constraints. In September he joined the expansion Florida Marlins to build an organization and team for the inaugural 1993 season. The Expos organization he left behind contained many of the players that would contribute on the 1994 squad that would have the best record in baseball. Drafted and signed amateurs during his three plus years at the helm included Rondell White, Ugueth Urbina, Chris Haney, Cliff Floyd, Mark Grudzielanek, Matt Stairs, and Kirk Rueter.
     
    In Florida, Dombrowski set about building the club’s system, bringing in a bevy of veteran scouts from Montreal and elsewhere. With his first pick in the 1992 amateur draft Dombrowski again nabbed Charles Johnson, whom he drafted and lost in Montreal. At the expansion draft Dombrowski picked up a number of useful veterans to either play or trade: Brian Harvey, Trevor Hoffman, Carl Everett, Jeff Conine, Greg Hibbard, and Danny Jackson. Dombrowski also made a huge trade that first season, landing 24-year-old Gary Sheffield and also dealt for future closer Rob Nen.
     
    By 1995 Dombrowski realized that the team’s pitching was not as far along as its hitting, so in December he signed two quality undervalued hurlers: Kevin Brown and Al Leiter. For 1996, he also introduced 19-year-old Columbian signee Edgar Renteria. Their fourth season was the Marlins most successful in team history (every year they had won more games than the year before). But Huizenga wanted to accelerate the process.
     
    To put the Marlins over the top, Dombrowski bolstered his squad with three of the top free agents on the market, Alex Fernandez, Bobby Bonilla, and Moises Alou, and several key role players. He also hired manager Jim Leyland, who had recently resigned from the Pirates. The team qualified for the postseason as the NL wildcard and went on to win the World Series.
     
    But Huizenga did not get the stadium he wanted, claimed to be losing money, and wanted out of baseball. He gave Dombrowski the opposite directive of the one he had given twelve months earlier: drastically reduce payroll to make the team more saleable. If the rise of the Marlins was steady and unrelenting, the fall was startlingly swift. By Thanksgiving, Dombrowski had traded Alou, Nen, Conine, and Devon White. By New Year’s Day, Brown, Dennis Cook, and Kurt Abbott were also ex-Marlins. The 1998 team, the defending World Champions, finished 54-108, one of the worst records of the expansion era.
     
    After the team’s sale, Dombrowski began to rebuild the team’s talent level under new owner John Henry, though the team maintained one of baseball’s lowest payrolls. At the conclusion of the 2001 season, with the team’s future in doubt, Dombrowski moved on to the Detroit Tigers as team president. He left behind a nucleus that would become (or used as trade chips to build) the 2003 world championship club.
     
    In 2001 the Tigers had finished below .500 for the eighth consecutive year, and owner Mike Ilitch wanted a strong hand in charge. In April 2002 Dombrowski assumed the GM mantle as well. He quickly realized that his rebuilding task was even more daunting than it appeared on the surface. The Tigers were burdened with a number of bad contracts with injured or non-productive players. At an ill-advised “private” venting in front of some season ticket holders, Dombrowski named Craig Paquette, Dean Palmer, Damion Easley, Matt Anderson, Danny Patterson, Bobby Higginson, and Steve Sparks. Basically untradeable, these seven players, under contract for roughly $40 million, accounted for a huge portion of the payroll. The 2002 team finished 55 – 106, with little payroll flexibility. Dombrowski had his work cut out for him.
     
    The next season was even worse. The 2003 Tigers started 3-25 en route to 119 losses, one shy of the 1962 Mets all-time record. Once again, however, Dombrowski was slowly rebuilding his team at a steady pace, using many sources. And as in his early days in Florida, his owner would pay up for scouts and front office executives. Dombrowski also brought in Jim Leyland, his World Series manager in Florida, after the 2005 season. His rebuilding culminated in the 2006 pennant.
     
    Nearly all the key 2006 players were acquired under Dombrowski’s reign. Fireballing hurlers John Verlander and Joel Zumaya and center fielder Curtis Granderson came from the draft; infielders Placido Polanco and Carlos Guillen were trade acquisitions; Ivan Rodriguez was signed as free agent in February 2004, as much to make a statement as for his abilities, and Magglio Ordonez was signed a year later, overpriced but useful nonetheless; Todd Jones was signed as a free agent for 2005, and Kenny Rogers for 2006; Chris Shelton was a Rule 5 draftee; and Nate Robertson and Jeremy Bonderman were both acquired as youngsters early in Dombrowski’s tenure as part of veteran for prospects deals.
     
    When several players suffered injuries in 2007 the team fell back, and Dombrowski realized he needed to again retool his squad. In December he made a huge trade, sending top prospects to Florida for Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis. The latter was coming off of a Cy Young runner up season, but was never healthy or effective in Detroit. Cabrera, however, became one of the best players in the game. Dombrowski’s trade record for the next few years was uncanny—he always seemed to know when to trade prospects for veterans or vice-versa. Moreover, he once again needed to maneuver around large contracts with players who no longer justified them, such as Willis and Ordonez.
     
    In late 2009 in a three-way swap he surrendered Curtis Granderson, but received Austin Jackson and Max Scherzer. Going back the other way, at mid-season in 2010 and 2011 he landed first Jhonny Peralta and then Doug Fister for prospects. In another great trade at mid-season in 2012 he landed Omar Infante and Anibal Sanchez for several more farm hands. Enough of the prospects Dombrowski didn’t trade, such as Alex Avila and Rick Porcello, developed into quality major leaguers, injecting some youth into the team.
     
    Dombrowski also showed a knack for finding undervalued free agents and signing them for reasonable contracts, including Jose Valverde (before 2011), Victor Martinez (2011), Brad Penny (2011), and Torii Hunter (2013). After appearing to overpay for Prince Fielder, Dombrowski swapped him for Ian Kinsler to regain some payroll flexibility.
     
    Dombrowski’s astute roster manipulation led to four consecutive division titles and one pennant from 2011 to 2014. Several recent more suspect trades, free agent losses, and an apparently thin farm system give some pause as to how much longer the string can continue. But Dombrowski has demonstrated an uncanny knack for both rebuilding teams and keeping them competitive. With Dombrowski in charge Detroit should remain a relevant and competitive franchise.
     
    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.
  5. Daniel R Levitt
    This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.
     
    [This one is from Mark]
     
    Michael Lewis’s 2003 book Moneyball depicted Billy Beane as the leading figure in the spread of analytics (more broadly: the use of data and evidence) in baseball management. Twelve years later all front offices combine analytics and scouting, and the dwindling number of people who decry this revolution have tended to blame Beane and like-minded GMs, while those who applaud it have treated Beane like their heroic surrogate. His ranking here would indicate that we believe the introduction of analytics has advanced front office decision making, which we do, but we also believe his impressive record fully justifies his standing.
     
    A former first round draft pick of the Mets, Beane spent parts of six seasons in the big leagues without earning regular playing time. In 1990 Beane finally gave up and took a job as an advanced scout with the A’s. Beane spent the next seven years working with Sandy Alderson in Oakland, learning to view the game the way his boss did — using sabermetric principals to find undervalued players. After the 1997 season Alderson resigned, and Beane took over. The A’s had been going through a rough patch — new ownership had ordered Alderson to slash expenses, and the team has been on the low end of baseball payrolls ever since. After a great five-year run, the club had been under .500 since 1992.
     
    The rise of the A’s is the early Beane years is due primarily to their great use of the amateur draft throughout the 1990s, when they selected Jason Giambi, Eric Chavez, Mark Mulder, Tim Hudson, and Barry Zito, and the signing of Miguel Tejada from the Dominican Republic in 1993. When Beane took over the big league team was struggling but this help was just around the corner.
     
    But Beane also made several low-cost deals that had short term dividends, dramatically enhancing this core. Among these acquisitions were Gil Heredia (28 wins in two years), Kenny Rogers (16-8 in 1998), John Jaha (35 home runs in 1999), Jason Isringhausen, Randy Valarde, Terrence Long, Kevin Appier (15-11 in 2000), Cory Lidle, Johnny Damon, Jermaine Dye, Scott Hatteberg, David Justice, and Billy Koch. Most of these players were bought cheaply and moved on if they attained free agency or got expensive. Beane was one of the first to believe that closers were fungible assets, and he was quick to move players like Isringhausen and Koch if he found a buyer who overvalued their save totals.
     
    Armed with his emerging core and his shrewd short-term patches, the A’s won 91 games and the division in 2000, and followed that up with 102, 103, 96, and 91 the next four years. They made the playoffs four times and lost in the division series (in the full five games) all four seasons.
     
    In 2003, when the A’s were coming off their two best seasons, Moneyball was released, and a debate ensued as to why the A’s were successful. The principal premise of the book– that Beane was winning with low payrolls at last partly by finding market inefficiencies, players undervalued by other clubs–was undeniable. In 2001 the A’s had the second lowest payroll in baseball and won 102 games, and did basically did the same thing the next year. Yes, Beane was fortunate to have inherited a young core, but Brian Cashman inherited a great core in the same year (1998), had more than three times the payroll, and won fewer games in these two seasons. Beane was clearly doing something better than everyone else.
     
    The controversy surrounding the book arose because Lewis depicted Beane as being at war with the scouts, who were often mocked as out-of-touch and unable to recognize good players who did not have obvious “tools”. As Lewis wrote: “[beane] flirted with the idea of firing all the scouts and just drafting kids straight from [assistant GM Paul DePodesta’s] laptop.” Many baseball people were appalled — particularly because it should have been obvious that Beane’s A’s were a reflection of great scouting. His long-time scouting director Grady Fuson, who deserves much of the credit for their drafts and signings, left the club in 2001 to take a promotion with the Texas Rangers before the book came out depicting him and his scouts as dinosaurs. (In the movie Beane is shown firing a clueless Fuson, which did not happen.) Pat Gillick, whose Mariners competed with Beane in these years, also took offense at the book’s depiction of scouts, suggesting that Beane was going to have a tough time competing unless he paid his young players when they became free agents.
     
    And in fact this is what happened. In the ensuing years the A’s lost all of their great players one by one and gradually slipped out of contention, with only one playoff appearance the rest of the 2000s and no more than eighty-one wins between 2007 and 2011. Much of the fall off can be attributed to the lack of success from Oakland’s college-centric drafting philosophy. From 2002 (the year after Fuson left) to 2009 the A’s drafts produced only three players who have turned in more than 10 career WAR, and no stars. Moreover, due to their small market size and intelligent use of expiring contracts to land compensatory picks, Beane had amassed a total of twenty-one first round picks (including supplemental choices).
     
    In 2010 Fuson returned to the A’s as a special consultant to Beane, surprising many observers, at least partly because he was persuaded that Beane had begun to blend analytics and scouting as many successful teams had been doing.
     
    In 2012 the Athletics returned to the top with back-to-back division titles and posted their best two records since the year Moneyball came out. It was a team filled with players Beane had acquired cheaply in trades (Josh Reddick, John Donaldson, Jarrod Parker) or in free agent signings (Coco Crisp, Brandon Moss, Bartolo Colon), a testament to the A’s ability to discover under-appreciated talent. Beane occasionally spent money, like on Yoenis Cespedes and Scott Kazmir, but their 2014 payroll was twenty-fifth of thirty teams in baseball.
     
    Unlike the team from the early 2000s, the recent A’s have not have the benefit of a great core of developed talent. But the drafting of AJ Griffin and Sonny Gray early in the 2010s suggests that the A’s are again receiving value from the draft. Overall, their recent success, including a 2014 wild card appearance, testifies to Beane, his scouting organization, and his analytical staff, all working together. Seventeen years after taking over, Beane was still playing with less money, and he was still winning.
     
    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.
  6. Daniel R Levitt
    This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.

    Sandy Alderson’s three pennants and one World Series championship, while a first-rate achievement, may not be quite enough to justify his ranking at number twelve. But Alderson’s place in history is enhanced by two considerations: he was the first modern GM to actively introduce analytics, though rudimentary by current standards, into a team’s decision making, and he was the first young executive of the modern era hired to run a major league team’s baseball operations without coming from a baseball background.
     
    After Alderson had his success in Oakland baseball front offices would never again be the same. Before Alderson, general managers had been hired after a long apprenticeship in the game (unless they were related to the owners). Alderson was different: he was Ivy League educated and an attorney. The Haas family saw Alderson’s potential and put him in charge of the teams as a 35 year old after only two years in baseball. His success changed the conventional wisdom of what was considered necessary in a general manager. Today there are many young, top-level front office executives sprinkled throughout the game with high-test degrees and little previous baseball experience.
     
    Alderson went to Dartmouth, served in Vietnam as a Marine infantry officer, and graduated from Harvard Law School. He was working at a law firm where he got to know Roy Eisenhardt, Walter Haas’s son-in-law, who became team president when the Haas family bought the Oakland Athletics in 1980. A year later Eisenhardt brought Alderson aboard as general counsel. In September 1983 the team gave Alderson the general manager’s duties.
     
    At the time, after the penurious final years of Charles Finley’s ownership and the manic administration of Billy Martin (who served as both manager and GM), the A’s organization was in disarray. Alderson quickly set about rebuilding the scouting and minor league organizations. For personnel decisions he not only relied on experienced baseball men such as Bill Rigney, but also canvassed the growing body of objective baseball research, predominantly that by Bill James, that was generally scorned within the game. As an outsider Alderson was not burdened with baseball’s traditional biases and used James’s ideas to his advantage, particularly by understanding the importance of on-base percentage and power.
     
    When manager Tony LaRussa was fired by the White Sox in mid-1986, Alderson snapped him up. LaRussa was, and remains, decidedly old school. Alderson, though, was not afraid to have strong subordinates, and would often “defer to success” when his alternative ideas may not have meshed with LaRussa’s.
     
    In the meantime, Alderson slowly assembled a true powerhouse. From the farm system the A’s introduced Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, and Walt Weiss, who won consecutive Rookie of the Year Awards from 1986 through 1988, plus Terry Steinbach. Astute trades brought in Dennis Eckersley, Bob Welch, and Storm Davis. Dave Stewart and Dave Henderson were both shrewd free agent signings. After a .500 finish in 1987, the A’s won 104 games and breezed through the ALCS before being stunned in the World Series by the Dodgers. The fine tuning continued throughout 1989, as Alderson added free agent hurler Mike Moore and dealt for speedy on-base machine Rickey Henderson (whom he had traded five years earlier) at the trading deadline. This time the A’s rolled through the postseason, sweeping the earthquake interrupted World Series over the Giants. The team dominated the AL again in 1990 before being upset in the World Series.
     
    For a little while it looked like it might go on forever. The A’s drew close to three million fans in 1990, second in the league, and in 1991 they had the AL’s highest payroll. Alderson used the team’s prosperity to lock up Canseco for a record contract and drafted phenom pitcher Todd Van Poppel when other clubs shied away from his record contact demands. Alderson had also masterfully acquired a number of extra early draft picks that he used on high-profile hurlers. In 1992 the team won 96 games before losing in the ALCS.
     
    But then it all came to a crashing halt. In 1993 the team fell to last place as the star pitchers aged with little to fill in behind them; McGwire was injured much of the year; and Ruben Sierra, the centerpiece of a Canseco trade in 1992, failed to live up to expectations, as did the ballyhooed pitching prospects. As the team bottomed out in the standings, attendance plummeted as well. Maintaining a multi-year run is surprisingly difficult–injuries, bad drafts, and just bad luck can quickly derail an apparent juggernaut. Nevertheless, as sudden as its end might have been, the A’s 1988 to 1992 run remains highly impressive.
     
    Walter Haas died in 1995, and the new owners were less willing to aggressively spend on players, necessitating Alderson trading McGwire in 1997. He finally moved on after the 1998 season, joining the commissioner’s office, leaving behind Billy Beane to run the front office and a decent nucleus of youngsters, such as Jason Giambi, Ben Grieve, Scott Speizio, Eric Chavez, Tim Hudson, and Mark Mulder.
     
    After six years as the number three man at MLB, battling with umpires, overseeing the administration of major league rules and draft-pick bonuses, and exploring international issues, Alderson joined San Diego as team president in 2005. Owner John Moores wanted an improved approach in the Dominican Republic and the draft, the latter flaw highlighted by the disastrous selection of Matt Bush as the first overall pick in 2004.
     
    Alderson did not clean house, leaving general manager Kevin Towers and his team in place. But he was not satisfied. He implemented a more systematic approach to management and bolstered the front office by bringing in Grady Fuson, a colleague from his Oakland days, and Paul DePodesta, the analytically inclined, recently deposed GM of the Dodgers, who reported directly to Alderson. Under Alderson the team began to operate more analytically, and in first draft under his regime the team selected college players through the first 14 rounds, a notorious Moneyball strategy. For the first few years things went well. The team won a division title in 2005 (albeit at 82-80) and then won at least 88 games the next two seasons. The team fell back to only 63 wins in 2008 amid reports of dysfunction in the front office. In early 2009 Moores sold a controlling interest in the Padres to Jeff Moorad, who let Alderson go.
     
