The Futility Infielder

It's a horrible time to be a young, progressive GM or a statheaded fan of one. In a three-day span we've seen both the Dodgers' Paul DePodesta and the Red Sox Theo Epstein leave their posts, the former fired by a thin-skinned, impatient owner, the latter unwilling to work with his poisonous viper of a mentor, walking away from a contract extension that had been reported as done. With both the Dodgers and the Red Sox failing to live up to the lofty accomplishments of their 2004 seasons, the departures will doubtless be spun by the mainstream mediocrity, er, media as repudiations of the Moneyball ethos that links the two bright young execs. Time to invest in a new pair of hip waders, kids, because the bullshit will be especially deep.

Obviously, there are some similarities between the two cases. The 2005 editions of both the Dodgers and the Red Sox were done in by injuries, a stupefying, record-setting avalanche of them in the case of the former, a smaller handful centering around a pair of gritty pitchers who left more than a little piece of themselves on the field during their championship run in the case of the latter. Both GMs were in the process of turning over aged, expensive rosters assembled by their predecessors, looking to shed large salaries while building from within, but they never got a chance to implement their visions fully.

The tenures of both GMs were curtailed by the duplicitous conduct of those above them -- senior VP Tommy Lasorda planting the bug in owner Frank McCourt's ear that it was time to get back to the Dodger Way, Sox CEO Leaky Larry Lucchino chafing at the credit his protegé received and, as is his modus operandi, using the media to retaliate. The media played a role in DePo's demise as well, with the Bill Plaschkes and T.J. Simerses of the world bashing him endlessly in the pages of the L.A. Times and elsewhere since the day he was hired, preying on the undercapitalized and inexperienced McCourt's sensitivity to criticism while doggedly defending the old guard.

I could write 5000 words on this if I had the time, and indeed I will, only you won't get to read them unless you buy Baseball Prospectus 2006 (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). With a heap of player comments and other work awaiting me, I'm going to conserve my bullets, though I'll offer a few here:

• Jon Weisman of Dodger Thoughts points out the rough edges of the so-called Dodger Way, such as the unseemly departures of True Blue heroes like Jackie Robinson, the Longest-Running Infield, Dusty Baker and Kirk Gibson, and the fact that for all of the team's historical success, they have never made the postseason for more than two years in a row. Shocking, isn't it? Here's more:

It was legendary Dodger executive Branch Rickey, a statistician, who said it was better to trade a player a year early than a year late. That is the foundation of the Dodger tradition.

Meanwhile, Tommy Lasorda's 1988 World Series title was preceded by three losing seasons out of four from 1984-87. The only place that the Dodgers have valued stability over performance in the past 50 years, where one could fail or grow old without repercussions, has been the front office.

The idea that somehow, Paul DePodesta violated the Dodger ethos by trading Paul Lo Duca or Dave Roberts, or letting Adrian Beltre go, or watching a division winner have a losing season the following year, is patently absurd, and anyone who says otherwise has simply forgotten or chosen to forget the team's history.

...The Dodgers traditionally win when they rely on their farm system and the farm system produces. To be sure, the farm system doesn't always produce. But in their entire history in Los Angeles, the team has made only one playoff appearance with fewer than five home-grown players in the starting lineup. That team was the hallowed 2004 team at whose breakup everyone is so aghast.

DePodesta bet his future on the Dodger Way, transforming the team into one that was going to rely on the farm system, supported by a few outside acquisitions. He had not finished the job - a 71-91 record indicates that - but he was doing exactly what people have been asking for since 1988. He was doing exactly what the Dodgers have been doing almost forever.

Slam dunk. Weisman, who was quoted in an L.A. Times article on the Dodger shakeup, has several essential links to other good articles, both in the blogs and the mainstream media.

• Rich Lederer of Basball Analysts has no fewer than 32 questions for McCourt. "If experience is so important, why do the McCourts think they know how to run a baseball team?" asks one. "If McCourt 'wants Dodgers here,' then how does [crusty old GM candidate Pat] Gillick fit into that goal?" asks another. "Is baseball the only business in the world in which a degree from Harvard is a negative?" Inquiring minds want to know.

• At The Juice Blog, Will Carroll steps out of his roles as injury analyst and rumor hound to link the DePodesta firing to the White Sox winning the World Series:

People will mark the day that the White Sox won the World Series as the beginning of the backlash, though it began at the tipping point the other way. The sabermetric revolution reached the masses -- and the ears of many owners for the first time - with Moneyball... Sabermetrics was a long, meaningless word with difficult spelling and to date, I'm not sure it's ever been uttered on ESPN without being attached to Moneyball.

