Management by Baseball

Baseball is way ahead of most lines of work in this skill set. An ideal manager finds the perfect balance Earl Weaver-style, making sure that most of the time the contributor is doing the things the individual can do better than anyone else available for the task while at the same time throwing her into situations that enable her to get experience and possibly grow in her abilities to be a high achiever in domains that are currently not her strengths.

There's another key factor a manager must balance: how many different things the individual can juggle. Some people thrive on doing a little of everything so they don't get bored. Others need to be doing the same thing over and over to stay in a groove. Neither is a good or bad pattern, just a working style factor the manager must understand and apply to the organization's and individual's advantage -- understanding, too, that there's a balance in this tool's application. Sometimes you can't optimize against a single staffer's skill pattern because the immediate requirement doesn't allow for it. In general, managers should worry less about those exceptions, though, than the general ability.

One of the interesting things about this practice is that how "difficult" the tasks you throw at a contributor are ends up being less of a factor than the contributor's individual strengths.

THRIVING IN THE SHARK TANK
Take Red Sox starter Matt Clement. After coming up through the San Diego Padres organization and pitching for them and the Florida Marlins and Chicago Cubs, Clement signed as a free agent with the Boston Red Sox over the winter. At this point, Clement is 9-1 with a Composite ERA of 3.33 (about 18% better than the A.L. average). Here are some of the component numbers from MLB.Com (w/some numbers I've added in the last two columns).

Year		TEAM	AVG	PA	NP		K/BB		BB/9		K/9		H9		HR9		G/F
1999		San Diego	.273	803	2903		1.53		4.28		6.73		9.46		0.9		1.9
2000		San Diego	.248	940	3536		1.32		5.49		7.46		8.52		1.0		2.0
2001		Florida	.267	760	2803		1.54		4.52		7.12		9.14		0.8		1.4
2002		Chicago Cubs	.215	858	3241		2.34		3.73		9.44		7.11		0.8		1.6
2003		Chicago Cubs	.227	851	3148		2.11		3.53		7.63		7.54		1.0		2.0
2004		Chicago Cubs	.229	775	2997		2.35		3.83		9.45		7.71		1.1		1.6
2005		Boston	.247	432	1643		2.56		2.81		7.19		8.42		0.5		1.4

Clement's Strikeout to walk ratio (K/BB) equals (exceeds slightly) the best of his career. That's because his walk frequency (BB/9) is a big improvement over his previous best while his strikeouts have actually declined a little. He has a vast apparent improvement in his home runs yielded rate (HR/9) though that's puffed up a little bit by pitching at home in a more homer-hostile Fenway Park this year (~34% less homer-ific than league average) than he did last year in homer-friendly Wrigley Field (~33% more homer-ific than league average); he still is markedly better this year than last in home runs allowed. And he's inducing more fly balls than he did in the past, comparable with his 2001 season which looked like an outlier before this year.

His pitching approach is quite different. Through about the first half of this year, his change to the American League seems to have altered his past patterns and so far, yielding what's looking to be his best season ever. And let's note that conventional wisdom says long-time National League pitchers find it harder to succeed in the American, where teams have an additional potential "real" batter w/the D.H. batting for the pitcher.

¿Why is Clement succeeding so far?

According to an article by Peter Gammons this month:

Usually when pitchers go from the National League to the American, people worry about the impact of the tougher lineups. But this has suited Matt Clement. "I really like the fact that all I have to do every day is concentrate on pitching," says the 6-0 Clement. "I don't have to worry about hitting, or holding a bat, or running the bases. Jason Varitek has helped me immensely, but so has concentrating on pitching." Cubs folks feel that not having to run the bases is good for Clement, who is asthmatic.

Simplification. This is one of those cases where it doesn't matter how difficult the assigned task is in general. If you give a talented contributor a tough task and clear out other distractions you give him a chance to focus on that difficult thing and make it seem not difficult.

BEYOND BASEBALL
As a manager, you can't always snap apart and re-assemble task assignemnts to take advantage of this, but if you're not experimenting at all with re-tuning assignments, you're undermining your potential by falling into the trap of ignoring individuals' varying abilities and ways of succeeding.

Where do you start if you haven't yet?

Create an inventory of staffer's individual abilities and holes in their swing. Compare that inventory with the inventory of what strengths you need for specific tasks. Experiment with assignments, especially team assignments (so individuals with more experience in the specific task can combine their experience with the newcomer's possible skill at it). Experiment with simplification, a la Matt Clement, or breaking up repetitive work for others who tend to do mostly the same thing. to see if after some time has transpired the change improves productivity or quality.

In case it's of interest to you, I'm going to be doing some radio this week talking about Management by Baseball. I think these are all live shows.