    After spending some time back in the commissioner’s office, in October 2010 the Mets gave Alderson another shot running a team, but once again he would be operating with limited resources. The team’s owners, battered financially in the Bernie Madoff scandal, hired Alderson to build a winner on a reduced budget. The club he inherited was coming off two sub-.500 seasons despite a $134 million payroll, the fifth highest in baseball. By 2013, the payroll was cut in half to $69 million, 25th highest. As of 2014 the club had inched up to 79 wins, and the future seemed to include several good young pitchers and position players. Still, Alderson is yet to get the Mets back to .500. Several years into his tenure Alderson described his mission: “One is stockpiling talent. The second is clearing payroll, and the third has been to be as competitive as possible—without compromising one and two.”
     
    So far the jury is out on number one; he succeeded on number two; and has fallen short on number three. But Alderson recently had his contract extended through 2017 and will go on trying. “The beauty of this game is that there are no absolutes,” Alderson once said. “It’s all nuances and anticipation, not like football which is all force and vectors. The one thing I’ve learned is that you get in trouble if you don’t have a healthy respect for the subtleties, for the things you can’t control.” When he had full control and a competitive budget Alderson built a great team in Oakland. Both the fact of his successes and the nature of his methods forever changed baseball front offices.

    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.
  7. Daniel R Levitt
    This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.
     
    [This one is from Mark]
     
    Were we to give Al Campanis credit for all his accomplishments in baseball operations, he would rank much higher than this, perhaps in the top five. Among other things, he was a legendary scout, a brilliant scouting director, and one of baseball’s most influential instructors. He did this over a two decade career with the Dodgers before assuming control of the baseball team in late 1968. For this exercise, we will ignore all of that and consider his years as GM (1969-1987) when he won four NL pennants, and the 1981 World Series.
     
    Campanis had a brief major league career (seven games for the 1943 Dodgers) and a minor league career most interesting for his role in helping Jackie Robinson break in with the 1946 Montreal Royals. In fact, Dodger GM Branch Rickey requested the Campanis go to Montreal to work with Robinson on infield play (the two men formed the double play combination). Campanis spent a few more years playing and managing in the system before beginning work full time for the major league club.
     
    Once Walter O’Malley took control of the Dodgers in late 1950 he put Buzzy Bavasi in charge of the big league team and Fresco Thompson in charge of the farm system. For the next eighteen years the two men remained at their posts, and Campanis worked with them doing seemingly everything that needed to be done. Starting as a scout, he created the first tryout camps in Puerto Rico and Cuba (he was fluent in Spanish, along with French, Greek and Italian), opening a pipeline to Latin America for the Dodgers (which other teams followed); signed Roberto Clemente and Sandy Koufax, among many others; and devised a 60-to-80 scouting scale (which was later expanded to 20-to-80).
     
    He ran “Dodgertown” at Vero Beach, a first-of-its-kind camp the Dodgers used for their minor leaguers and for spring training. He turned his course material (derived from the teaching of Rickey) into the book The Dodgers’ Way to Play Baseball, an influential instructional used across the country and world for 25 years. The Dodgers earned a reputation as the best organization in baseball beginning in the 1950s, and Campanis was the living embodiment of the “Dodger Way,” a term he coined.
     
    He was named scouting director (a role he was already performing) once the team moved to LA in 1958, and he developed a system-wide manual for scouts that was far head of its time. The Dodgers were leaders in amateur talent acquisition before the draft (leading to four pennants and two Series victories between 1959 and 1966), and masters once the draft was in place. In 1968 Bavasi left to become president of the expansion Padres and O’Malley promoted Thompson to GM. A few months later, Thompson died, and O’Malley turned to Campanis.
     
    After a long run of success, the Dodgers dropped well below .500 in both 1967 and 1968, having lost Sandy Koufax, Maury Wills, and many of the key players from their mid-1960s run. The team rebounded back over .500 in 1969 and stayed there for a decade, a run of success with two primary causes.
     
    First, with the onset of amateur draft in 1965, Campanis continued the Dodgers’ great run of amateur talent acquisition, overseeing several great drafts including the greatest draft year in history in 1968, when the Dodgers selected 234 future bWAR. After selecting Bill Russell, Charlie Hough and Steve Yeager in the previous two years, in 1968 Campanis landed Ron Cey, Dave Lopes, Steve Garvey, Doyle Alexander, Joe Ferguson, Geoff Zahn, and Bill Buckner. Since the average draft traditionally yields about 28-30 WAR, the Dodgers got nearly eight years’ worth of value in one year.
     
    Second, from 1970 through 1976 Campanis made a remarkable series of trades, one excellent deal after another without really making a bad one.
     
    In October 1970 he traded two role players for Dick Allen. After one great season, Campanis turned around and traded Allen for Tommy John, who had several excellent seasons in Los Angeles. Campanis traded for Al Downing (getting a 20-win season in return). He acquired Frank Robinson (surrendering Doyle Alexander, who had a fine career ahead of him), and (as he did with Allen) traded Robinson a year later in a package that included Andy Messersmith, who had three great seasons pitching in Dodger blue.
     
    In December 1973 Campanis made two great trades. First he dealt longtime centerfielder Willie Davis to the Expos for relief pitcher Mike Marshall. The next day he traded pitcher Claude Osteen for centerfielder Jimmie Wynn. In 1974 Marshall pitched a record 102 games and 210 innings in relief, winning the NL Cy Young Award, while Wynn hit 32 home runs with a 151 OPS+. The 1974 Dodgers broke through with 102 wins and the NL pennant. After getting one more All-Star season out of Wynn, Campanis flipped him to Atlanta for Dusty Baker — Wynn was finished, while Baker gave the Dodgers eight years of solid play.
     
    Campanis also acquired Burt Hooton for nothing in 1975, Pedro Guerrero in a minor league trade the same year, and then Reggie Smith in 1976. All three gave multiple years of star play for Los Angeles.
     
    Between 1970 and 1976, the Dodgers finished second six times (five times to the Reds) and won the pennant in the other season. The Big Red Machine was a tough mountain to get over, but the Dodgers finally did so by winning back-to-back pennants in 1977 and 1978. Those star-filled clubs were primarily led by Campanis draft choices (Garvey, Lopes, Russell, Cey) and trade acquisitions (Baker, Smith, Hooton, John). They were an excellent team, though they lost both World Series to the Yankees.
     
    The Dodgers finally won the Series in 1981, with a team heavily fortified with the additions of Guerrero, Jerry Reuss (acquired in a 1979 deal) and Fernando Valenzuela, signed in 1979. The Dodgers system was still churning out prospects, winning the Rookie of the Year award four years in a row beginning in 1979. After a near miss in 1982, the Dodgers won the division in both 1983 and 1985, losing the NLCS both times.
     
    In early 1987, Campanis appeared on the ABC news program Nightline, to mark the 40th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s debut in the major leagues. Unfortunately, Campanis made some incendiary comments about the qualifications of African-Americans to serve in baseball management. Though he apologized and many friends came to his defense, his quotes were disturbing enough that the Dodgers let him go a day or two later. His career in baseball was over. It was a sad way to end another wise great career in the game. (The year after he left, his team won the World Series again, their last at this writing.)
     
    In 18 seasons, Campanis’s Dodgers won six division titles and finished second in eight seasons, three times by a single game. After years of working in the organization to help develop major league players, Al Campanis did a fine job once given control of the big league team.
     
    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.
  8. Daniel R Levitt
    This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.

    In his 18-year tenure at the Giants helm—the longest of any active general manager—Brian Sabean has witnessed the evolution of the very nature of team building. Sabean has the mindset of a scout but eventually became open to new perspectives, even when they seemed to conflict with a scout’s approach. As analytics began to make inroads in the game’s front offices, Sabean’s methods and practices adapted to meet these new challenges. Sabean won his first pennant by building around an aging but still potent Barry Bonds and then three World Series championships by restructuring his team around a young core with undervalued pickups. As much as any modern GM, he represents a successful bridge between the old and new approaches.
     
    After several years coaching college baseball, Sabean jumped to the professional ranks, joining the Yankees as a scout. From 1986 to 1992 Sabean played a key role in the Yankees scouting and drafting, a period in which the team landed many of the players that would make up the great Yankees squads of the late 1990s. He also observed first hand well-respected general managers Bob Quinn and Gene Michael in action. When Quinn got the general manager’s job in San Francisco in 1993 he hired Sabean as a key assistant. In 1996, after two last place finishes, principal owner Peter Magowan promoted Sabean to general manager.
     
    Other smart, aggressive front office personnel and scouts had also recently joined the Giants, and Sabean judiciously delegated authority, creating a team of trusted lieutenants. Assistant GM Ned Colletti remained with Sabean for nine years before starting his own successful run as general manager of the Dodgers. Dick Tidrow and Bobby Evans are still with Sabean 19 years later.
     
    Despite inheriting a last place club, Sabean had one huge advantage to work with: Barry Bonds, still in the prime of his career. Sabean revamped the team around Bonds using both free agent signings and trades, most notably swapping popular third baseman Matt Williams for infielders Jeff Kent and Jose Vizcaino. A couple of young, previously lightly utilized starting pitchers (Shawn Estes and Kirk Rueter) were given a chance, both had good years, and the Giants won the division.
     
    The farm system Sabean inherited remained relatively fallow, and over the next several seasons he filled in around Bonds and Kent, who had developed into a great hitter in his own right, with short-term veteran solutions. Overall, these mid-market players (J.T. Snow, Ellis Burks, and others) delivered impressive returns, and San Francisco remained consistently competitive. The Giants opened their new privately financed stadium in 2000 and attendance boomed, freeing up additional revenues for player signings.
     
    In 2002 the team came within one game of winning the World Series before falling to the Anaheim Angels. As a consequence of the Giants fill-in-with-veterans strategy, they were an exceedingly old team. For the next several years, Sabean continued to use veteran free agents to plug holes and try to win before his stars could no longer contribute. Bonds’s tremendous late-career peak essentially delayed Sabean from rebuilding. In 2003 the team won 100 games and in 2004 they won 91, capping an outstanding eight year run in which they averaged just over 92 wins a season.
     
    Inevitably, however, a win-now strategy with a veteran team can only work for only a limited time and eventually comes with a cost. Without the necessary influx of young players, the Giants lost at least 85 eighty-five games from 2005 to 2008. On top of the disappointing seasons on the field, Sabean and Magowan did not come off well in the Mitchell Report, devoted to the prevalence of steroids in baseball. Sabean also made some baseball moves that backfired: signing free-agent pitcher Barry Zito to a record-breaking contract; overspending on free agent Aaron Rowand; and surrendering a couple of future all-stars to the Twins for A.J. Pierzynski.
     
    Sabean had nearly run out of chances. Bill Neukom, named managing general partner in 2008, spent the 2009 season evaluating the organization–another sub-.500 season and Neukom might very well have brought in a new GM. Fortunately, Sabean and his staff had been effective in rebuilding the farm system, the team rebounded to 88 wins, and Sabean received a contract extension. And over the next five years the Giants won the World Series three times.
     
    Much of the turnaround could be attributed to a stellar collection of pitching prospects from the Giants farm system: Matt Cain, Jonathan Sanchez, Tim Lincecum, and Madison Bumgarner. But there is more to great pitching than simply drafting youngsters with live arms. Sabean put an organization-wide emphasis on the health of his players, particularly pitchers, and it paid off. In 2010 their top-four starting pitchers all started at least 33 games, and in 2012 the team’s top five starting pitchers started 160 of the 162 games. (Matt Cain’s 2014 injury shows that no emphasis is fool-proof.)
     
    Sabean and manager Bruce Bochy (hired in 2007) were also willing to integrate young positon players into the team. Venezuelan signee Pablo Sandoval broke out in 2009 as a 22-year-old and anchored third base for the next six years. Catcher Buster Posey spent just over a year in the minor leagues before he became the club’s starter and franchise player and captured the 2010 Rookie of the Year award. The Giants lacked the top prospects to rebuild the rest of the offense, however, and Sabean once again needed to rely on his staff’s savvy to fill holes cheaply and efficiently without surrendering any key contributors.
     
    Before the 2009 season, Sabean signed Juan Uribe and Triple-A outfielder Andres Torres, and in mid-summer he traded for Freddy Sanchez. For 2010 he signed Aubrey Huff, Pat Burrell (after his release in May), and claimed Cody Ross off waivers in August. All these undervalued players contributed to the 2010 World Series victory. But because most were temporary solutions, Sabean had to repeat this strategy, and for the team’s next championship he landed Melky Cabrera, Hunter Pence, and Marco Scutaro. Similarly, he always seemed to have pieced together an effective bullpen.
     
    To find this underappreciated talent during the Giants’ stretch of World Series victories, Sabean was both receptive and innovative when it came to the evolving tools for player evaluation. For a man who spent his formative front office years in scouting and player development, and would naturally have resented the way Michael Lewis portrayed scouts in Moneyball, statistical analysis eventually assumed a meaningful part of the evaluation process. At least as important, Sabean recognized that the Giants needed to take advantage of their location in the heart of the technology industry and were at the forefront marrying video downloads with high-powered computing. As the USA Today put it, the Giants “applied a mixture of tech and baseball savvy that helped the baseball and business side. . . . You might call it Techball.”
     
    Over Sabean’s tenure the Giants have won four pennants and three World Series, an enviable record. The team has produced some high-end talent, Sabean has proved adept at finding key contributors at low cost, and he and Bochy have kept the team winning and free of drama.

    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.
  9. Daniel R Levitt
    This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.
     
    After more than 15 years paying his dues in baseball operations at both the major and minor league levels, Walt Jocketty wanted to become a general manager. He came close four times before finally landing the job in October 1994 with the Cardinals, a club that hadn’t made the postseason since 1987. In his thirteen years in St. Louis Jocketty’s Cardinals made it to the NLCS six times, winning two pennants and one World Series championship. After moving on to Cincinnati in 2008, Jocketty brought the Reds multiple postseason appearances, their first since 1995.
     
    With a player’s strike in full swing when he was first hired, Jocketty could not immediately begin reconstructing his team, but he was used to operating under hardship. With the penurious A’s in 1980, during Charlie Finley’s final year of ownership, Jocketty ran the amateur draft without scouts–he relied on the major league scouting bureau for player information, and on his wife and a visiting clubhouse man for help keeping him on track. Despite the bizarre working conditions in Oakland, Jocketty long considered manager Billy Martin a mentor.
     
    Jocketty remained ambivalent towards the influx of analytics despite spending many years in the Oakland front office with Sandy Alderson. His style combined the best of a commitment to scouting and an aggressive approach to team building. He was a master when it came to bolstering his team with a midseason trade, landing Mark McGwire (1997), Will Clark (2000), Mike Timlin (2000), Woody Williams (2001), Chuck Finley (2002), Scott Rolen (2002 and 2009), Sterling Hitchcock (2003), Larry Walker (2004), and Jeff Weaver (2006). He was not afraid to use his prospects in trade—generally receiving more value than the prospects turned out to be worth—and successfully restocked teams by acquiring mid-level free agents and trade targets on a regular basis. One of the very few GMs to make this latter strategy work, Jocketty possessed a knack for sensing which players still had something left and not getting stuck with bad contracts in trades.
     
    When St. Louis started slowly in 1995, Jocketty fired manager Joe Torre 47 games into the season. For 1996 he brought in Tony LaRussa, his longtime friend from their years in Oakland. In addition, he delivered to LaRussa a number of offseason acquisitions that worked out surprisingly well. Jocketty secured closer Dennis Eckersley and starter Todd Stottlemyre from his old colleagues in Oakland, and signed Andy Benes as a free agent to strengthen his pitching corps. Two free agents, Ron Gant and an aging Gary Gaetti, proved valuable additions, and starting shortstop Royce Clayton came over in a trade. The Cardinals won 88 games before eventually losing in the NLCS.
     
    Despite picking up Mark McGwire at the trade deadline in 1997, the Cardinals fell back over the next few years. But once again Jocketty struck it rich: in 1999/2000 he boasted one of the greatest offseason hauls of all time. In trades he obtained 2000 20-game winner Darryl Kile, 15-game winner Pat Hentgen, closer Dave Veres, center fielder Jim Edmonds, second baseman Fernando Vina, and shortstop Edgar Renteria. Jocketty also signed catcher Mike Matheny as a free agent. The Cardinals once again made it back to the NLCS before falling to the Mets.
     
    The Cardinals returned to the postseason in 2001 and 2002, augmented with 1999 draftee Albert Pujols and the emergence of 1995 draftee Matt Morris, but still couldn’t get past the LCS. After missing the playoffs in 2003, Jocketty again went to work. He strengthened the pitching staff by swapping J.D. Drew for Jason Marquis and Adam Wainwright, signing free agent Jeff Suppan, and enjoying the recovery of Chris Carpenter, signed as a free agent a year earlier. Free agent signee Reggie Sanders and trade acquisition Tony Womack both won starting jobs and performed capably. The team won 105 games, their most since World War II, and finally captured the pennant before being swept by the Red Sox in the World Series. For his wheeling and dealing Jocketty was named the Sporting News Executive of the Year for the second time, having also won in 2000.
     
    After winning 100 games the next year and again losing in the NLCS, the Cardinals fell to 83-78 in 2006, but it was enough to win a weak NL Central. Somewhat surprisingly, this team went on to win the World Series with the lowest winning percentage in history to win it. After falling short with some great teams, Jocketty had his world championship with one of his least accomplished ones.
     