As Beane's philosophy spread apostle-like (or more accurately, restarting a tradition of coaches such as Bear Bryant, Bill Walsh, and Vince Lombardi, as well as Paul Richards) to Toronto, Boston, and Los Angeles, as well as other outposts like Cleveland, Colorado, and Texas, the great story of Moneyball fast became legend. Legend, as we all know, trumps fact every time. The legend threatened a tobacco-stained oligarchy because they felt threatened, not that they were. No organization got rid of scouts and when they did fire them, it was never because they were replaced by a laptop. Scouts get fired, regularly, by organizations of all stripes. Almost everyone in baseball understands the "hired to be fired" mentality of the game.

...There have been books and columns and insane, fact-ignoring rants in the years since Moneyball came out and became the descriptive term for using business-based methodology in baseball. Most have some basis in friendship - writers protect their friends and more importantly their sources - and in fact. The book short-shrifted scouts in order to make a good story. By writing that good story and shifting it to a Faulknerian good vs bad scenario, Moneyball did as much damage as it did good. Don't get me wrong - it's a phenomenal book. It's a bad legend.

So it's really the book, or the idea of the book, and not the Kenny Williams-Ozzie Guillen Series win that started the backlash... The upcoming backlash is a quick snack, the snap judgement of those looking for a reason. The White Sox are a broken bottle, the weapon of opportunity, not of choice. They'll just as soon bludgeon the Yankees and Red Sox with their own checkbooks. They'll ignore the blended approach of Tim Purpura, Kevin Towers, and Walt Jocketty for the more expeditious free-swinging high risk, high reward Angels and White Sox. The backlash will be led by people that would be better served by trying to find a new generation to mold, to find the middle ground that so many refuse to acknowledge exists.

A must-read.

• ESPN's Jerry Crasnick notes the odd timing of the DePodesta move after DePo fired manager Jim Tracy:

Think about it: Is there a more dysfunctional scenario than ownership cutting loose the manager and general manager three weeks apart? Short of walking around wearing sandwich signs with "We're Clueless" on the front, the McCourts couldn't have provided a greater gift to media critics who view them as an easy target.

...There's no disputing that DePodesta's personal style was detrimental to his job security. He was harder to find than Sandy Koufax during spring training in Vero Beach. And in crisis time -- for instance, when the Dodgers took a pounding for backing out of the Javier Vazquez trade last winter -- he was slow to return phone calls and articulate his position to the press. Maybe he just felt that he shouldn't have to, that he was smarter than everybody else.

But this much is clear: DePodesta deserved more than 21 months to execute his vision and prove himself, just as his predecessor, Dan Evans, didn't deserve to be canned after two years on the job. There has to be a happy medium between Chuck LaMar's decade-long tenure with Tampa Bay and management-by-turnstile in LA.

• Turning to Epstein, most Sox fans are sympathetic to his plight and his reasons for leaving. Here's Sully from The House That Dewey Built:

Thank you for everything, and know that you will always have legions of admirers, particularly amongst my demographic (College Grads in their 20’s). Graduating college and entering the real world can be tough because there’s no real manual on demeanor, professionalism, humility and really just how to carry yourself as an ambitious young adult. But the reason why this one will hurt for a long time for us is that I think we all got the sense that Theo had it all down pat - extremely hard working, smart, humble and ultimately, principled. I have no doubt that he will enjoy considerable success throughout the remainder of his working life.

Noting that Epstein is "no Brian Cashamn," David Pinto of Baseball Musings writes, "Good for Theo. He stuck to his guns and when it wasn't going to work out, he left. It's the Red Sox loss. Theo can go home knowing his the only living person to put together a championship in Boston."

I found Pinto's Cashman comparison a bit puzzling at first, commenting

Cashman had the clout to extract a commitment from his boss that the Yankee front office would be more functional and orderly (not that it means things will work out that way, but admitting you have a problem is the first step).

Epstein clearly did not have that clout, and now the Sox lose a promising GM who, as you say, is the only who can claim to have brought them a championship. Epstein loses a high-proflie job where he had huge resources to draw upon, not to mention the eternal goodwill of the fanbase for his role in ending the 86-year drought. I'm not sure I see a win for either side there, except in the Pyrrhic sense.

To that comment, Pinto replied, "The Brian Cashman line was to reflect how people think Steinbrenner is impossible to work with, but Cashman does it. It turns out that it's Lucchino that's the tough one to deal with. At least with the Boss you always know where you stand."

Mmmm, delicious irony covered with a special, creamy schadenfreude sauce. The man who called the Yankees the Evil Empire (and who drove Alex Rodriguez into their waiting arms) has proven to be a more odious boss than George Steinbrenner himself, odious enough to drive away the best and brightest from his dream job.