Organizations that have the capability of growth or change (that is, have a chance to be successful) have to master a few universal ideas, regardless of what endeavour they are in. I've written about a few of them before, but a recent experience I had with a client impels me to bring it up again, and with some new baseball examples that describe it better than any other case study can (as usual).

When the talent is the product, and in most organizations that add value and aren't just plaqueing up the world that's the case, it's important for management to remember that the job description is not the employee.

[] THE JOB DESCRIPTION IS NOT THE EMPLOYEE
In baseball, teams rarely make the mistake of forgetting the player is a bundle of aptitudes, strengths and weaknesses, strengths that might fade, weaknesses one might coach them beyond. Successful franchises are capable of changing a player's position based on development or a better chance to succeed in the organization. The NL champion 1977 Dodgers, for example, had two people they acquired to be outfielders, in their infield (Dave Lopes and Bill Russell), a player drafted as a middle-infielder in right (Reggie Smith), and a first baseman who'd started as a third-sacker (Steve "Father of his Country...Or At Least A Lot of Its Population" Garvey).

Baseball management is exemplary in being free of the misconception that once a staffer has a title or a set of responsibilities that the staffer loses their individuality and seemingly becomes a 3rd Baseman or a Pinch-Hitter. They are willing to move players around to various roles and positions for the player's advantage (the position the minor-league player currently plays is blocked by an all-star veteran with a long contract), training them to play another position. They're willing, of course, to do it for their own benefit, when they have a sunk investment or a need.

And, of course, there are weak front offices who are slow or even unwilling to see the advantages for both player and team, stuck as they are to conflating the job description with the person currently in the job.

The Blue Jays' Poet-Novelist-Starting Pitcher Miguel Batista, was acquired to be a starter. But last year, the bullpen was struggling and the Jays had a crop of promising young arms coming up to the big team. The team needed bullpen help, Batista stepped right up -- was willing and able. They didn't have to trade him to make room for a starting spot and then engineer another trade for bull-pen help; they moved him from one role/job description to another role/job description, saving a lot of staffing logistics overhead. In business, it's incredibly exhausting and expensive to hire good staff (and more expensive to hire bad staff), costing time and focus and energy better applied to making progress.

Large organizations have a lot to learn from baseball in this. To quote myself from before...

Bad front offices never look under the label, assuming because when they acquired a player, and they labeled him a shortstop or a starter or a middle-of-the-lineup batter, that to shift him to a different role would cost them "face".

For a weak front office, the label becomes the player, and the player himself disappears, objectified, frozen like a fly in amber, preserved in the viewer's perception and dead as a frelling doornail.

In baseball's strong front offices, players are individuals, taken as they are with all their actual history, potentialities and ability to change and grow.

Outside of baseball, frankly, almost all management teams are like the weak baseball front offices. "Flexible staffing" usually means laying off a third of the workforce and shipping half of what's left to a Communist China prison-labor camp. The skill of tweaking job descriptions or shifting roles based on knowing each staffer's strengths and experiences, and in response to shifting priorities and opportunities, is pretty rare among managers outside of baseball.

But the Blue Jays' situtation is a fecund analogy.

If you have contributors who are achievement-oriented, why not shift them around to take advantage of opportunities? And if you have "contributors" who are not achievement-oriented, or managers who won't get beyond job titles or pre-conceived designs for getting work done well, why are you letting them plaque up your organization?

Staffers themselves can be part of the problem, as well.

[] THE EMPLOYEE IS NOT THE JOB DESCRIPTION
Take Chad Fox. When the Chicago Cubs' bullpen imploded in late April, manager Dusty Baker decided to move to something he called a "Bullpen by Situation". As opposed to the now-common model associated with an innovation by manager Tony LaRussa and pitching coach Dave Duncan, this Dusty model would bring in relievers based on a lot of in-game specific factors and not overarching general rules. In the now-common model, players are "mop-up men" and "7th-inning guys" and "set-up men" and "closers".

It removes some of the ergs required for managerial decisionmaking. The manager (and you see this outside of baseball a lot) get to autonomically follow a simplified If/Then path. Low energy. And while players (and staff) like Miguel Batista, who are very "Yang", it's exciting or another opportunity to succeed.

But there are staffers who are more "Yin", like the Cubs' Chad "The Tarleton Travesty" Fox. When Baker announced his innovation/change, Fox was quoted as saying he was willing to do whatever but...

"To me, it's just too much of an up and down, up and down. It's nice to know what your role is. It's nice to know if you're going to pitch late or pitch early."

Willing but whingeing.