    The team missed the postseason in 2007 for only the second time since 2000, but owner Bill DeWitt was growing concerned over the tension within the front office. A year earlier he had promoted Jeff Luhnow–hired in the aftermath of Moneyball to bring a more analytical mind set to the Cardinals and beef up the team’s international presence and amateur drafting–to run the farm system in addition to the draft. Jocketty was clearly unhappy with this internal reorganization and his loss of authority, and DeWitt decided the team should move on without him.
     
    Jocketty didn’t have to wait long for his next opportunity. Cincinnati owner Bob Castellini knew and respected Jocketty from his days as a minority investor with DeWitt in St. Louis. In January 2008 he brought in Jocketty as a special advisor and in April made him general manager. Jocketty inherited a team that had not finished above .500 since 2000, but was not without talent, including Joey Votto, Brandon Phillips, Jay Bruce, Johnny Cueto, and Bronson Arroyo. Jocketty spent most of 2008 evaluating his club, which was close to competing. Over the next couple of years Jocketty added Jonny Gomes, Ramon Hernandez, Orlando Cabrera, and Scott Rolen via trade or free agency, flame throwing Aroldis Chapman from Cuba, and Mike Leake, drafted in 2009 as major league-ready hurler. In 2010 the team won the division title for the first time since 1995 but lost in the NLDS. Jocketty won the Sporting News Executive of the Year for the third time (joining Branch Rickey and George Weiss as the only executives to have won it at least three times).
     
    Jocketty continued to fine-tune his squad, adding free agent Ryan Ludwick and trade acquisition Mat Latos (at the cost of two first round draftees) for 2012 and Shin-Soo Choo for 2013. The Reds qualified for the postseason both years. They had become overly dependent on their stars for offense, however. When Choo left as a free agent and Votto, Phillips, and Bruce suffered through injury marred seasons in 2014, the Reds fell back to 76 wins.
     
    Jocketty has always relied on his ability to identify still productive, moderately-priced, mid-career major leaguers, and he is one of the very few GMs to have successfully pulled this strategy off. It helps of course to have one’s farm system deliver an Albert Pujols, but the Reds have a farm system deep in pitching and there is no reason to think that if the high-priced Reds core returns healthy in 2015, Jocketty won’t again be able to find quality short term solutions to keep the team competitive.
     
    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.
  10. Daniel R Levitt
    This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.
     
    [This one is from Mark]
     
    Not many GMs have had a career arc like Dan Duquette. Despite undeniable success in Montreal and Boston, he spent what would ordinarily be the prime of his career (ages 43-53) unemployed, or at least not employed by a Major League team. The Orioles gave him another shot after at least one other candidate had turned them down, but it should have surprised no one when he had success right away in Baltimore.
     
    Duquette played baseball at Amherst before getting hired by fellow alum Harry Dalton as a Milwaukee scout in 1981. By 1987 he was the player personnel director for the Expos, and during his tenure the club drafted or signed Vladimir Guerrero, Javier Vazquez, Orlando Cabrera, Cliff Floyd, Marquis Grissom, Cliff Floyd and Rondell White. After the 1991 season Montreal GM Dave Dombrowski left to run the expansion Marlins, and the 33-year-old Duquette took over the Expos, a last place team filled with young talent, mainly players he had helped bring into the organization.
     
    It did not take Duquette long to make his mark. Within three years he had traded for pitchers Ken Hill, John Wetteland, and Pedro Martinez. Just a few weeks into the 1992 season he replaced embattled manager Tim Runnels with Felipe Alou, 57-years-old and languishing in the system. Alou was perfect for the young team — which now included all of the aforementioned youngsters plus Moises Alou (Felipe’s son) and Larry Walker. The team won 87 games in 1992, then 94 in 1993, just three games behind the Phillies.
     
    In January 1994 Duquette was lured away to run the Boston Red Sox. (The team Duquette left behind in Montreal would have the game’s best record in 1994 when a player strike ended the season in August.) As a Massachusetts native, Boston was Duquette’s dream job, and the club also gave him a bigger budget and a higher salary. The Red Sox had finished seventh and fifth the previous two years.
     
    As an early adopter of using advanced statistics to identify players, he was known for acquiring undervalued players and getting production from them — Troy O’Leary, Brian Daubach, Jeff Frye, Tim Wakefield. He also tended to look for offense-valued players while tolerating their sub-par defense — Jose Canseco, Will Cordero, Kevin Mitchell, Jose Offerman, Carl Everett — with mixed results. His 1995 team included a few stars he inherited (Roger Clemens, Mo Vaughn, John Valentin) and a lot of his own shrewd pickups. The Red Sox won the division by seven games.
     
    Both Clemens and Vaughn left as free agents, but more stars soon took their place. Nomar Garciaparra joined the lineup in 1997, and later that year Duquette made two of the greatest trades in team history. In July he dealt mediocre reliever Heathcliff Slocumb to the Mariners for pitcher Derek Lowe and catcher Jason Varitek. After the season he dealt two minor league pitchers for a 26-year-old Pedro Martinez. Lowe and Varitek would have long careers with occasional stardom, while Martinez and Garciappara would be among the game’s best players for the next several years.
     
    Beginning in 1998, the Red Sox finished second (always to the Yankees) for eight straight seasons. They captured the wild card in 1998 and 1999, losing the ALCS to New York in the latter season. At this point in his tenure team ownership clearly instructed Duquette to spend the money and go for the brass ring. After falling back in 2000, Duquette signed Manny Ramirez, the biggest free agent on his resume. A year later he signed Johnny Damon, giving the Red Sox (with Trot Nixon) one of the game’s best outfields.
     
    In early 2002 a group headed by John Henry purchased the Red Sox, and Duquette was fired soon after. Despite his track record, his reputation with the press and fans had soured. He was blamed for losing Clemens, whose late career resurgence was a constant reminder, and Vaughn. He hired a statistical consultant whose bizarre behavior and public comments did the analytical revolution no good. He was accused of making rapid-fire deals like a Rotisserie League GM, without regard for clubhouse harmony or stability. And his 2001 late season promotion of pitching coach Joe Kerrigan as manager proved to be a disaster for all concerned. Duquette did himself no favors with his shy demeanor, which some considered aloof or arrogant. The new owners decided on a fresh start, letting both Kerrigan and Duquette go.
     
    Duquette next endured his ten years in the wilderness. His name often surfaced when GM openings arose, but he stayed out of the big leagues, opening a sports academy in western Massachusetts and running a couple of summer collegiate teams. Finally, in November 2011 he became the GM of the Baltimore Orioles.
     
    The once-proud Orioles had endured 14 straight losing seasons at the time of Duquette’s hiring but promptly won 93 games and a wild card playoff spot in his first season. This was mostly Andy MacPhail’s team, but Duquette deserves credit for cobbling together a good low-cost pitching staff, acquiring Miguel Gonzalez, Jason Hammel, and Wei-Yin Chen before the season. In 2013 the Orioles, largely unchanged, won 85 games and finished third.
     
    The 2014 Orioles had to endure injuries to Manny Machado and Matt Wieters, and the drug suspension of Chris Davis, but Duquette and manager Buck Showalter brought the team in with 96 wins and a division title before losing the ALCS to the Royals. Key additions to this club included Nelson Cruz (a league-leading 40 home runs), Steve Pearce (an OPS+ of 160 in 93 games) and pitcher Bud Norris (15-8, 3.65). At the trading deadline Duquette picked up reliever Andrew Miller, who posted a 1.35 ERA in 23 games down the stretch. For his efforts, Duquette was named Executive of the Year, 22 years after winning the award with Montreal.
     
    As of this writing there are reports that Duquette could be headed to Toronto to become CEO. If so, this might put an end to an impressive general managerial career, with undeniable success improving three franchises over 14 years.
     
    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.
  11. Daniel R Levitt
    This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.

    The Pittsburgh Pirates have won three World Series in the past 89 years, and all three of them were substantially built by the same man. Joe L. Brown replaced a legend, but carved out a great legacy in Pittsburgh for 21 seasons.
     
    Today, hundreds of bright young men (and a few women) without any playing experience descend on baseball’s winter meetings looking for a job, many hoping to eventually become a big league general manager. Since the advent of Moneyball and the application of analytics, a front office position has become a highly sought after opportunity. It has not always been this way. Until recently, front offices were much smaller and the road to becoming a general manager was much more haphazard. Joe L. Brown may have been the first to consciously and successfully aspire to be a general manager at a young age.
     
    While a student at UCLA in the late 1930s, Brown told his dad he wanted to run a baseball team. His father, the famous comedian Joe E. Brown, tried to discourage his son, telling him there were only 19 top executive jobs in baseball: sixteen general managers, two league presidents, and one commissioner. Nevertheless, the well-connected elder Brown hooked his son up with Harry Grabiner, an executive with the White Sox, who gave Brown a position as assistant business manager for Class D club in Lubbock, Texas, about as entry level as one could get.
     
    The personable Brown slowly worked his way up the baseball ladder. After World War II he was hired by the Pirates organization to run one of their farm clubs. When Pittsburgh decided to replace Branch Rickey in late 1955 after four consecutive last place finishes, owner John Galbreath turned to the 37-year-old Brown.
     
    Despite the futility at the major league level, Rickey and his scouts left a fairly well-stocked farm system. Brown brilliantly restructured the talent on hand: keeping the key players, trading others to fill holes, and continuing to work his scouts for new ones. When the Pirates finished second in 1958, with their first winning record in 10 years, Brown was named the Executive of the Year by The Sporting News. Two years later they won the World Series. This club included several players who were in the system when Brown took over — right fielder Roberto Clemente, second baseman Bill Mazeroski, shortstop Dick Groat and hurlers Vern Law and Bob Friend — but all of them had to further develop under Brown’s reign. Moreover, he recognized these players as future stars and didn’t trade them despite several opportunities. Brown filled in around these stars by acquiring several major contributors: catcher Smoky Burgess, third baseman Don Hoak, center fielder Bill Virdon, and pitchers Harvey Haddix and Vinegar Bend Mizell.
     
    The Pirates fell all the way to sixth after their championship season with principally the same lineup and pitching rotation. Several players regressed, but a principal factor was that National League at this time was as strong as any league has ever been. Well in front of the dysfunctional American League in signing African Americans, the NL was filled with competitive teams and great ballplayers. To remain in contention Brown relied on both trades and his development staff — the latter more successfully than the former.
     
    Brown had inherited Howie Haak, one of Latin America’s most successful scouts, when he took over the club, and Pittsburgh’s farm system continued its productive run under Brown’s leadership. With the continued influx of young talent, such as Willie Stargell, Gene Alley, Bob Bailey, and Steve Blass, a great trade for Matty Alou, and an MVP season from Clemente, the 1966 team finished only three games back, and Brown felt the team was only a couple players short of breaking through. He traded Bailey for speedy infielder Maury Wills, but when the team regressed in 1967 he traded some quality prospects for veteran hurler Jim Bunning. This time injuries (and Bunning’s off year) kept them out of contention.
     
    Help, though, was on the way. The farm system delivered another generation of Pirate stars and valuable regulars, many of them African American and Latino. The first wave, broadly speaking, included Dave Cash, Al Oliver, Manny Sanguillen, Richie Hebner, Dock Ellis, Bob Moose, Bob Robertson, Bruce Kison, Rennie Stennett, and Freddie Patek. Brown and manager Danny Murtaugh successfully integrated these youngsters into their existing nucleus, winning the NL East in 1970 before losing in the NLCS. The next year Pirates won the World Series, the second under Brown’s tenure. On September 1, 1971 the Pirates started the first all-black (African-American or dark-skinned Latino) lineup. And while it was the 1979 team that came to be associated with the hit song “We are Family”, Al Oliver remembered: “The ‘Family’ originated in the early ‘70s, we just didn’t have a song, but ‘family’ is something we always talked about, starting with our general manager Joe Brown.”
     
    During the first half of the 1970s, talent continued to flow into the organization, and the team kept winning. Players such as Dave Parker, Milt May, Craig Reynolds, Willie Randolph, Richie Zisk, Frank Taveras, John Candelaria, Kent Tekulve, and Omar Moreno joined the major league team or were used for trades. Beginning in 1970 the Pirates won five of the next six division titles. After the team fell back to second in 1976, the fifty-eight-year-old Brown decided to retire to California after 21 years at the helm. The talent accumulated under his watch would carry the team to several more excellent seasons, including its 1979 World Series victory. He made a brief return in 1985 at the behest of the Galbreath family to steady the Pirates ship in the midst of drug scandals, low attendance, and on-field struggles.
     
    When it came to hiring a manager, Brown always came back to Murtaugh. Murtaugh had managed for Brown in New Orleans, and the general manager promoted him to be the Pirates skipper in 1957 after firing Bobby Bragan. Murtaugh retired after the 1964 season for health reasons, but returned several times after Brown let other managers go, and was at the helm of both the 1960 and 1971 World Champions. Brown liked trading, but was never again as successful as he was when he assembled the 1960 squad. By not shying away from African American and Latin American players, though, his scouting and developmental system produced a generation of ballplayers that would make the Pirates one of the top clubs of the 1970s.

    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.
  12. Daniel R Levitt
    This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.
     
    Cedric Tallis had a fairly short career as a general manager, certainly so when making his case as one of the best 25 GMs in history. But his role in turning an expansion team into one of the model franchises in baseball should be recognized. Relatively quickly Tallis assembled the Royals teams that would dominate the AL West throughout the late 1970s. That he was no longer in Kansas City when they broke through was unfortunate for Tallis, but for all practical purposes those great teams were his creation.
     
    When pharmaceutical mogul Ewing Kauffman put together his bid to land an expansion franchise for Kansas City, he invited California Angels front office executive Cedric Tallis to join his group as its general manager. Kauffman recognized Tallis not only as a smart baseball man, but also someone who could be a champion and overseer for the new stadium complex under consideration in Kansas City. Many of the most successful teams of the 1960s operated with a dominant general manager atop the baseball operation, and Kauffman recognized the merit of this model. With the January 11, 1968 announcement awarding an AL franchise to Kauffman, the 53-year-old Tallis had a four-year contract and a new major league team to build.
     
    Between the onset of the amateur draft in 1965 and in the introduction of free agency in 1976, it may have been more difficult to assemble a baseball team than at any point in history. This dearth of freely available talent together with trying to launch an expansion franchise combined to make Tallis’s task highly challenging. But he turned out to be a near perfect choice.
     
    Like many of the best GMs of the 1960s and 1970s, Tallis honed his craft in the minor leagues. After getting out of the army, he finagled a job as a general manager in the class D Georgia-Alabama League, the lowest rung in Organized Baseball. At the time, a minor league GM was responsible for just about everything: finding players, managing the business affairs, and once—in Tallis’s case–helping to contain a pack of unruly fans trying to attack the umpire.
     
    Tallis learned well how to construct an effective organization. In Kansas City he built one of baseball’s largest and most effective collection of scouts. He hired smart people for his front office and farm system and didn’t shy away from the strong-willed. His staff counted a number of future general managers in Sid Thrift, Lou Gorman, Herk Robinson, and John Schuerholz. Tallis created a lively yet demanding environment but let his assistants do their jobs. He willingly accepted input before making the final decision himself.
     
    At the expansion draft Tallis focused almost exclusively on young players. Kauffman had given him the freedom to avoid veteran “name” players who might provide an ephemeral boost at the gate. Tallis’s made his lasting mark on the team, however, with a succession of brilliant trades. With few other avenues for player acquisition at the time, trades took on a heightened importance. Tallis’s deals quickly built up the Royals talent base and rearranged it so that by the early 1970s the team was consistently competitive, and by 1976 it captured the division title with a talent core that would anchor a winning team for many years to come. Five of the starting nine position players on the 1976 division winner came via Tallis’s deal-making: catcher Buck Martinez, first baseman John Mayberry, shortstop Freddie Patek, centerfielder Amos Otis, and designated hitter Hal McRae. None of these players cost Tallis any player that he really needed–it was a remarkable series of deals, yielding four All-Stars and a dependable long term catcher.
     
    Virtually the rest of the 1976 team also arrived under Tallis’s reign: right fielder Al Cowens, third baseman George Brett, ace reliever Mark Littell, and starting pitchers Paul Splittorff, Dennis Leonard, and Doug Bird came from the draft; starter Al Fitzmorris was still around from the 1968 expansion draft; and second baseman Frank White came through the Baseball Academy, one of Kauffman’s innovations. Unfortunately, Tallis was not around to enjoy the years of success. Kauffman was a brilliant and creative owner, but he was also impatient and becoming more concerned with expenses as the 1973 recession deepened. In mid-1974 Kaufman fired Tallis and laid off many of his scouts.
     
    A year later Tallis’s old friend Gabe Paul, president and GM of the Yankees, hired him to watch over the completion and reopening of the remodeled Yankee Stadium and act as his baseball assistant. When Paul resigned after the 1977 world championship season, George Steinbrenner promoted Tallis to GM. This was at the start of Steinbrenner’s micro-management years, however, and Tallis’s authority was circumscribed and ambiguous. The team repeated as world champions, but the Yankees front office became further disjointed and chaotic when Tallis was promoted to executive vice president with Gene Michael named GM.
     