I should say, mind you, that my sense of schadenfreude is towards Lucchino, not towards Sox fans reading this. You guys (and gals) have been jobbed out of the man who brought equality to one of sport's great rivalries, the man who's made the past three years of Yankee-Red Sox matchups into Ali-Frazier heavyweight title bouts, exhilarating and exhausting. Which isn't to say that the rivalry won't continue on the equal footing it's been on the past three years, but you folks want to see Lucchino's lifeless feet swinging from a lamppost even more than I do.

• My BP colleague Christina Kahrl hits a home run on the two GM departures in her latest Transaction Analysis:

In case you've missed the events of the last 72 hours, counterrevolution is the fashion, and as our own Will Carroll has put it, the weapon of choice is the White Sox. Skip however smug and frequently fact-free interpretations of why the White Sox won are--maybe it's just me, but "pitching, defense and the three-run home run" was Earl Weaver's formula, not Gene Mauch's. However much Ozzieball is a put-up job, it's manna from heaven for the industry's old guard, a generation of men grown jealous in recent years over the credit heaped upon the game's up-and-coming wave of general managers.

However unnecessary the "rivalry" between old-school baseball and the next generation of management techniques could and should have been, that struggle has taken on a life of its own. In this sort of contest, the scorecard is not one that counts whether DePo and Theo were both General Managers of teams in the postseason in 2004, or one that records that Epstein's Red Sox did something that Gorman's or Duquette's did not. Success is apparently not the measure of success, it is instead what the now-unfashionable smart kids were damned well supposed to deliver, and the moment that they didn't, they were there to be scapegoated.

These are not the same stories, this particular tale of two cities, but I would suggest that both team's decisions to make changes at the top reflect a battle over fundamentals, not just over the way the game is operated, but how it is supposed to be remembered, and more basically, who is supposed to be remembered. In Beantown, the capacity for jealousy is what poisoned what was supposed to be a model for success in contemporary front office management. Sadly, a team president seems unusually insecure over his place in history. But when America was treated to the bizarre spectacle of Tom Werner, the man who Huizenganated San Diego baseball, suddenly sharing in the credit for Boston's victory in 2004, we were reminded of the truth in the adage that victory has many fathers, while defeat is an orphan.

After exploring the specifics of the two situations, Karhl sounds a topical note when turning her attention to the media's role in all of this:

The poisonous synergy between baseball's old guard and media figures only too ready to rely upon them for the peculiarly dopey "inside dope" is a significant component of this backlash. Both are motivated by careerism, and both stand to lose a lot to what will inevitably be characterized as the "Moneyball" generation of GMs. Again, baseball reflects the times in which we live, an age where the historical actors and the fourth estate interact in such a way that each simultaneously perverts and supports the purposes of the other. Journalists consider their jobs to be no more than the regurgitation of the information they're handed, either from every baseball club's increasingly polished media relations department, or courtesy of some unnamed inside source. It doesn't matter that such sourcing is transparent, whether it's Bob Nightengale's reliance on tales told by two owners named Jerry, or Dan Shaughnessy playing Howdy Doody to fulfill the desire of a Larry To Be Named Later to play "who's your daddy." The '90s showed us that careers involving hopping up and dancing on laps were lucrative; little did we know it was journalism that was the real growth industry on that score. Face it, whether you're a columnist or you're on the beat, once you've settled in, it's not only easy to settle for repeating what you're told, it spares you a lot of the lame daily exercise that goes with chasing down stale pre- and postgame quotes. Nobody thinks of affording themselves the opportunity to pursue actual storylines, like the events of a game (you know, the news event), or assessing a team's performance using facts. Such things simply are not done.

But however bad that content, or however transparent its craven quality, however standard-issue the bilge may be, that bilge possesses an addictive quality all its own to the subjects of such attention. Insulated within their profession, baseball management, on the field or off, is notoriously tin-eared. It's this that links these two decisions, whether it is Lucchino's jealousy of the credit given to his one-time protege, or McCourt's fear of being singled out for not being a good "baseball guy" for hiring one of those damned kids. In both cases, the elder man has betrayed his responsibilities to the future to hoard the worthless kudos of fickle friends. In each case, I would suggest they have made life easier for their division rivals in the long term. In the short term, whoever inherits the Dodgers has a great chance to look good for a year before being forced to rely on his own judgement. As for the immediate future for whoever goes to Boston, I think it's much less rosy: whoever goes in is going to have to have plenty of Blistex on hand to keep the Bossling happy, while having very little actual control over the franchise.

Fantastic stuff, at least if you're a BP subscriber.

There are plenty of nuances to both of these stories, and I wish I could take all day to explore them. Suffice it to say that the men chosen to fill these gaps will add a great deal of further context to these two departures, which seemed so improbable just a few weeks ago. While neither DePodesta nor Epstein may find themselves at the helm of another team this winter, we haven't heard the last of either man or the chaos left in their wake.