It's simpler for the staffer as well. Less to think about. The staffer can unplug the brain, just to the work that crosses his desk, go to meetings others schedule. Some work really hard, too...it's not that they're all trying to sandbag you, they just don't waste many brain cycles imagining how to make the organization more effective (that's someone else's job). And many of these types use the conserved energy to invest in office politics. When there are an abundance of these Chad Fox types, it's most frequently because weak management has encouraged this kind of behavior with its own brittle unwillingness to adapt or take and act on staff input. Management sets a tone, but It Takes A Whinger to close out the possibility of improvement.

BEYOND BASEBALL
There are likely Chad Fox-es in your organisation, too, individuals who have forgotten they are individuals, contributors, people who have become their job description.

To be truly effective, most organizations have to be like baseball teams, with management like the Toronto Blue Jays', willing to make flexible staffing decisions in both the staffers interest and their own. It helps if your H.R. department is smart enough to allow you to hire Miguel Batistas, people who may never become super-stars at any single position they hold but can make your team more effective in a number of ways and elevate its ability to adapt to changing conditions.

You can learn most of the components of flexible staffing by observing baseball management. Pick you hometown team and observe their personnel and job title evolution over the season. How do they choose to cope with injuries? Do they try out people in new positions? Get rid of someone who's failed at one particular role? Do they have a pecking order that drives what deicison they make (the high bonus prospect gets multiple chances, but the no-name is one chance and out)?

Statistics are like a girl in a fine bikini.
They show a lot but not everything -- Toby Harrah

I usually was near the top of the league in HBP, though no one else, I think, wanted to be. The first major leaguer I ever saw who played it roughly my way was Ron Hunt, and I was at two games where I saw him get plunked. Twenty-five HBP/season were not unknown for him, and one year, 1970, he harvested 50 of them.

Like me, he was a mistake hit-by...Hunt intentionally leaned into pitches that were mistakenly thrown too close to him -- a tribute to his greater skill because major league pitchers make far fewer mistakes than little league ones do (and throw harder, obviously). The biggest difference though, was I always pretended it was my lack of mobility, whereas he proudly showed he was doing it on purpose, and that difference is an important part of this discussion.

Mike at Mike's Baseball Rants this week did a swell era-adjusted study of all-time major league HBP leaders (Hunt is in there), and it makes for a great example around which to discuss both metrics and interpretation of what they mean.

INTERPRETATION DEMANDS CONTEXTUALIZATION
One of the best things about Mike's presentation is, he doesn't even bother to lead with the raw totals for players...a traditional leaders' table ordered by career or single season highs. Because over the decades, the frequency of HBP occurence has shifted. His very first, marquee, stat table is contextualized to the seasons the player labored in. So he creates a measure, the number of HBP by which the player exceeded the league average HBP over the number of plate appearances. Let's call it "career exceeded expectations" or CEE. Here's the top of his table, with the key columns (read his article...really interesting and more complete data) for the players who got 100 or more HBPs over what the league average would have been for his career.

If you know much about these players, you can see they are not all that similar. A common mistake people in business or government make too frequently is to look at a table and think every case/person/country/department that is on the high end or the low end is there for the same or similar reasons. In this table, and in a subsequent beyond-baseball example, there's a lot of variation.

In the case of this table, the players fall into three clusters, which I'll call the Ends cluster (which includes Hunt & Biggio), the Means I cluster (includes Minoso, Jennings, Welch, Tucker & Kendall) and the Means II cluster (which includes Robinson & Baylor).

The players in the Ends cluster get hit as an end. They just want to get on base as often as possible so they can be a potential run. In Hunt's case, it was a major part of his OPS, in Biggio's less so, but the HBP itself was the goal.

For the players in the Means I cluster, the HBP is a technique to terrorize the pitcher an unnerve the infielders. Jennings, Welch and Tucker all played for the brawling, effervescent 19th century Baltimore Orioles whose core strategy was actually a tactic -- cognitive terror and raw aggression designed to make sure the umps and opponents were distracted (Welch stole home to win a "world series" like post-season championship, allegedly after telling the pitcher and catcher he was going to do it). Minoso (The Cuban Comet), Jennings (Eeh-Yah) and Welch were all excellent base-stealers who made a show of working the pitcher's attention away from the hitter when they were on base. For them, yes, getting on base was worthwhile, but the HBP was just the prologue to other, more irritating things they could inflict on their opponents.

For the Means II cluster, Baylor and F. Robinson, getting hit was also a means, but to a different end. Both were serious power hitters who knew they could hit better if they could get the fat part of the bat on a pitch and both found that harder on inside pitches. So by arranging to make it incrementally more dangerous for a pitcher to come inside against them, they created a bit of incentive for the pitcher to try to work him away (where they felt they were more effective). A subtle point...Baylor, in the early part of his career was more of a member of the Mean I cluster; when in his mid-30s, his bat slowed a tad and his success with inside pitches was not up to what he wanted, he notched up his technique as an extension of his game. Many are critical of Baylor as a manager, but he was an extraordinarily smart batter.