    Eventually, after another division title in 1980 and pennant in 1981, Tallis and Steinbrenner broke up in late 1983 with Tallis becoming the executive director of the Tampa Bay Baseball Group, Tampa area businessmen looking to bring baseball to the region. Several major league teams appeared very close to moving—most notably the White Sox and Rangers–only to pull back at the last instant. The group expected to be short listed in late 1990 for the 1993 National League expansion. The short list did include Tampa but designated a rival ownership entity. Tallis was crushed. He felt betrayed by friends he had known most of his adult life. Shortly after being notified of the decision, he suffered a heart attack and died several months later when hit with a second one.
     
    It’s unfortunate that Tallis never had another chance with an expansion franchise or a losing team. He not only built a competitive team under the most difficult circumstances, but he also had the personality to run an organization. In addition to fashioning creative tension among capable subordinates, Tallis felt comfortable dealing with the press and enjoyed the limelight, key attributes for someone atop a baseball franchise.
     
    His forceful personality manifested itself in his driving. Once while giving a ride to the owner of the Tokyo Giants in Florida, Tallis took off down a two-lane highway, careening past the orange construction cones. The next morning when the owner reluctantly climbed back into Tallis’s car for a lift to the ballpark, he immediately buckled his seat belt—in an era well before this was common practice–and clung to the dashboard with both hands. When surrounded by the Kansas City press who all knew about Tallis’s manic driving habits, he told them, “Mr. Tallis is a kamikaze taxi driver.”
     
    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.


  13. Daniel R Levitt
    This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.
     
    [This one is from Mark]
     
    Of all the successful general managers in history, few are more of challenge to access than Brian Cashman. We could see an argument that he should rate much higher — after all, the Yankees have won six pennants and four championships in his 17 years as general manager, a record very few can match. On the other hand, he had some advantages: he started with a great team (he won titles his first three seasons), his ownership provided him enormous financial resources (peaking with a payroll 60% more than the second highest team), and there are countless stories of his decisions being overridden by his bosses, at times calling into question who was running the show.
     
    Cashman took over the Yankees in February 1998. At the time, his team had five great homegrown talents — Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada, and Andy Pettitte — all but Williams near the start of their careers and not yet earning free market salaries. His first team won 114 games, the most in league history. This excellent (and, for a time, relatively underpaid) core helped allow him to acquire or sign stars or superstars seemingly every year — Roger Clemens, Mike Mussina, Jason Giambi, Hideki Matsui, Alex Rodriguez, Gary Sheffield, Randy Johnson, Johnny Damon, CC Sabathia, Mark Teixeira, Jacoby Ellsbury, and more — in order to keep winning.
     
    As time went on, the lack of new homegrown talent led to an increasingly high payroll (not enough value was coming from pre-free agency players) so that by 2014 the team had an old and mediocre roster and Cashman seemed finally to have hit his budget limit. But this was 16 years into the job. For many years Cashman’s acquisitions, when added to his nucleus, preserved the Yankees as one of the best teams in baseball.
     
    The problem is not that Cashman has not done a fine job — he obviously has. It’s that no one else in history has ever had a job like it. There is really no one to compare him to. Moreover, the complex Yankee front office, with key executives split between New York and Tampa and overseen for the first decade by an active, engaged George Steinbrenner, makes apportioning credit or blame somewhat problematic. Nevertheless, Cashman was clearly the point man for trades and free agent signings and should be evaluated on his results.
     
    The key to the Yankees undeniable success during much of Cashman’s tenure, certainly for the first decade, was the talent he inherited. Jeter and Rivera put together Hall of Fame careers, while Williams, Posada and Pettitte were close to that level and contributed for many years. The great 1998 Yankees were built mainly by Gene Michael (the GM from 1991 to 1995) and Bob Watson (1996-97), who between them held onto the prospects (something the Yankees had not done, to their detriment, in the 1980s). Michael also made great deals for Paul O’Neill, David Cone, and Tino Martinez, while Watson signed David Wells and acquired Scott Brosius.
     
    So Cashman started with a young core surrounded by veterans. As the veterans aged out, he generally went out to the market to find replacements. After losing the 2001 World Series, the Yankees lost O’Neill, Brosius, Martinez, and Chuck Knoblauch from their starting lineup, either via retirement or free agency, but Cashman acquired Jason Giambi (the best hitter on the market), Robin Ventura, Raul Mondesi, and Rondell White. Like most GMs, Cashman had good luck when he signed the high end guys, which he often did, and less luck with the non-stars. Once he had to pay his homegrown guys market rate (Jeter made $750,000 in 1998, but $10 million two years later), the team payroll took off.
     
    The Yankees also had less luck with developing talent during the Cashman years, partly because his free agent spending cost the team a lot of high draft picks. He acquired 22-year-old Alfonso Soriano from Japan in 1998 and the second baseman gave them three excellent seasons (2001-2003) before being used to acquire Alex Rodriguez in 2004. There was also some bad luck — Nick Johnson was a very highly rated hitting prospect who could not stay healthy. After losing the 2003 Series with a 101-win team, Cashman signed Gary Sheffield and traded for Rodriguez. The 2004 team won 101 again, before losing an historic seven game LCS to the Red Sox.
     
    By the mid-2000s, the Yankees spending was far outstripping the competition. While their 2001 payroll was $109 million, essentially the same as the Red Sox, by 2004 they were up to $182 million (compared with Boston’s second highest $125 million). The next year they were up to $205 million, $84 million more than Boston. At this point the Yankees leveled off and other teams began to catch up. Helping considerably, the Yankees introduced a new star in 2005 when Robinson Cano forced his way into the lineup at second base. A player as good as Cano, probably on his way to the Hall of Fame, can make up for a lot of bad drafts.
     
    After nine straight division titles, the Yankees finally finished second in 2007 and then missed the playoffs in 2008. The team had gotten quite old and had holes everywhere. Cashman went back out to the market and signed the best pitcher (Sabathia) and best hitter (Teixeira), while also picking up Nick Swisher and A.J. Burnett. Suddenly the Yankees were back in business — Sabathia and Teixeira had great seasons, as did many of their holdover stars, and they waltzed to a 103-victory season and a World Series title.
     
    Although this veteran team hung on for a few more years, winning three more division titles, by 2013 the Yankees were old, expensive (a record $228 million payroll), and no longer contending. Rodriguez signed a 10-year extension after the 2007 season, a contract the Yankees soon regretted. Sabathia had three great seasons before he began to struggle with effectiveness and health. Teixeira battled injuries, Rivera and Jeter retired. Cashman got a lot of value out of all of these players, but to get them he needed to keeping paying them past the time (except for Rivera) that they were contributing, and the Yankees paid the price in the early 2010s.
     
    As of this writing, it appears that Cashman is passing on the free market this off-season. It will be difficult to improve the team without increasing the budget, since they already have $180M committed to just 10 players in 2016. The team has the money, and a GM that has proven adept at finding players to give it to. Still just 47, Cashman likely has a long career ahead of him.
     
    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.
  14. Daniel R Levitt
    This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.
     
    Jim Campbell was decidedly old school. He believed in building teams through scouting and development. He displayed loyalty to his players and staff, who he expected to work hard and show appreciation for their opportunity. To those he respected he would be generous and loyal. On those principles his Detroit Tigers won the 1968 World Series. He distained marketing and give-away days; to Campbell, winning should be enough. And when the environment shifted, he remained a throwback. He never reconciled himself to the players union or free agency. Nevertheless, he was one of the few general managers who built a World Series champion in the 1980s without changing his approach.
     
    Campbell joined the Tigers organization in 1949 as business manager of their club in Thomasville, Georgia, the bottom rung of the minor leagues. As with many future GMs coming up at the time, the minor leagues proved a fertile training ground. While Campbell was moving up—he was named farm director in 1956 and director of minor league personnel and scouting in 1961—the Tigers cycled through five general managers in seven years.
     
    When John Fetzer took control of the Tigers’ ownership group 1961 he began searching for the long-term general manager he felt the club needed. Baseball GMs in those days often had tremendous power, presiding over the entire organization—the stadium ushers, ticket sellers, the public relations staff. Fetzer later said that he thought Campbell was “ten years away” from taking on such a job, but the more he searched, the more he was intrigued by the 38-year-old executive. Fetzer also recognized that Campbell’s scouting and development organization had been doing its job well during the years of management turmoil.
     
     
    From 1957 to 1962 the Tigers’ scouts signed a number of amateur free agents who would become the core of their squad. Of the top sixteen players on the eventual 1968 world championship team (the nine position players with at least 100 games, six pitchers with at least 70 innings pitched, and pinch-hitter extraordinaire Gates Brown), eleven were originally signed during this six-year time frame: infielders Dick McAuliffe, Ray Oyler, and Don Wert; outfielders Jim Northrup, Gates Brown, Willie Horton, and Mickey Stanley; catcher Bill Freehan; and pitchers Mickey Lolich, Pat Dobson, and John Hiller.
     
    After the 1962 season, Fetzer put Campbell in charge. At Fetzer’s behest, one of Campbell’s first tasks was to find non-segregated spring training accommodations. Campbell successfully negotiated with politicians and business leaders in Lakeland, Florida to create a more tolerant environment for the players. Once in charge Campbell began to integrate the system’s young players onto the roster of what was already a pretty good team and resisted the urge to trade prospects for veteran stopgap solutions. He also continued to find players, landing Denny McLain in the now-extinct first year player draft. As the prospects were introduced to the majors, the team jelled under manager Charlie Dressen, but in 1966 the organization suffered tragedy when both Dressen and his successor Bob Swift left the team for health reasons and died before the end of the year.
     
    To skipper the team for 1967 Campbell hired Yankees scout Mayo Smith, who, on the surface, did not seem a particularly inspired choice. The Tigers remained in the pennant race until the final day of the 1967 season, ultimately finishing a game behind the surprising Red Sox. Campbell essentially stood pat over the 1967–1968 winter, believing that with some of his injured stars for a full season the team could win. He was right, and in 1968 the Tigers won the World Series for the first time since 1945. After years of contention, Campbell’s homegrown ball club had finally come together.
     
    Though the core of the 1968 team was already middle-aged, the Tigers continued to contend over the next several years. After the 1970 season Campbell traded the increasingly troubled McLain for Joe Coleman, Eddie Brinkman and Aurelio Rodriguez, among others, bolstering his squad for another run. Under new manager Billy Martin, the team won 91 games in 1971 and a division title the next year, mainly with the same, now-aging core. In fact, the Tigers of this era had the most stable roster in baseball history. Nine Tigers—Gates Brown, Norm Cash, Bill Freehan, Willie Horton, Al Kaline, Mickey Lolich, Dick McAuliffe, Jim Northrup, and Mickey Stanley—were together for the entire decade of 1964 to 1973, easily a record.
     
    As these players aged, Campbell proved unable to replace them, principally because the Tigers were much less adept in the early years of the draft than they had been in the previous era of amateur free agents. Because a team was limited by its draft position, its scouts could no longer sign as many top amateurs as the ownership would afford or they could hustle. Campbell overrated his drafted prospects and by 1975 the team bottomed out at 102 losses. Martin had been fired two years earlier when Campbell could no longer tolerate his off-field baggage.
     
    Despite the team’s struggles Campbell disdained the opportunities presented by the introduction of free agency in 1976, signing no significant free agent for many years. Fortunately, the team’s scouting department hit another hot streak, drafting Lance Parrish in 1974; Lou Whitaker in 1975; Alan Trammell, Dan Petry, and Jack Morris in 1976; Kirk Gibson in 1978; and Howard Johnson in 1979. As these players matured together, Campbell had another great young nucleus to build around. And once again he filled in masterfully: he snapped up manager Sparky Anderson and traded for Chet Lemon, Aurelio Lopez, and Willie Hernandez, among others. After a second place finish at 90-72 in 1983, the club was sold to Domino’s Pizza magnate Tom Monaghan, and Campbell became the Tigers president and CEO, relinquishing the general manager position to Bill Lajoie.
     
    Lajoie added a couple of stopgap free agents (Milt Wilcox and Darrell Evans) and the team Campbell had built broke through with a historic season in 1984, winning 104 games and cruising to the World Series championship, one of the few built in the era without the considerable influence of free agent signings. Campbell presided over one more division championship in 1987, but was let go in 1992 as the team was again being sold.
     
    In 21 years as the Tigers GM Campbell built two world championship teams and finished over .500 16 times. Though the second half of his tenure offered a new way to source talent, Campbell remained a throwback and built a champion without materially relying on free agents.
     
    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.
  15. Daniel R Levitt

    John Quinn

    By Daniel R Levitt,

    #24 — John Quinn
     
    This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.
     
    [This one is by Mark]
     
    Theo Epstein recently said that “everybody thinks they can be a GM or president of baseball operations. It comes with the territory.” But it was not that long ago that most baseball fans did not know who their team’s general manager was. The GM was considered to be part of ownership — and was often a relative or close friend of the owner — and dressed and acted like a conservative politician. Hardcore fans argued about players, and maybe even the manager. But unless a big trade happened, most of the GM’s work was out of sight. But the job was no less critical than it is today.
     
    Part of a distinguished family of baseball executives (father Bob Quinn, son Bob Quinn, and son-in-law Roland Hemond were all GMs for multiple teams), John Quinn spent 44 years in baseball front offices, including 27 years as general manager for the Braves and Phillies. He had a hand in creating three pennant winners and (famously) nearly a fourth, and started the building of a team that would bring glory to Philadelphia after his departure.
     
    John Quinn worked for his father with both the Red Sox and Braves before succeeding him as Braves GM in early 1945. Bob Quinn was 75, and left to become director of the Hall of Fame. Three years later the Braves won their first pennant in 34 years, and much of the credit went to John Quinn. He had lured one of the game’s best managers, Billy Southworth, away from the Cardinals, and made brilliant trades for Bob Elliott, Jeff Heath and Eddie Stanky. And he deserves a lot of credit for the productive farm system (Warren Spahn, Johnny Sain, Al Dark, Earl Torgeson) because he had served as farm director before taking over the big league club.
     
    The 1948 Braves were not built to last (most of Quinn’s acquisitions were players in their 30s), so while the team slowly drifted away Quinn began to build another team, and it is this team that gets John Quinn on our list. By 1953 the Braves were in Milwaukee, but only one significant contributor to the 1948 pennant winners (Warren Spahn) made the trip west.
     
    The 1945 signing of Jackie Robinson by the Dodgers, and his subsequent extraordinary play, opened up, as a practical matter, the largest collection of untapped talent in baseball history. Quinn’s rebuilding of the Braves in the 1950s can largely be credited to the team’s aggressive pursuit of this talent. The Dodgers and Giants, featuring several African-American stars, dominated the NL in the early 1950s, and the Braves followed a similar path to catch up. These three teams won every NL pennant between 1951 and 1959.
     
    In late 1949 Quinn acquired minor league outfielder Sam Jethroe from the Dodgers and he became the team’s first black player. Jethroe had two excellent seasons, winning the 1950 NL Rookie of the Year award, but he was 33 when he debuted and did not last long. The Braves had more success with younger recruits, signing Bill Bruton, Wes Covington, and a raw 18-year-old named Henry Aaron in the early 1950s, and several more black and Latino players in the years ahead. In the meantime, Quinn’s scouts were also signing players like Eddie Mathews, Del Crandall, and Bob Buhl, and Quinn made great trades for Lew Burdette and Joe Adcock.
     
    The 1956-59 Braves were an excellent team, winning two pennants (and the 1957 World Series) and nearly two more — losing by one game in 1956, and losing a playoff in 1959. Quinn deserves a lot of credit for this team and he got it — he was considered one of the best executives in the game at the time. After the 1958 season, the Yankees tried to lure Quinn to New York to serve as George Weiss’s assistant. This would have been a (temporary) demotion, but the job offered the promise of succeeding the 63-year-old Weiss. Quinn declined, and the man who took the job (Roy Hamey) in fact did succeed Weiss two years later and won three pennants in his three seasons at the helm.
     
    Quinn was interested in a new job because the Braves had hired Birdie Tebbetts to a new position as Vice President, becoming Quinn’s boss, so in early 1959 he left to become VP and general manager of the Phillies. The club had finished last in 1958, and would do so the next three years as well — losing a record 27 straight games in 1961. But Quinn began to put a team together, thanks to some savvy deals. Over a four year period, Quinn acquired Johnny Callison, Tony Taylor, Tony Gonzalez, Don Demeter, Wes Covington, Cookie Rojas, and Jim Bunning, turning the lowly Phillies into a contender. The club won 81 games in 1962, then 87, then 92.
     
    The 1964 Phillies had a 6.5 game lead with 12 to play, before losing 10 in a row and ultimately falling one game short. Much has been a written about manager Gene Mauch, whose long career in the game is overshadowed by the final two weeks of that season. But what of John Quinn? The Phillies collapse presumably had nothing to do with Quinn, who built the team and actively improved it during the season (picking up Frank Thomas, Bobby Shantz and Vic Power late in the summer). Had the Phillies won the World Series, which would have been their first ever, it’s not hard to imagine Quinn being in the Hall of Fame today.
     
