Imagine this conversation between Steve Cohen and David Stearns shortly after Stearns was officially installed as the Mets new president of baseball operations:
Stearns: “The first thing we have to do is get rid of Buck Showalter.”
Cohen: “Why?”
Stearns: “Because, Steve, any time you have a chance to hire Carlos Mendoza as your manager you absolutely have to do that!”
OK, so maybe that isn’t exactly how the conversation went down when Cohen explained to the media back on Oct. 2 that Showalter was shown the door because he felt obligated to let his new president of baseball operations hire his own manager. I’m sure Cohen fully believed Stearns would be bringing in his sidekick in Milwaukee, Craig Counsell, the primo manager on the free agent market. Neither one of them realized how little appetite Counsell had for managing in New York. But in the end Stearns got what he wanted in Mendoza, a nice guy who interviewed well and who everyone likes, but with no previous managerial experience will obligingly do whatever Stearns’ analytics geeks lay out for him, with no pushback.
This unfortunately is what the state of managing has come to in the new age of analytics in baseball, and Counsell should be commended for shattering the appallingly low salary structure for managers, with the record five-year, $40 million deal he negotiated from the Cubs. You could make the case that the most important person on any major league team is the manager, who not only is in charge of the game on the field but is the front man for the entire organization every day of the season.
But that isn’t how the new wave of analytically–driven GMs see managers. In their view the manager is simply a necessary appendage to the analytics department — whose decisions on lineups, player availability (i.e. load management) are all made for him. Which is why most managers in baseball are earning less than $2 million, or akin to what middle relievers and backup infielders make. It’s baseball’s disgrace.
This is one of the reasons why Showalter, at the time a three-time Manager of the Year, waited three years between managing jobs before being hired by the Mets in 2021. Money may have been a reason why Showalter didn’t get the Angels job last week, despite his longtime close relationship with Angels GM Perry Minasian, although I suspect a bigger factor was that Angels owner Arte Moreno wanted to hire a minority — and he couldn’t have gotten a more qualified one in two-time American League pennant winner Ron Washington.
The truth is Showalter should be glad he didn’t get the Angels job. It’s the worst managing job in baseball, starting with the fact that Minasian is in the last year of his contract and the mercurial Moreno has made no effort to extend him. That aside, the Angels are (1) a bad team in one of the most competitive divisions in baseball with the Rangers, Astros and Mariners, (2) with not much coming in the farm a system, and (3) a $245 million third baseman, Anthony Rendon, they can’t get to play. Throw in the fact that constant injuries have rendered Mike Trout a shell of the player Moreno extended for 12 years, $426 million in 2019 and the uncertainty of Shohei Ohtani re-signing, and what Washington is looking at is a team guaranteed to have a ninth straight losing season. It’s probably why Moreno gave him only a two-year contract.
IT’S A MADD, MADD WORLD
The selection of Orioles GM Mike Elias as major league executive of the year is a real puzzlement. Yes, the Orioles had a breakthrough 101-win season and made the postseason for the first time since 2016, but as far as the personnel was concerned, Elias had very little to do with it, other than drafting catcher Adley Rutschman No. 1 (over Bobby Witt Jr.) in 2019, a decision you couldn’t miss on either way. Otherwise, the Orioles core players, Ryan Mountcastle, Anthony Santander, Cedric Mullins, Austin Hays, and even their very promising rookie right-handed starter Grayson Rodriguez, were all brought into the organization by Elias’ predecessor Dan Duquette. And even though it was clear to everyone the Orioles had a huge deficit in their starting rotation, Elias, both last winter and at the trade deadline, failed to address it adequately and that was why the Orioles flamed out in the division series. They still have big holes in their rotation and there are plenty of free agent front line starters out there — Blake Snell, Aaron Nola, Jordan Montgomery, Sonny Gray, Eduardo Rodriguez — but just going on past performance there is no reason to believe Elias’ penurious Orioles will sign any of them. At the trade deadline, they could have had Dylan Cease from the White Sox but Elias refused to sacrifice any of his top prospects at Triple-A, all of whom are blocked at the big league level, and wound up with Jack Flaherty from the Cardinals who was awful and pitched one inning of relief in the ALDS. Meanwhile, Braves’ GM Alex Anthopoulos somehow finished second to Elias despite the fact he acquired almost everyone on their 104-win team, most notably beating out a half dozen of his peer in his brilliant trade for catcher Sean Murphy last winter. And where in the heck was Kim Ng in the voting? Apparently nowhere despite the fact that she literally traded the underfinanced Marlins into the postseason with her inspired deals for Luis Arraez, Josh Bell and Jake Burger, along with her gutsy hiring of Skip Schumaker as manager…The announcement last week that MLB settled a federal law suit and two others in New York State by the parent companies of the Staten Island Yankees, Tri-City Valley Cats, Salem-Keizer Volcanoes and Norwich Sea Unicorns — all of whom had their franchises eliminated when baseball downsized the minor leagues from 160 teams to 120 in September 2020 — kind of slipped under the radar. But I’m told it cost the MLB owners well over $100 million, especially the anti-trust one which they obviously feared could be headed all the way to the Supreme Court.