    But the Phillies did not win, and in some ways the team never recovered from the collapse. The late 1960s teams were dominated by Dick Allen, the team’s best and most controversial player. Allen was the team’s first African American star, but his frequent injuries and personality troubles got him booed by the home town fans by 1968, and he spent all of the next year lobbying to get out of town. When Quinn finally dealt him, he managed to extract Curt Flood and Tim McCarver from the Cardinals in a deal that became famous not for the players involved but because Flood refused to report to the Phillies. Flood sued baseball, taking his case all the way to the US Supreme Court before losing. The Phillies were not a good team by 1968, and had developed a reputation as a place no one (especially black players like Allen and Flood) wanted to play.
     
    In February 1972 Quinn made his last trade, swapping Rick Wise for Steve Carlton. It was quite a way to go out, as Carlton won four Cy Young Awards in Philadelphia, and helped the team to six post-season appearances in the next 12 years. Many of the players from these great teams — Mike Schmidt, Greg Luzinski, Larry Bowa — were in the Phillies system by the time Carlton arrived, but Quinn would not be around when the team finally broke through. He was fired in June 1972, with his team on its way to a last place finish. He died in September 1976, just a couple of weeks before their first post-season appearance in 26 years.
     
    John Quinn served two teams as general manager — each time taking over a struggling franchise. He won three pennants with the Braves and improved the Phillies considerably. His chance at a better place in baseball history might have been lost in September 1964.
     
    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.
  16. Daniel R Levitt
    This is the first entry in a blog associated with the publication of In Pursuit of Pennants: Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball, coming out this spring and coautored by Mark Armour and me (Dan Levitt). We are crossposting this from our blog at the book's website. Thanks to the Twins Daily team for hosting.
     
    Over the next several weeks we will be counting down the top 25 general managers in baseball history—as we see them anyway—some will signed by Mark and some by me. Because of the disparity in resources and opportunities available among the various front offices over the years, and the evolving nature of the job itself, evaluating general managers is largely a subjective exercise.
     
    The most common approach to assess general managers objectively has largely been based on wins per payroll dollar. This is interesting and can be informative, but the goal is to win, not necessarily to win cheaply. Moreover, regardless of the money available, the challenge of building a team is highly dependent on what kind of team you start with. Brian Cashman (Yankees) and Joe Garagiola, Jr. (Diamondbacks) each had their first GM season in 1998. Cashman was handed one of history’s greatest teams, while Garagiola had a first year expansion team. Comparing their performances is not easy. How should we apportion credit (or blame) for teams that have the stamp of previous GMs? Gene Michael collected most of the players Cashman built around—how much credit should he receive for the Yankees success after he was no longer in charge?
     
    So what did we look at in our rankings? First and foremost obviously is winning: how successful were the general manager’s teams and how consistently were they good. Constraints and resources need to be taken into account: how much freedom and authority did ownership give the GM to make decisions, build a front office, and select his on-field staff, and what were his financial restrictions? Context, too, is important. The challenge of staying on top is very different than building or rebuilding a struggling franchise. Specific direction from ownership also matters. Was the GM given a win now directive? If so, winning right away gets more weight than restocking the farm system. In other cases success over the longer term may receive more emphasis. Moreover, in some eras the competition may be unusually weak or strong, making the job either more or less challenging.
     
    Much like with players, the very best GMs were able to oversee a team through an extended run of success, or to build a team more than once (possibly after switching teams). We give some extra credit for innovation, such as being at the forefront of a trend or being one of first to figure out how to take advantage of a structural change in the game.
     
    Almost all GMs have records that are a mix of good and bad seasons, good and bad trades. And the trades are often judged post-facto, by how well the players performed after the trade even if those performances could not have been expected. There is a lot of luck in baseball, and we are aware that an ill-timed injury, or a key hit in a playoff series, can have a big impact on a GM’s reputation. In our rankings we have tried to strike a balance between acknowledging the impact of good fortune and giving due respect to what actually happened.
     
    A couple of notes on eligibility. The GM role was created about 1920 — before then the players were signed or acquired either by the owner or manager. For the purposes of this exercise, we are not considering GMs who were also owners or managers of the team. If we did, John McGraw (a manager in charge of the New York Giants roster for 30 years) and Barney Dreyfuss (who owned the Pirates for 32 years and built several champions himself) would each be in the top 10. Also, note that we are ranking the men (so far, they are all men) who have run what we now call “baseball operations”, regardless of the person’s actual title. Theo Epstein is the President of Baseball Operations for the Chicago Cubs, while Jed Hoyer is the GM. For our purposes, we are crediting (or blaming) Epstein for the Cubs performance, since he is in charge.
     
    Also, we (somewhat arbitrarily) decided to require that the candidates start their GM career by 2003, allowing for 12 years of service. John Mozeliak, Andrew Friedman, Jon Daniels and others have had impressive starts to their likely long front office careers, but we did not want to get too far ahead of their stories.
     
    In the end this is meant to be fun. Each general manager’s challenge is unique to the time, place, environment, and ownership he reports to. We hope our career summations help illustrate aspects of how baseball’s top general managers met these challenges and provide context for their tenure.
     
    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants: Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store. The top 25 GM countdown is being crossposted from our blog at the book's website.
  17. Daniel R Levitt
    Mark Armour and I have a guest post at John Thorn's MLB blog this morning. This is a short essay on the history of Baseball Operations, riffing off Moneyball, which serves sort of as an introduction to our new book.
     
    http://ourgame.mlblogs.com/2015/03/09/baseball-ops-welcome-to-the-evolution/
  18. Daniel R Levitt
    I originally wrote the following analysis of Terry Ryan as GM of the Minnesota Twins for The National Pastime, 2012: Short but Wondrous Summers: Baseball in the North Star State. I was the editor of the publication—one I heartily recommend by the way for those interested in the history of baseball in Minnesota--and pulled the essay just prior to publication when the publisher informed me that we had gone over our allotted page count. It is great to have this outlet to finally run the article. Due to its length and a natural break point about half way through, I am breaking it into two halves.
     
     
    Given this disparity among the resources and opportunities available to the various front offices, is there a way to objectively evaluate some of the more important facets of their performance beyond wins and losses? In fact, there are some aspects of the general manager’s role that can be quantified. Using the Retrosheet transactions database I evaluated all the moves made by the Twins after Ryan's hiring in September 1994 through the end of the 2007 season. Obviously, using this type of analysis to assess Ryan assigns the ultimate responsibility for all transactions--rightly or wrongly--to the general manager.
     
    In this short investigation I examine the value of players lost via free agency, outright release, the expansion draft, waivers and trades, and players acquired via amateur free agency (i.e. players not eligible for the draft), free agency, waivers and trades. Unfortunately this is not quite as straightforward as it might seem: for example, players who become free agents and are subsequently re-signed; in the database these players are shown as both lost via free agency and gained through free agency. The net effect is zero, but it increases the total volume of talent coming and going. Another example is players who come and go before they become established major leaguers. As an illustration of this issue, Casey Blake was claimed on waivers, lost on waivers, reclaimed on waivers, and subsequently released before he achieved any significant major league playing time. While it makes sense to account for them this way--each transaction needs to be evaluated on its own merits and the Twins free agents were certainly available to any team--these multiple moves can make the talent velocity appear greater than it might otherwise be.
     
    For each player involved in a transaction, I calculated the WAR he would earn over the balance of his career. For players still active, WAR is calculated through the 2008 season, the last season for which I have been able to generate the data set (obviously many of these players will significantly increase their career totals). [i would like to update this in the future]
     
    So, what does Ryan's scorecard look like? The table below summarizes the cumulative WAR surrendered and gained in all the Twins transactions from the fall of 1994 through his retirement in 2007.
     
    WAR From Twins Transactions Under Ryan’s Tenure
    [table]


    Transaction Type


    From Min


    To Min




    Players Becoming Free Agents


    42






    Players Released


    54






    Players Lost in Expansion Draft


    9






    Amateur Free Agent Signing




    10




    Free Agent Signing




    80




    Waivers




    36




    Trades


    102


    164




    Total


    218


    290


    [/table]
     
    Despite working under relatively tight financial constraints for most of his tenure, Ryan lost surprisingly little talent to free agency. Only Kenny Rogers, already 38 years old when he left after one season with the Twins, produced more than five wins above replacement after leaving the Twins as a free agent.
     
    Surprisingly, Ryan's two most significant personnel blunders came from releasing two players with significant major league ability, and both came after the 2002 season. In October he released Casey Blake, who would go on to become a valuable contributor with the Indians. More significantly, in December Ryan compounded his error by releasing David Ortiz, who became a perennial MVP contender. Both could have played important roles on the competitive Twins teams from 2003 through 2006. In addition, the loss of Damian Miller to the Diamondbacks in the expansion draft proved surprisingly costly. Miller went on to several seasons as a quality major league catcher.
     
    Given his financial constraints, it is not surprising that Ryan never signed any high-priced free agents. But he often tried to augment his team with bargain priced players with some upside. As mentioned above, Ryan had some success in the mid-1990s. Later he received a quality season from Kenny Rogers before losing him. Ryan also landed several useful role players, such as Mike Redmond, at a reasonable price. Some of his most notable free agent moves involved re-signing his own veterans, such as Radke and Shannon Stewart, on a short-term basis.
     
    For most of Ryan’s tenure, the Twins did not develop many players from Latin America. In the mid-1990s the Twins landed two players who would become useful major leaguers--Luis Rivas and Juan Rincon--but added none of consequence over the next decade. Ryan's staff did smartly pluck Bobby Kielty from the U.S. amateur ranks when he was available outside of the draft.
     
    Ryan may have distinguished himself most clearly in his ability to make quality trades. His worst trade, in terms of value differential, was the swap of Todd Walker to Colorado for little in return. As an extenuating circumstance with this trade, however, the Twins also received cash. Ryan’s regime can be credited with several outstanding deals. Most have been mentioned above: the trades of A.J. Pierzynski and Chuck Knoblauch each added two valuable players. Trading Dave Hollins for David Ortiz was also a great move, unfortunately later vitiated by the latter's release.
     
    To get a better sense of the Twins drafting success under Ryan, I calculated the total career WAR from all players picked in each year’s draft from 1987, when Ryan first joined the Twins as scouting director, through 2001, when the Twins selected Joe Mauer with the first overall pick. Draft classes more recent than 2001 have not had a chance to mature sufficiently through 2008 for a valid evaluation. One needs to be cautious, however, when evaluating drafts. How many early picks a team has, how high in the first round they pick and how much money the team is willing to spend on signing bonuses all affect a team’s draft success without reflecting on the acumen of the team’s front office.
     
    Twins WAR from the Draft (1987 - 1994)
    [table]



    1987


    1988


    1989


    1990


    1991


    1992


    1993


    1994




    Twins


    8.1


    -2.3


    94.6


    37.5


    62.9


    -0.1


    18.4


    45.0




    Lg Avg


    29.5


    27.0


    30.8


    22.8


    23.8


    16.5


    17.7


    12.5




    Diff


    -21.4


    -29.3


    63.8


    14.7


    39.1


    -16.6


    0.7


    32.5


    [/table]
     
    Twins WAR from the Draft (1995-2001)
    [table]



    1995


    1996


    1997


    1998


    1999


    2000


    2001




    Twins


    15.3


    8.2


    12.7


    2.5


    12.2


    -1.3


    26.8




    Lg Avg


    17.7


    14.9


    11.8


    15.0


    14.5


    9.6


    8.2




    Diff


    -2.4


    -6.7


    0.9


    -12.5


    -2.3


    -10.9


    18.6


    [/table]
     
    Caveats aside, Ryan’s record with the draft was mixed. On the positive side, while scouting director Ryan oversaw two stellar draft classes: in 1989 he landed Chuck Knoblauch, Scott Erickson, and Denny Neagle; two years later Ryan brought in Brad Radke and Matt Lawton. During his time as general manager the Twins selected several players that went on to become stars. Mauer, Morneau, and Cuddyer, all drafted in the first three rounds between 1997 and 2001, anchored the Twin’s teams of the mid-2000s. Ryan and his staff also generally recognized their better players and studiously avoided including those who would have a solid major league future in trades. On the other hand, the Twins had a top-6 or higher overall pick in 1998, 1999 and 2000 and came away with little to show for it.
     
    But if Terry Ryan and his staff had at least a couple of years of professional baseball with which to evaluate a player, they were formidable. In trades, particularly after his first year on the job, the prospects Ryan acquired developed into capable major leaguers more often than could be reasonably expected. His veteran free agent signings also generally turned out well, and he rarely lost key players to free agency. Two of his more significant misses had extenuating circumstances: the trade of Todd Walker netted the team cash, and David Ortiz was arbitration eligible, 27 years old and had yet to play a full major league season, mainly due to injuries.
     
    A general manager's job, of course, entails more than talent acquisition, and sometimes a team is in a position where the key decisions involve sorting out the talent (including possibly surrendering more talent than one receives) to alleviate an abundance at one position and solve a dearth at another. But the luxury of rearranging one's talent first requires building a solid talent base. Ryan consistently surrendered less talent than he received as he built a well-balanced team that captured four division championships between 2002 and 2006.
     
    After four seasons of retirement, Ryan returned as general manager, hired to once again retool the Twins after a 99-loss season in 2011. “I don’t know if it will be for one year or 10 years,” Ryan said. “I’m going to see how it goes and see exactly the direction of success and workload and all the things that about 4 1/2 years ago we talked about over at the Dome.” Ryan also identified some of the issues the organization needed to address, including a large number of missed games due to injuries, placing the onus to fix the problems squarely on his shoulders. “Players can only take advice. Players take the advice you give them,” Ryan said. “I would never put it on the players. It’s our responsibility to take control of that and we will.”
     
    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.
  19. Daniel R Levitt
    I originally wrote the following analysis of Terry Ryan as GM of the Minnesota Twins for The National Pastime, 2012: Short but Wondrous Summers: Baseball in the North Star State. I was the editor of the publication—one I heartily recommend by the way for those interested in the history of baseball in Minnesota--and pulled the essay just prior to publication when the publisher informed me that we had gone over our allotted page count. It is great to have this outlet to finally run the article. Due to its length and a natural break point about half way through, I am breaking it into two halves.
     
    In September 1994, Terry Ryan took the helm of one of baseball’s more celebrated front offices. The Minnesota Twins had recently won two World Series, in 1987 and 1991, and much of the credit for assembling those teams was assigned to the scouting and player development personnel. Ryan had joined the Twins in January 1986 as scouting director and worked his way up to being general manager Andy MacPhail’s key assistant. After MacPhail left to assume the presidency of the Chicago Cubs, naming Ryan the Twins’ new general manager seemed the natural continuation move.
     
    Nevertheless, Ryan’s new position was far from ideal. On one side he had Tom Kelly, a successful manager who had a definitive idea of what he liked in a ballclub, coming off of the two World Series victories, and wielding a lot of influence within the organization. On the other he had owner Carl Pohlad, who, while committed to winning, was also very concerned with the bottom line and beginning to focus much of his energy on lobbying for a new stadium in Minneapolis. The team itself had finished the recent strike-shortened season 53-60, with the league’s highest ERA and the top two batting stars from the World Series--Kirby Puckett and Kent Hrbek--well past their prime. Moreover, the farm system, which had supplied most of the talent for the championship runs, was slipping; Baseball America ranked the Twins farm system 16th of the 28 organizations.
     
    With the baseball world shut down because of the ongoing strike, Ryan could not make any major league player moves during his first offseason as general manager. Once the strike was settled, Ryan’s hand was soon forced by the team’s terrible start to the 1995 season; the club stood at 17-42 on June 30. In July, Ryan swapped four of his veteran pitchers--Scott Erickson, Kevin Tapani, Mark Guthrie, and Rick Aguilera--for eight prospects. Unfortunately, Ryan’s first significant foray into the trade market did not bode well for the future, although in fairness, the pitchers Ryan traded were not stars (except for Aguilera, whose contract was expiring at the end of the season). Of the prospects, only one, Frank Rodriguez, was ranked in Baseball America’s annual listing of the top 100, and only one, Ron Coomer, already 28 years old, went on to become a major league regular.
     
    Ryan had better luck that offseason with a batch of free agent signings. In an effort to bolster his struggling club Ryan signed a number of veteran free agents of mixed quality: Paul Molitor, Dave Hollins, Roberto Kelly, Greg Myers, and Rick Aguilera, brought back after the midseason trade. Amazingly, all five of these moves worked out and the Twins improved their winning percentage by nearly 100 points over 1995.
     
    One way to quantitatively evaluate a general managers moves is by using the Wins Above Replacement metric (WAR), a sabermetric measure denominated in wins now gaining more mainstream recognition. By combining batting, base running, fielding and pitching statistics, WAR estimates how many wins a player produced for his team above a “replacement player,” generally classified as the best player a team could land on short notice without surrendering any talent in return, such as a veteran triple-A player with some major league experience. As a benchmark, 8 WAR represents an MVP caliber season, while 5 WAR would typically qualify as an All-Star season. The five veteran free agents all turned in positive WAR seasons in 1996 led by Molitor at 3.4 and Hollins at 2.5.
     
    While the team may have been playing better in 1996, the front office suffered a humiliation in the annual player draft. Travis Lee, selected second overall, claimed he should be a free agent because the club had not followed a little-known rule and offered him a contract within 15 days of the draft. The Twins believed they were following Lee's request not to negotiate until after the Olympics. With a hearing scheduled for September 24 to determine Lee’s status, Lee and the Twins tried to negotiate an agreement. Lee was reportedly willing to accept a $2.1 million signing bonus ($100,000 more than first overall pick Kris Benson), but the Twins elected to take their chances on the hearing. In the event, Lee (along with three other players who used the same tactic) was declared a free agent and signed with Arizona for an astounding total package of $10 million.
     
    Not surprisingly, a team built around mediocre veteran free agents and a 39-year-old Molitor did not remain competitive. Over the next four years, from 1997 to 2000, the Twins could not win more than 70 games in a season. A large part of the team’s struggles can also be traced to an unforeseen collective disappointment from the club’s top prospects. Had some of them performed closer to expectations, Ryan’s strategy of filling in with veteran free agents may have led to a club on the fringes of contention. From 1992 to 1996 the Twins had 14 different players that were ranked among Baseball America’s top 100 prospects. From the five position players, two of whom were ranked in the top 20 at one point, the team received just five seasons of at least 400 plate appearances: two from Todd Walker and three from Rich Becker.
     
    The return from the pitchers was even more dismal. The nine pitchers combined to deliver only four seasons with more than 150 innings pitched. Even this overstates the case; only one of these four seasons was accompanied by an ERA below 5.00. It remains unknowable whether these players were simply overrated or a flaw existed in the Twins player development system, but in any case, a large group of highly touted prospects failed to live up to expectations.
     
    Ryan had some success with unheralded prospect Marty Cordova. Already 25 years old when he debuted as the regular left fielder in 1995, Cordova went on to win the Rookie of the Year Award. He followed up with a stellar 1996, but then struggled through two seasons with an OPS below .750. In 1996, Ryan also traded an aging Dave Hollins to the Mariners for a young David Ortiz, though he didn’t exceed 300 at-bats with the Twins until 2000.
     
    Despite the Twins’ struggles at the major league level and a change of focus by the top executives, Ryan remained committed to building his ballclub. After the 1997 season Ryan traded star second baseman Chuck Knoblauch to the Yankees for several players, most notably lefthander Eric Milton and shortstop Cristian Guzman, both of whom went on to become valuable major league regulars. The two youngsters added significantly more Wins Above Replacement than Ryan surrendered. Later in this article I will summarize the team's moves under Ryan using WAR.
     
    As the decade rolled on, Ryan continued to pick up useful ballplayers in trades--usually surrendering less than he received--and minor free agent deals. Although not stars, these role players included outfielders Dustan Mohr and Bobby Kielty, and pitchers Kyle Lohse and Joe Mays.
     
    Ryan also had a knack for knowing which of his prospects to hang onto. Of course, some of this was by necessity--by 2000 Ryan was operating with baseball’s lowest payroll, and the Twins were being mentioned as a contraction target. “Scouting and development have to provide us with a constant flow of talent, or we’re in big trouble,” Ryan acknowledged. “We know who we are. We try to be fair, try to be honest, try to be sincere. We have a passion from the front office down to the players. One thing we are is accountable. We don’t try to be something we’re not.”
     
    Although the Twins consistently ranked no higher than the middle of the pack in Baseball America’s minor league organization rankings during the mid to late 1990s, the Twins had some talent in the system and much of it had graduated to the majors by 2001. Along with veteran pitcher Brad Radke, key regulars included catcher A.J. Pierzynski, first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz, second baseman Luis Rivas, third baseman Corey Koskie, and outfielders Matt Lawton, Torii Hunter, and Jacque Jones. Ryan’s trade acquisitions filled in nicely around these home grown products, and the Twins finished the 2001 season in second place at 85-77.
     
    Nevertheless, with no new stadium on the horizon, major league baseball (with the compliance of the Twins ownership) targeted the Twins for contraction. Ryan, though, stayed on, hoping the team would survive, and knowing that he had put together a pretty good team. “That’s what makes this such a tough thing to accept,” Ryan lamented. “We think that with a little tinkering with our roster in 2002, we’d be right there. We’ve got a lot of things in place. If we get through this thing, we feel we have a chance to be pretty good.” He reportedly turned down an opportunity to take over the Toronto Blue Jays for a bump in salary; following his lead, the rest of the key front office employees remained as well. Ryan’s determination was rewarded when the team escaped elimination, partially due to a local court ruling.
     
    In another significant decision that offseason, Ryan named coach Ron Gardenhire as the replacement for longtime manager Tom Kelly, who had retired. Otherwise Ryan did very little tinkering for 2002, although the pitching staff was now led by veteran Rick Reed. Trading from a relative surplus of outfielders, Ryan had acquired Reed during the previous season for 29-year-old outfielder Matt Lawton, a useful player but with little remaining upside. In 2002 the 37-year-old Reed turned his last good season with a WAR of 2.6. Gardenhire managed this team superbly, most notably in crafting a strong bullpen anchored by veteran Twins draftee Eddie Guardado, and led the squad to its first division championship in eleven years. The team beat Oakland in the ALDS before falling to Anaheim four games to one in the ALCS.
     
    The Twins could easily have fallen from their perch. In 2002 the Twins ranked 27th in payroll, offering little flexibility to fill in for injuries, and several players seemed to be plateauing or regressing. But Ryan was in the midst of a great run. The farm system had been rebuilt so that it now contained two future MVPs (Justin Morneau and Joe Mauer--the first overall pick in 2001) and a star outfielder in Michael Cuddyer. Moreover, Ryan had bolstered his pitching staff by bringing in future Cy Young Award winner Johan Santana in a one-sided swap of Rule 5 draft picks in 1999. After repeating as division champion in 2003 Ryan made one his best moves, swapping catcher A.J. Pierzynski to San Francisco for several players, most notably closer Joe Nathan and starter Francisco Liriano. Behind the new influx of talent, Minnesota won a third consecutive division championship in 2004 and another in 2006.
     
    After slipping to third in 2007, though, Ryan surprised many observers by announcing it was time to move on. “This is a good thing for me,” Ryan said of his retirement. “My health’s intact. My marriage is intact. That’s a difficult thing to do in baseball.” He also left a pretty solid nucleus for successor Billy Smith, another well-respected long time Twins front office employee, though relatively unknown and heralded more for his administrative acumen than his talent evaluation skills. The players certainly recognized Ryan’s accomplishments. “I’ve always been on his side,” commented outfielder Torii Hunter. “For what he has and the limitations he has with payroll, he’s done a great job. You give this guy a Yankee payroll, and I promise you he will do 10 times better than any other GM out there.”
     
    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.
  20. Daniel R Levitt

    Pat Gillick

    By Daniel R Levitt,

    This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.
     
    Pat Gillick served as a general manager for four different teams. At his first stop, in Toronto, he built an expansion team into one of the best organizations in the game (winning 86 or more games for 11 straight seasons), culminating in five division titles and two world championships. In Baltimore, he worked for an impatient owner who wanted his team to compete right away — Gillick delivered two consecutive ALCS appearances, the Orioles only post-seasons between 1983 and 2012. In Seattle, he was tasked with trading one of the game’s best players, and then watching another superstar leave as a free agent a year later. Despite this, his Mariner teams won over 90 games all four of his years at the helm and an all-time record win total 2001. At his final stop, in Philadelphia, he took over a good team that had not been able to get over the hump and into the playoffs. Gillick made the post-season in his second year and then won the World Series in 2008, the team’s first in 28 years. A few days later, he retired. By succeeding at four distinct challenges without fail and showing a unique ability and keenness for finding talent others might have overlooked, Gillick earned a place among the very best GMs in history.
     
    Gillick’s approach was to first make sure he had great scouts and then to widen his talent search to non-traditional avenues. As Gillick put it: “One needs to fish in many waters.” In Toronto Gillick and his longtime friend Epy Guerrero were at the forefront of creating an identifiable presence in the Dominican Republic. He also looked for underappreciated opportunities with multi-sport athletes. His success in the mostly ignored Rule 5 draft of veteran minor leaguers was legendary; no one else even came close to his success and he forced teams to be much smarter about protecting their assets from this draft. Moreover, Gillick used free agency to perfection in Baltimore and Seattle—in both places he quickly reloaded franchises with little talent left in their minor league systems. With the latter organization, he also signed the first hitter from Japan to star in the major leagues, Ichiro Suzuki, along with a first-rate reliever, Kaz Sasaki.
     
    Toronto’s head of baseball operations Peter Bavasi brought Gillick—who had been gaining a reputation as a front office savant with the Yankees –over to help build the expansion Blue Jays for their inaugural 1977 season. The next year Bavasi moved up to team president, and Gillick took over as GM. With the Blue Jays he immediately set about building a top-notch scouting staff. Two of his most important hires were Al LaMacchia, a longtime scout for the Phillies and Braves, and Bobby Mattick, who had already signed Frank Robinson, Vada Pinson, Curt Flood, and Gary Carter by the time he joined the Blue Jays. Both became important voices within the organization. He joined a minority of teams that shunned the new centralized Major League Scouting Bureau. Gillick was going to assemble his own organization.
     
    Along with slowly building up talent throughout the draft, Gillick looked for other avenues to find players. In the fall of 1977 Gillick began to exploit a little-used “river” when he selected first baseman Willie Upshaw, whom he and Guerrero knew from the Yankees organization, in the Rule 5 draft. This draft allows teams to claim veteran minor leaguers not protected on their club’s 40-man roster, but with the qualification that the selecting team had to keep the player on its major league roster for the entire upcoming season. Over the years Gillick mastered the Rule 5 draft to uncover a number of other valuable contributors, including George Bell, Manny Lee, Jim Gott, and Kelly Gruber.
     
    Gillick was also willing to take risks with multi-sport athletes, accommodating them in ways other teams might not have. In 1977 Gillick drafted multi-sport prep star Danny Ainge in the fifteenth round. Two years later he drafted prep quarterback and baseball catcher Jay Schroeder in the first round, paying a $100,000 bonus and allowing him to play college football at UCLA. In the end, neither panned out but testified to Gillick’s never ending quest for an edge in talent acquisition.
     
    Gillick had known Epy Guerrero, destined to become the Dominican Republic’s greatest scout, at least since 1967 when Gillick was a scout for the Astros and the two signed Cesar Cedeno. In 1977 Guerrero created a rudimentary baseball school for youngsters. Several years later the Blue Jays began to fund the operation, expand it, and run it year round, establishing a prominent presence in the country, one that provided the team an advantage for a decade or more.
     
    In 1983 the Blue Jays finally passed .500, winning 89 games. Two years later they won 99, but lost a heartbreaking ALCS to the Royals. The team continued to win as Gillick integrated a number of young stars–Bell, Tony Fernandez, Tom Henke, Fred McGriff, Duane Ward, John Olerud, David Wells, and Pat Borders—and dealt for Robbie Alomar and Devon White but could not quite capture the pennant. But Gillick still had one more river to fish in. With the opening of Skydome and the associated increase in revenues, he could focus on high-level free agents to augment the club. It would take him one more year, but Pat Gillick would prove a master of this strategy. Gillick also self-imposed a three-year contract limit to prevent getting stuck with aging stars in a long decline phase.
     
    In the 1991-92 offseason Gillick signed 37-year-old Twins pitcher Jack Morris and aging Angels’ slugger Dave Winfield, and the Blue Jays won the World Series. After the 1992 season, Gillick was faced with seven key Blue Jays becoming free agents: Henke, Winfield, Jimmy Key, David Cone, Joe Carter, Manny Lee, and Candy Maldonado. Of the seven, Gillick re-signed only Carter, but added veterans Dave Stewart to bolster the pitching staff and Paul Molitor to replace Winfield at DH. Once again, Toronto won the World Series.
     
    After the strike-shortened 1994 season Gillick stepped aside due to some health concerns and simply tiring out after so many years in one place. A year later he jumped back in as Baltimore’s GM. The team had dropped below .500 in 1995, and owner Peter Angelos wanted to reach the postseason. Gillick went to work. He diagnosed the Orioles biggest deficiencies at second and third base and the bullpen, and the farm system did not offer much immediate help.
     
    Gillick filled these holes quickly and effectively, while still holding to the three-year contract limit he had used in Toronto. He signed free agents Robbie Alomar, his old Toronto standout, to play second, and B.J. Surhoff to play third. To shore up the bullpen, he signed Randy Myers and Roger McDowell. Finally, to make up for the loss of departing free agent hurler Kevin Brown, Gillick traded young outfielder Curtis Goodwin for David Wells, another ex-Blue Jay. The team won the wild card and made it to the ALCS. In 1997 Baltimore won the East with the AL’s best record and again made it to the ALCS before falling to the Indians in a heartbreaking series.
     
    Gillick left Baltimore after the 1998 season (his friend and manager Davey Johnson had left a year earlier). Once again Gillick returned to the game after a year off, this time with the Seattle Mariners. With the opening of their new stadium a year earlier, Seattle’s ownership wanted a championship-quality ball club. Coming off of two sub-.500 seasons, however, a drained farm system and with two of baseball’s biggest stars—Alex Rodriguez and Ken Griffey Jr—scheduled to become free agents one year later, Gillick had his work cut out for him. That they could keep neither (though Gillick did get Mike Cameron included with a package of players in trade for Griffey) meant Gillick needed find players outside the system.
     
    Gillick succeeded spectacularly and quickly, transforming the 79-win 1999 team into one that went to the ALCS in 2000 and won an AL record 116 games in 2001. He turned over nearly the entire squad, masterfully using free agency. Among the key players, John Olerud, Bret Boone, Mark McLemore, Stan Javier, Aaron Sele, Jeff Nelson, Arthur Rhodes, Kazuhiro Sasaki, and Ichiro Suzuki were all signed as free agents in just two off-seasons. Moreover, the final two players in the list came from Japan, a new river for Gillick to fish in, and Ichiro became the first Japanese non-pitcher to excel in the U.S. major leagues.
     
    Though Gillick had wanted to restock the farm system during his years in Seattle, that goal was secondary to delivering a title. He was hampered by the loss of draft choices from all his free agent signings, another pitfall of relying heavily on a free agency. In fact, the Mariners had only one first round draft choice during his four years at the helm and failed to sign him (John Mayberry Jr.). Gillick’s scouts, however, remained active internationally, and the team signed four impact players for the minor league system during Gillick’s tenure: Shin-Soo Choo, Jose Lopez, Felix Hernandez and Asdrubal Cabrera.
     
    After a couple of years out of baseball, Gillick, now 68, took over as the GM in Philadelphia. In contrast to his three previous stops, the Phillies team he took over was filled with young talent, including Ryan Howard, Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, Brett Myers, and Cole Hamels. Over the next couple of years Gillick bolstered his young nucleus with a couple of veteran hurlers, including former Mariner Jamie Moyer, an excellent bullpen, and Jayson Werth. Moreover, he managed to do this without surrendering any of his key players–the core he inherited in 2005 was all on hand to celebrate the World Series victory in 2008.
     
    With his three-year contract up and his third world championship earned, Gillick decided it was time to retire. He was 71 years old and had succeeded with a fourth organization, a remarkable feat unmatched by any other GM, fully validating his credentials as a master team builder. Gillick’s obsessive search for the best players, wherever they may have been, allowed him to thrive in the face of diverse challenges.

    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.
  21. Daniel R Levitt

    #3 — Ed Barrow

    By Daniel R Levitt,

    This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.

    Before feuding owners Jacob Ruppert and Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston turned to Ed Barrow in 1920, the Yankees had never won a pennant. They won their first in 1921 and during Barrow’s tenure went on to win thirteen more as well as ten World Series. Technically hired as business manager—the GM position hadn’t yet been formalized—Barrow concocted on the fly the modern concept of the general manager. He had spent his entire adult life mastering just about every executive position in baseball, and now it would carry over to one more. For the next 24 years in New York he would apply that expertise to building one of the great American sports dynasties.
     
    Before joining the Yankees, Barrow had managed Babe Ruth and the Red Sox to their last World Series championship prior to the “curse.” As president of the International League in the 1910s he had led the battle against the upstart Federal League, a self-declared major league backed by some of the biggest industrialists of the era. Barrow also spent time as a minor league owner, a minor league manager, and manager of the Detroit Tigers. He prided himself on having signed Honus Wagner while a minor league owner, the immortal’s last stop before the majors. As a youth Barrow had boxed and was not afraid to mix it up with players or umpires. He knew just about everyone in baseball and at 52 was ready for a new challenge.
     
    Up to Barrow’s time with the Yankees most teams were run by a team president and the manager. Barrow grasped the potential of his new role perfectly and became the ideal for this position. He defined the job early in his tenure, telling manager Miller Huggins, “You’re the manager, and you’re going to get no interference or second guessing from me. Your job is to win, and part of my job is to see that you have the players to win with. You tell me what you need, and I’ll make the deals—and I’ll take full responsibility for every deal I make.”
     
    The team Barrow inherited had purchased Ruth the year before, and the Babe helped the team to 95 wins and a third place finish. Over the next few years Barrow went back to his old boss and Huston’s close friend, Boston owner Harry Frazee, and using Ruppert’s money bought all the rest of the Red Sox best players. Spending over $400,000 Barrow and the Yankee owners purchased Wally Schang, Everett Scott, Joe Dugan, Sam Jones, Joe Bush, Herb Pennock, and Waite Hoyt–the core of the team that would carry the Yankees to their first three pennants and first-ever World Series victory in 1923.
     
    One of the keys to the Yankees long-term success was Barrow’s amassing possibly the greatest assemblage of scouts in baseball history. After the disastrous 1925 season in which the team fell to 69 – 85, Barrow expanded and reorganized his scouts, creating arguably the first modern scouting department. He hired “Vinegar” Bill Essick to scout the west and Eddie Herr, a former Detroit Tiger scout, whom he assigned to the Midwest. Holdovers Bob Gilks and Ed Holly focused on the South and East respectively. Superscout Paul Krichell remained principally responsible for the colleges, and acted as Barrow’s right hand. Bob Connery purchased a controlling interest in the St. Paul franchise in the American Association and left the Yankees organization to run the Saints.
     
    Over the next few years Barrow continued to fine-tune his scouting staff. He brought in Gene McCann to help in the East and Johnny Nee to take over the South. Several years later the Yankees added the last of their legendary scouts, hiring Joe Devine to help out in the West. Like Barrow’s existing scouts, all three had spent time as minor league managers, a well-mined source for scouts.
     
    Once Frazee’s stable of stars ran out and the other major league teams were under little pressure to sell off their talent during the roaring twenties, Barrow needed another talent source to restock his team. At the time, prior to the inception of the farm system, the minor leagues were run independently and major league clubs purchased or drafted (hopefully) major league-ready players. Barrow’s scouts out-hustled and out-scouted the competition, identifying the top minor league players and cajoling their owners into selling. Over the next decade the Yankees purchased several future Hall of Famers along with many valuable contributors.
     
    The signing of Hall of Fame second baseman Tony Lazzeri typifies Barrow’s process. Barrow often dispatched his scouts to review prospects on short notice, and Krichell joked that every telegram from Barrow started with “immediately” or “at once.” Lazzeri was tearing up the Pacific Coast League, and Krichell traveled to Salt Lake City to scout him, liking what he saw. Although several teams showed some reservation because Lazzeri was epileptic, Krichell recommended Lazzeri to Barrow despite his price tag of $50,000 and five players–a huge outlay for the time. Given the cost, Barrow dispatched Holly to confirm Krichell’s judgment and practically ordered ex-scout Connery, now in St. Paul and no longer a Yankees employee, to also validate Krichell assessment.
     
    When the team next won the World Series in 1927, many of the key players—catcher Pat Collins, second baseman Lazzeri, shortstop Mark Koenig, outfielders Bob Meusel and Earl Combs, and pitcher Wilcy Moore—were all purchases from the minor leagues. Barrow’s crack team of scouts continued identifying and purchasing the best players over the next couple of years, including Bill Dickey, Frank Crosetti, and Lefty Gomez.
     
    With the onset of the Depression in the early 1930s, the minors looked for financial assistance from the majors. In response the majors changed the roster rules to make investing in and controlling in minor league franchises worthwhile. Ruppert quickly grasped the impact of this rule change, ordered Barrow to establish a farm system, and hired George Weiss to run it. To stock what would quickly become the best minor league system in the league, Barrow redirected his scouts to spend more time chasing top amateurs. Of course, the scouts did not completely forgo the high, independent minors, and in 1934 the Yankees purchased Joe DiMaggio for $25,000 and five players, a discount price because of his reportedly bum knee.
     
    Landing the best amateurs required wits, money, salesmanship, and hustle. The Yankee scouts became renowned for selling the benefits of the Yankee organization to prospective signees, and directed by Barrow, quickly proved their mettle in unearthing amateur talent. In 1937, for example, when the Yankees easily won the pennant and World Series, their top farm team in Newark won more than 70% of its games. This minor league team, often considered one of the greatest ever, was led by many future major league players and stars acquired by the Yankees scouts.
     
    The Yankees won four consecutive World Series from 1936 to 1939. During this great run Barrow and manager Joe McCarthy successfully integrated the products of their farm system onto a championship squad, a gutsy but long-term, high-yield approach. By 1939, many of the key players, such as Joe Gordon, Red Rolfe, Charlie Keller, Atley Donald, Marius Russo, and Johnny Murphy, had been signed as amateurs and graduated from the Yankees farm system.
     
    When Ruppert died in 1939, Barrow took over as team president but still ran the team as the de facto GM. In early 1945 the Ruppert trust, needing money to pay its taxes, sold the Yankees to a triumvirate of Larry MacPhail, Del Webb, and Dan Topping. Barrow disliked the flashy MacPhail and unsuccessfully tried to interest his hunting buddy and Boston owner Tom Yawkey in purchasing the club. After the sale the new ownership kicked the 76-year-old Barrow upstairs with a title of chairman of the board, but it was a purely symbolic position.
     
    The team he was forced to sell had a culture and infrastructure in place that would help carry it to another two decades of greatness. As one of the first and most successful men ever to embrace the role of general manager, he helped fashion a position that encompassed the oversight of both the scouting staff and the farm system. That he not only shaped the role, but excelled at it, allowed him to bequeath an organization that would be the envy of baseball for many years to come.

    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.
  22. Daniel R Levitt

    #4 — Bob Howsam

    By Daniel R Levitt,

    This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.
     
    [This one is from Mark]
     
    Bob Howsam considered himself the last of a breed. A protégé of Branch Rickey, who believed in scouting, player development, and the art of making a deal, Howsam built one of history’s greatest teams, the 1970s Cincinnati Reds, a ballclub that reflected that same Rickey-like approach. And he did so at a time when a general manager could not outspend his competition on amateur players around the country, or invest heavily in free agents. Between the advent of the amateur draft (1965) and free agency (1976) Howsam had to rely on the smarts and talent evaluation of his staff and himself. Howsam had all this plus confidence, and he loved working in the game played under these rules.
     
    In 1948 Howsam cobbled together family money to purchase the Denver Bears, a team he ran for the next 13 years, winning a few league titles, setting attendance records, and winning two minor league Executive of the Year awards. In the early 1950s his Single-A team affiliated with the Pirates, allowing to work with and befriend Branch Rickey. In the late 1950s Denver was the Yankees Triple-A club, allowing him to work with George Weiss. Howsam credited both men for his later success — he learned talent evaluation (especially youth and speed) from Rickey, and business and organization from Weiss.
     
    By the late 1950s Howsam had reason to feel that he had conquered minor-league baseball. To that end, he spent a couple of years on two unrelated efforts—bringing professional football and major league baseball teams to Denver. Howsam was one of the leaders behind the Continental League, a proposed rival to the American and National Leagues that planned to open in 1961 — Howsam would have run the Denver club. In football he owned the inaugural Denver Broncos of the AFL. The club finished just 4-9-1 in 1960, and reportedly lost $1 million for Howsam and his family. At the end of the season Howsam sold his business, which meant he lost not only the Broncos, but the Bears and his stadium. He and a friend spent the next three years selling mutual funds.
     
    In August 1964 baseball called him back, somewhat unexpectedly. The St. Louis Cardinals were in the midst of a disappointing season and owner Gussie Busch surprisingly fired his general manager, Bing Devine. Busch had employed Branch Rickey as a senior adviser, and most observers felt that Rickey had undermined Devine, publicly questioning many of the trades he had made. In any event, Rickey now recommended Howsam, his protégé, who became the GM. As fate would have it, the Cardinals rallied (aided by the Phillies collapse) and won the World Series. This was awkward for Howsam, who obviously had nothing to do with the team’s success, but instead had to deal with resentment for the firing of Devine (who was named Executive of the Year a few months after getting axed). After the series victory, manager Johnny Keane resigned, and Busch let Rickey go.
     
    Despite the circus he walked into, and the fact that his team was a champion, Howsam was confident enough in his abilities that he overhauled the front office considerably, keeping only people he trusted and believed in. After the 1965 club fell to seventh place, Howsam traded three aging regulars — Bill White, Dick Groat, and Ken Boyer — very popular players who Howsam correctly believed were near the end of the road. In early 1966 he acquired Orlando Cepeda from the Giants, and after the season picked up Roger Maris from the Yankees. Maris and Cepeda became the number three and four hitters for the club that won the next two pennants and the 1967 World Series. But by that time, Howsam had moved on to Cincinnati.
     
    The Reds had been purchased by a group of local businessman who bought the club primarily to keep it in the city. They did not know anything about how to run a team, and hired Howsam and gave him a three-year contract, more money, and complete power. Unlike most GMs then or later, Howsam ran the entire operation in Cincinnati with very little interference from his bosses.
     
    He inherited a fair bit of talent in Cincinnati. Though the Reds had fallen to 78-84 in 1966, their worst finish since 1960, the farm system had recently produced Pete Rose, Tony Perez, and Lee May, and in 1967 would offer up Johnny Bench. Several of Howsam’s early deals were to trade veterans who were blocking his talented youngsters. Like Rickey, he did not want to have to pay veteran salaries to reserve players, who would likely resent having lost their job.
     
    More than anything, Howsam was a master deal-maker. He had an organization of talent evaluators he believed in, and every fall he held multi-day meetings to go over every player in his organization, and in other team’s organizations. He asked his staff not only for frank assessments of his own team, but also for detailed information on how players on other teams might be valued by their management. When he called a GM to make a deal, he wanted to know before dialing the phone what players his counterpart undervalued. Like Rickey, he looked to trade his players when he sensed decline was coming. In late 1968 he traded star center fielder Vada Pinson to the Cardinals for a player he believed could be Pinson’s equal, only seven years younger, in Bobby Tolan. In the same deal he got Wayne Granger, who became the Reds primary relief pitcher. Howsam made lots of deals, and he almost always got the younger player.
     
    In Howsam’s first three years in charge, the Reds won 87, 83, and 89 games, respectively, finishing only four games out in 1969. After that season Howsam replaced manager Dave Bristol, whom he had inherited, with 35-year-old Sparky Anderson, who had five years of minor-league experience. The choice was met with derision, but Anderson proved to be one of history’s greatest skippers. In his first season the Reds finished 102-60, losing the World Series to the Baltimore Orioles. The Reds had acquired the nickname “The Big Red Machine,” and were led by offensive stars Bench, Rose, May, Perez, and Tolan.
     
    In 1971 a number of Reds had off-years, and the team fell to 79-83 and a tie for fourth. Howsam and Anderson determined that they needed more team speed to return to the top. In December 1971, Howsam pulled off his most famous deal, trading Lee May, second baseman Tommy Helms, and utilityman Jimmie Stewart to the Astros for second baseman Joe Morgan, infielder Denis Menke, outfielders Cesar Geronimo and Ed Armbrister, and pitcher Jack Billingham. Billingham and Geronimo were key members of the upcoming teams, while Morgan, an unappreciated star in Houston, became the best player in baseball. Howsam also added outfielder George Foster and pitcher Tom Hall through trades in 1971.
     
    It was the Morgan trade that turned the Reds from a good team to one of the best teams ever. Over the next five years (1972-76) the Reds won 502 games, four division titles and two World Series. They had the best record in baseball three times, and the year they did not make the post-season, 1974, their 98 wins were surpassed in the game only by the Dodgers, who were in their division. The team was upset in the 1972 World Series by the A’s, and in the 1973 NLCS by the Mets, before finally breaking through with back to back titles in 1975 and 1976. By this time the Reds featured several players drafted by Howsam’s scouts and developed in his system — Ken Griffey, Dave Concepcion, Don Gullett, Rawly Eastwick — and key Howsam trade acquistions — Morgan, Geronimo, Billingham, Foster, Fred Norman, Clay Carroll, Pedro Borbon.
     
    During this time, an era of increasing facial hair in the culture and in baseball, the Reds stood out for their short hair and clean shaven faces. Howsam had very conservative views about the baseball and his players. He was insistent that they wear their uniform a certain way—not too baggy, socks visible up nearly to the knee, low stirrups, black shoes—and the uniforms were clean and pressed each day. While the Cardinals’ players had chafed at Howsam’s old-fashioned sensibilities, the Reds players, starting with the leaders like Rose and Bench, went along. One notable exception was Ross Grimsley, a young star pitcher, who was traded to the Orioles in 1973. To Howsam, looking and performing as a team was part of the formula for success.
     
    The 1976 Reds swept the Yankees in the World Series, their second straight, the crowning achievement of Howsam’s career. He later said that he felt some sadness knowing that no team would ever be put together the way his team had been. Howsam was referring to the onset of free agency in baseball, which would take place in the upcoming offseason for the first time. Howsam was one of baseball’s most vocal hawks on labor matters, speaking out for holding the line during the 1972 strike and the 1976 lockout.
     
    The Reds lost star pitcher Don Gullett to free agency that fall, and lost several other free agents in the coming years, foremost among them Rose and Morgan. After the 1977 season Howsam resigned, taking a position as vice chairman of the board. Despite the free agency losses, the club Howsam built contended for four more years.
     
    Midway through the 1983 season Howsam returned as general manager, a position he held for two years. Howsam’s biggest move was to reacquire Rose in August 1984 and make him player-manager. Rose helped turn the Reds around—beginning in 1985, they finished second for four straight seasons. Howsam retired, as planned, effective July 1, 1985.
     
    Although Howsam’s work in St. Louis is underappreciated (his on-the-fly rebuild is a big reason for the 1967 and 1968 pennants), his efforts to build the Big Red Machine, to take a good team and turn it into a legendary one, is what he is most famous for. But still, he is not appreciated enough. He is not in the Hall of Fame, for one thing. He built and presided over an incredible team, a team filled with some of baseball’s most iconic players, at one of the most competitive periods in baseball history and in its strongest league. With an amateur draft and no free agency, the GMs of the time had to rely on talent evaluation and their own genius. No one ever did it better than Robert Lee Howsam.
     
    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.
  23. Daniel R Levitt
    This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.
     
    George Weiss presided over the greatest sustained run of excellence in baseball history. Under Weiss’s leadership, from 1948 through 1960 the New York Yankees won ten pennants and seven World Series in a thirteen year span. After a slip to third in 1959 Weiss retooled his squad and returned to the top the following season. For this accomplishment The Sporting News named Weiss Executive the Year, the fourth time Weiss had been so honored, more than anyone else in the history of award. For Weiss it was a particularly satisfying honor because the Yankees owners had just forced him out of his position as GM, citing his advanced age of 65. The team Weiss had built went on to win the next four pennants as well, giving the Yankees an incredible fourteen in sixteen years.
     
    Promoted to general manager after the 1947 World Series, the Yankees were already established as baseballs preeminent organization. In the aftermath of the war, however, the existing pecking order was as open as it had been for many years for new leadership. It is to Weiss’s credit that he quickly re-embarked the Yankees on one of the great runs in American sports history.
     
    Weiss succeeded because he understood the importance of creating a strong organization, and he ran it smartly and efficiently. He was not afraid to have strong, intelligent men in subordinate roles. As top assistants Weiss at various times had Bill Dewitt, a one-time baseball owner, and Lee MacPhail, a future great GM and American League president whose father Larry once went on a tirade against Weiss. He also included his entire front office staff in decisions. “The entire organization bears down all the time. Every day, 12 months a year,” Weiss once said. “There’s a restaurant in New York which advertises that it threw away the key when it opened for business. That’s the picture I carry of the Yankees.” In today’s world of 24-hour sports channels and football coaches sleeping in their office, this may seem unremarkable. But in the 1950s, with family ownership and sportsmen owners, Weiss’s professional approach was groundbreaking.
     
    Weiss successfully ran minor league franchises until the Yankees hired him to build and run their fledgling farm system in early 1932, and he quickly turned it into the league’s preeminent operation. A Baseball Digest study in May 1958 looked at which teams had originally signed the active major league players. Of the 318 regulars and top reserves (approximately 20 per team) 43 had originally been signed by the Yankees, nearly one-seventh of the total.
     
    The Yankees were landing quality as well as quantity. All-time greats Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford graduated to the Yankees early in Weiss’s tenure as general manager. Yogi Berra was called up just prior to Weiss’s promotion while he still ran the farm system. That these three were among the best half-dozen players in the league begins to explain the Yankees on-going dominance. Weiss and his crack scouts also filled in around their stars with capable regulars, constantly looking to improve at all positions.
     
    From the end of World War II until the introduction of the amateur draft in 1965, teams stocked their farm systems by signing amateur talent. Weiss and the Yankees, as one of the wealthier franchises naturally competed for many of these players. They paid some top prices for the era, notably $65,000 for Andy Carey, but didn’t differentiate themselves solely with their checkbook. Weiss believed his scouts could out hustle their competitors and dig up amateurs others might miss or not fully recognize their potential. They proved him right: Mantle, Berra, Ford plus future stars such as Bill Skowron, Gil McDougald, Hank Bauer, Bobby Richardson, and Tony Kubek all cost less than $7,000.
     
    The Yankees farm system proved much more successful at developing position players than pitchers. Other than Ford and Vic Raschi, most of the top Yankees pitching during Weiss’s tenure came through trades. The farm system’s surplus of talent and Weiss’s trading acumen allowed the Yankees to pick up most of their top pitchers from other organizations. Valuable hurlers Eddie Lopat, Allie Reynolds and Bob Turley, among others, came via the trade route. Weiss trusted his great scouts to be able to recognize pitchers of ability often struggling with poor won-loss records on second-division teams. He would then acquire these hurlers by surrendering prospects and occasionally cash.
     
    Weiss became a master of the mid-season trade, often using his cash and prospects to add a valuable veteran for the stretch drive. Late in the 1949 season Weiss purchased aging veteran Johnny Mize, who still had a couple of good years left, for $40,000. Other midseason acquisitions included Johnny Sain, Johnny Hopp, Ewell Blackwell, Harry Simpson, and Ryne Duren. Weiss found another source of talent in the Kansas City Athletics. Other than the deal that brought Roger Maris to New York, however, the trades were not nearly as one-sided as often remembered. Kansas City needed to find players somewhere and the World Champion Yankees had good ones.
     
    To some degree, the legacy of all post war general managers and owners is determined by their response to integration. Weiss and the Yankees have been rightly criticized for their slow reaction to bringing in black players. The team’s first black player, Elston Howard, did not appear with the Yankees until 1955, eight years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Brooklyn. Weiss was certainly not alone in either baseball or American society in his embarrassing resistance to integrate. Ten of the sixteen teams still had no black players as late as September 1953. Moreover, most teams did not integrate solely due to a sense of responsibility or morality. Teams signed black players because they wanted to win, and once Robinson had broken down the door and played so well, integration was the best (and cheapest) way to find top talent. The Yankees, uniquely, continued to win without aggressively signing black talent.
     
    Weiss had a reputation as a tough negotiator with his players, which in fact made him little different from most other front office executives. In this era before free agency a player was effectively bound to his team for life, or until the team wanted to trade or release him. With no alternative employment within baseball, the players had little leverage to earn their market value. Relative to the rest of baseball the Yankees paid respectable salaries. For example in 1954, one of the few years the Yankees failed to win the pennant, the team paid a league high $674,622 in player salaries. Pennant winning Cleveland was second at $592,660; the rest of the league ranged from $357,329 to $450,796. In other words, the Yankees had a payroll 50 percent greater than all but one team.
     
    After the Yankees let him go after the 1960 World Series, Weiss still had one act remaining in his baseball career, eagerly jumping into all the challenges and headaches of building the expansion New York Mets organization from scratch. The problem of landing good players turned out to be much more difficult than Weiss imagined. Very few players of major league ability were made available through expansion draft. And with no minor league system, the Mets had no players on hand to trade. Thus, to stock his organization with talent Weiss was limited to trying to make one-sided trades, finding serviceable major league players through waivers, and signing amateur free agents and waiting for them to develop. The lack of talent quickly became apparent, and for their first several years the Mets were the laughingstock of baseball. The team lost an all-time record 120 games in its inaugural season and saw little improvement on the field over the next few years. But by the time Weiss retired after the 1966 season, he had assembled the front office infrastructure that would create the “miracle” 1969 World Series champion and remain a consistent pennant contender thereafter.
     
    Given the Yankees remarkable run with Weiss at the helm, we could have ranked him even higher than we did. The main reason we left him here is because we felt his efforts were considerably aided by the underwhelming, uncommitted and financially compromised competition in the AL in the 1950s. Among the seven teams Weiss competed with, the under-capitalized Browns, Athletics and Senators had no chance at the pennant and no hope of rebuilding with better players. The Chicago White Sox were still run by the Comiskey family, which had not won a pennant since the Black Sox scandal of 1919. In Detroit, the Tigers had deteriorated since the death of Frank Navin in 1945. Only Cleveland and Boston offered any realistic competition to the Yankees, and the Red Sox wasted much of Tom Yawkey’s money on untried bonus players. Weiss did his job exceptionally well, even considering his weak competition, and is certainly worthy of his top five placement.
     
    For a supposedly unemotional man, Weiss was surprisingly sentimental about his baseball career. In his stately old home in Greenwich, Weiss had what he called his “Baseball Room.” Filled with all sorts of memorabilia, including original player contracts and personalized mementoes from baseball greats Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson though Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, the room reflected Weiss’s life. He had spent his entire adult life in baseball with few hobbies. During that time he had helped build and then presided over arguably the greatest sustained run of greatness in American sports history. The mementos and memories were well earned.
     
    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.
  24. Daniel R Levitt
    This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.
     
    [This one is from Mark]
     
    Buzzie Bavasi masterfully presided over a Dodger team that won eight pennants (plus twice lost pennant playoffs) and four World Series titles. He was an organization man in an unparalleled organization, filled with talented men like owner Walter O’Malley, farm director Fresco Thompson, scouting director Al Campanis, manager Walter Alston, the game’s best scouts and instructors and many of its best players. But O’Malley hired Bavasi to run the Dodgers and generally left him alone to do so for 18 years. He would not regret it. “[bavasi] learned [baseball] under Larry MacPhail and Branch Rickey,” Jim Murray once wrote. “That was like learning war under Genghis Kahn and Machiavelli. And Bavasi never knew what it was to work under a dilettante owner, some millionaire who wanted a ball club instead of a yacht.”
     
    Bavasi grew up in a wealthy family in Scarsdale, earned a business degree from DePauw University, and took a job working for MacPhail in 1939. He spent the next decade (save for two years in the army) working in the Dodger system, eventually running their Triple-A club in Montreal. After the 1950 season, Rickey (who had taken over the team in 1942) left the Dodgers for the Pirates, and O’Malley (now in complete control) made Bavasi the new general manager (though he did not get that title for several years).
     
    Rickey left behind a great team, a group that would win four pennants in Bavasi’s first six years — Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, Don Newcombe, Gil Hodges and others — players who would later be known as “The Boys of Summer.” Bavasi did not have to add core players, but he did quite a bit of maintenance to keep the team running at peak performance. He acquired Andy Pafko during the 1951 season, which ended with a playoff loss to the Giants. The same year he purchased Joe Black and Jim Gilliam from the Baltimore Elite Giants — Black gave them one great year, and Gilliam a decade of solid play.
     
    After the 1953 season, Bavasi hired manager Walter Alston, who filled the position for 23 years. Having lost World Series in 1952 and 1953, Brooklyn finally won its first (and only) title in 1955, led by heroes (and recent signees) Sandy Amoros and Johnny Podres. The next year Bavasi acquired Sal Maglie in May, and Maglie finished 13-5 with a 2.87 ERA and helped get them back to the Series again.
     
    After the 1957 season the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, a move which also acts as a useful historical divide for the team and for Bavasi. While it is fair to consider Bavasi the capable caretaker of Branch Rickey’s old team in Brooklyn, that is no longer true by the late 1950s. All of the old “Boys of Summer” were gone or fading, and the team’s continued success in LA should be credited to Bavasi and his organization, and to a masterfully rebuilt team.
     
    The new Dodgers including Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale and Tommy Davis, signed while the team was still in Brooklyn, but the Dodger scouts (and O’Malley’s bankroll) really went to work once they relocated to LA, landing Ron Fairly, Willie Davis, Frank Howard and more. The 1959 Dodgers won a surprising championship with a blend of the past, future, and a few short term solutions, though without star performances. For his efforts Bavasi took home the Executive of the Year award, but he did not rest on his success — by 1961 Howard, Fairly and both Davises had joined the lineup.
     
    From 1962 through 1966 the Dodgers won three pennants (losing a playoff for another), and two World Series. The key to most of these teams were the power pitching of Koufax and Drysdale, and a good offense led by the young players, plus Maury Wills, who also joined the lineup in 1960. It was a remarkable team, and no one deserves more credit for it than Buzzie Bavasi. One man who appreciated him was his boss. “The wheels are always turning in Buzzie’s head,” O’Malley once said. “He’ll work for you 24 hours a day. This is because the man doesn’t sleep.”
     
    As good as the Dodgers were, Bavasi is perhaps underappreciated because he made fewer trades than his contemporaries. “Why play poker,” he said, “when you’re the only one in the game with any money?” The Dodgers developed their own talent, and Bavasi was rarely called upon to find more. In fact, several times every year Bavasi sold players to other teams, and his trades usually included cash sent his way. This income, often well over $100K per year, was reinvested in the organization.
     
    After 18 years as GM, Bavasi longed to get into ownership, which in 1968 caused him to buy into the new San Diego franchise and take control as president and GM. This proved to be a mistake. The principal owner of the Padres, C. Arnoldt Smith, a multimillionaire businessman and close friend of President Nixon, was immediately beset with financial difficulties — including the collapse of his United States National Bank, at the time the largest bank failure in US history. Smith later spent time in prison for embezzlement.
     
    For the first four years Bavasi had to run a team with no money. In late 1972 Bavasi turned the GM duties over to his son, Peter, while remaining as president. In 1974 Smith, facing financial and legal problems, sold the Padres to Ray Kroc, and the team began to improve. Dave Winfield, drafted in 1973, joined the lineup immediately and became their best player. Randy Jones was a star pitcher for a couple of years. Kroc was willing to spend money — Buzzie was apparently the high bidder before Catfish Hunter signed with the Yankees as a free agent at the end of the 1974 season. He stayed aggressive when wholesale free agency started in 1976, landing Gene Tenace and Rollie Fingers. In 1977 Bavasi left the Padres to become president of the California Angels, assuming the GM duties when Harry Dalton left after the season.
     
    The Angels had some talent when Bavasi arrived, but he enhanced things considerably. Within a few months he had traded for Brian Downing and signed Lyman Bostock. The 1978 team won 87 games, the most in club history. After the season Bavasi traded for Dan Ford and Rod Carew, and in 1979 the team won its first division title. Bavasi brought in more talent in the coming years, landing Fred Lynn, Rick Burleson, Doug DeCinces, Bob Boone and Reggie Jackson, enough to cop another division crown in 1982. Both teams lost in the LCS. Bavasi ran the Angels until 1984 when he finally retired.
     
    Although he had some success in Anaheim, Bavasi’s place in history rests with his 18 years running the Dodgers. The Dodgers had a strong organization before he became GM, but Bavasi unquestionably made it stronger and led the club to some of its greatest successes, including four of the six World Series titles the franchise has won in its history.

    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.

  25. Daniel R Levitt
    This post is part of a series in which Mark Armour and I count down the 25 best GMs in history, crossposting from our blog. For an explanation, please see this post.
     
    [This one is from Mark]
     
    Harry Dalton was the GM for three teams over a 25 year period, winning five pennants and contending for several others. His claim to fame was his work in Baltimore, where he made a series of moves to turn a very good team into one of the greatest ever assembled.
     
    When Dalton went to work for the Orioles in late 1953, he was a 25-year-old Amherst grad just back from serving in Korea. He spent the next seven years working as a key lieutenant for farm director Jim McLaughlin. Though the Orioles organization made progress in the 1950s, things might have gone better without the ongoing battle between McLaughlin and manager/GM Paul Richards, each with his own autonomous scouting staff. Richards relinquished his GM duties to Lee MacPhail in 1958, and by 1961 both Richards and McLaughlin were gone. MacPhail promoted Dalton to run an extraordinarily productive farm system. Dalton’s talented team of scouts became known as “The Dalton Gang,” and his organization included legendary coaches and instructors like Earl Weaver and Cal Ripken, Sr. After the 1965 season MacPhail left to work in the commissioner’s office, and Dalton became general manager.
     
    The Orioles had been a good team for several years by this time, winning 97 and 94 games the previous two seasons. MacPhail’s last act was to work out a trade with the Reds that would land Frank Robinson. He left approval of the deal to Dalton, who tried to extract another piece from Reds GM Bill DeWitt. DeWitt balked, but Dalton sensibly chose to authorize the deal in its original form. Robinson became the leader of the team, and won the Triple Crown and MVP while he was at it. The Orioles won the 1966 World Series.
     
    The Orioles fell back in 1967, largely due to injuries to Robinson, Jim Palmer and Dave McNally. When the club failed to rebound adequately in 1968, reaching the All-Star break at 43-37, Dalton fired manager Hank Bauer and gave the job to Earl Weaver, who had spent many years in the organization as a Minor League manager. Weaver was not shy about making changes, playing Don Buford (a great Dalton acquisition) and Ellie Hendricks, and taught the Oriole Way that Dalton had long championed in the minors.
     
    After the 1968 season Dalton traded outfielder Curt Blefary to Houston for pitcher Mike Cuellar, who won 125 games over the next six seasons. The next three years the Orioles won over 100 games, waltzed to division titles, and swept the ALCS. That they only were able to win one World Series masked how great this team was. So good, in fact, that Dalton only had to make one trade of note — he dealt some unneeded players to the Padres for Pat Dobson, who won 20 games in 1971. In six years Dalton won four pennants and two World Series in Baltimore.
     
    After the 1971 season Dalton left the Orioles and took a job as GM of the Angels. The difference in the situations could hardly have been larger — the Angels had just come off a fourth place finish on the field and a much worse one off of it. Picked to win the AL West by many pundits, they endured the emotional breakdown of their defending batting champ, Alex Johnson, the breakdown and retirement of newly acquired slugger Tony Conigliaro, a gun confrontation in the clubhouse, additional turmoil between teammates, and more. Not surprisingly, the manager and general manager both lost their jobs. Owner Gene Autry hired Dalton to straighten it all out.
     
    A few weeks after taking over, Dalton traded the longtime face of the franchise, Jim Fregosi, to the Mets for four players. One of the players, Nolan Ryan, became a star, making this the best trade in team history. Unfortunately, this proved to be the high water mark of his six years in Anaheim. A year later he made another big deal, trading star pitcher Andy Messersmith to the Dodgers for Frank Robinson (returning to the AL to utilize the new DH rule), pitcher Bill Singer (who would win 20 games the next season), and Bobby Valentine. The key to the deal for Dalton was Valentine, a talented 22-year-old who could hit, run and play centerfield. Unfortunately, in May 1973 Valentine tore up his knee on Anaheim’s chain link fence trying to catch a fly ball. He never recovered his former speed, and never fulfilled the promise many had for him.
     
    Dalton continued to make deals, but he just never really had enough talent. The team had drafted Frank Tanana in 1971, and a few years later he and Ryan were their best two players. The only impact player drafted on Dalton’s watch was Carney Lansford, who did not help until Dalton had left. Desperate for offense, in late 1975 he traded Ed Figueroa and Mickey Rivers for Bobby Bonds, in what turned into a great deal for the Yankees. Bonds had a great year for the Angels in 1977 before he moved to his next stop.
     
    With the advent of free agency in 1976 Autry was ready to go all-in, and Dalton made an unappreciated, canny move. The rules in the first year of free agency stipulated that a team could only sign two players, unless they lost more than two themselves, in which case they could sign as many as they lost. The Angels played the 1976 season with two unsigned players: seldom used utility men Paul Dade and Billy Smith. On September 9, the Angels purchased infielder Tim Nordbrook from the Orioles, an unusual transaction for a team that was in fifth place. What made this deal interesting was that Nordbrook was also soon to be a free agent, giving the Angels a total of three. The Angels made no effort to sign Nordbrook, so they ultimately “lost” three players who combined for 25 at bats and 4 hits in the 1976 season. Having lost three players, Dalton was able to sign Don Baylor, Joe Rudi, and Bobby Grich.
     
    The Angels looked to be a contender for 1977, but Rudi and Grich both got hurt and the team stumbled to fifth place. Rudi was through, but Grich recovered to continue his great career the next season. Too late for Dalton, who left after the season to become GM of the Brewers. Dalton likely could have stayed on, but he was unhappy when Autry hired Buzzy Bavasi to be team president, Dalton’s boss. When Bud Selig offered him the job in Milwaukee, Dalton was assured that he would be in charge. The squad he left behind in California would capture its first division title two years later.
     
    In Milwaukee, Dalton inherited some talent: Robin Yount, Cecil Cooper, Sixto Lezcano, and Paul Molitor (who would debut in 1978). That said, the team had won 67 games in 1977, and had not finished .500 in their nine-year history. That would change quickly as the Brewers won 93 games in 1978, advanced to the playoffs in 1981 and to the World Series in 1982. The six-year period from 1978 to 1983 remains the best in Brewers history.
     
    Dalton made some good moves to get this team over the hump and keep it there. He traded for Buck Martinez and Ben Oglivie soon after he arrived. He made a huge deal in December 1980 with the Cardinals, landing Rollie Fingers and Pete Vukovich (who between them won the next two Cy Young Awards), and catcher Ted Simmons, their new cleanup hitter.
     
    After a few down years, the Brewers came back to contention in the late 1980s with a new team centered around Molitor and Yount, plus players Dalton’s staff had signed or drafted, like Teddy Higuera, BJ Surhoff, and Chris Bosio. Milwaukee won 91 games in 1987 and finished just two games back in 1988 but failed to get back to the post-season. Dalton was released from his contract after the 1991 season after 14 years in charge.
     
    That Dalton was not able to repeat his Baltimore success in his next two stops is not surprising — his Oriole squads were among the best teams ever, a team he helped put together in the minor leagues and helped turn into a juggernaut as the GM. He inherited a mess with the Angels, and while he improved the talent level, he was not able to win the division. In Milwaukee he had more talent to work with and he made some key additions that helped the Brewers capture their only pennant.
     
    To read more about the history of baseball operations and the GM, please buy our new book In Pursuit of Pennants–Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball via the publisher or at your favorite on-line store.
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