Being on the leaders table, in itself, doesn't really tell you what the player was aiming at, and if you presume there's a uniform strategy or reason behind that, you not only might be wrong on an individual case, you might be playing into their hands. Want to defeat Hunt? Pitch him away and that will defuse this tactic. Pitch Baylor or Robinson outside, and you're merely doing exactly what they're trying to get you to do.

BEYOND BASEBALL
Too many educated managers make the same mistake. They gather or get presented data about competitors or markets and while the facts are they, the managers make a hash of it by assuming uniformity. And like throwing outside to Baylor, they're somethimes playing right into the hands of their opponents or competitors.

A marketing manager looks at her competitors' marketing and advertising expenditures to see how her next year's budget should get tweaked. Maybe she even accounts for relative cash flow to see the level of commitment each has to marketing effort, instead of looking at just gross expenditures (which don't account for the gross amount each company has to draw upon). But there's a strong need for context -- some of those competitors are going to be new and trying to make themselves known in the field, some don't have new product to push, some are having a temporary slowdown in marketing expenditure to make their books look better in bad times, some pre-paid for advertising and the expenditures numbers don't indicate that.

Without context, the numbers don't add the full value they could. In most measures there's almost never one single reason why all "leaders" or "trailers" appear on the board.

Here's one last example. Recent military expenditures as a percentage of GNP. The CIA invented this figure for positioning reasons during the Cold War and it's still in use. Here's a recent table from www.nationmaster.com for countries' military expenditures as a percentage of their GNP

The #1 is a country run by a functionally-demented cadre, plus a significant chunk of their GNP isn't measured by GNP measures (meaning their extraordinary level of military spending becomes an even more exceptional percentage of the part of the GNP that gets included). #2 is one of the poorest countries in the world and their currency got devalued and they spend military $$ on dealing with a neighbor's insurrection troubles. Four of the members don't need their militaries to be significant, but they have a lot of revenue from U.S. oil and return some of it to the U.S. in arms purchases as a diplomatic kickback. A few of these countries are scared spitless about ongoing border disputes and potential insurrections and wars. #14 is probably very different today...at that time, one of its neighbors claimed it had no right to exist as a country and another was having a major war that was threatening to leak over its borders, but that conflict is not going on any longer while the table is old enough to represent a changed reality.

And again "as a percentage of GNP" isn't a real military measure, more of a government-choice indicator. If you were trying to judge how "war-like" or "war-prepared" or "dangerous" any of these countries actually are, you'd have to look at their actual military budget. Take Afghanistan...their military $/GNP is about twice the US', but their expenditures are actually 1/745th of the part of the U.S. military budget that's on the books.

As with the HBP table, sometimes there's intent that's an end, sometimes there's intent that's a means, sometimes it's inadvertent.

There are a whole host of reasons to take presented measures carefully, to make sure you understand the context for a member's inclusion before you do much to shape a competitive or analytical approach.

"There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies and
anything a baseball team owner says." -- Benjamin "Boots" Disraeli

There's a tendency in baseball for teams to replace a manager viewed as currently unsuccessful with a polar opposite. The "nice guy" with the "disciplinarian" and vice versa, the "quiet tactician" with the "voluble firebrand" and vice versa. This is not an approach that guarantees failure...the Law of Problem Evolution means there's some virtue in it, but it's usually done for emotional reasons and is reactive and simplistic -- therefore almost never optimal.

There's a parallel tendency among managers. When we leave a job, we have a list of things we're determined to have or avoid on the next one. We may overlook the overall utility of the position because some bad reaction we had to our last gig makes us lose perspective. My friend Chris was so peeved by being micro-managed by an entrepreneur who knew almost nothing about Chris' specialty, that he jumped at the first job that offered him autonomy and decisionmaking power...in a disasterously incompetent organization he was in no position to save. My buddy Eric worked at an organization where he was so unappreciated, he grabbed the first organization that had the core value of recognizing success with public arm waving --- but they stiffed him (along with everyone else) on his commission.

And I don't know why, but an extraordinary number of bad business owners and executives seem to have a knack for tapping into this need and fooling a manager into taking a job she shouldn't. Sometimes that technique is malicious, but usually it's just the hiring person's desire to get the job filled or get your talents on board.

But sometimes the hiring person is (a) a liar, and (b) is so narcissistic he believes it doesn't matter as long as the lies get him his way. Sometimes that person owns the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

Lou Piniella found this out, much to his current existential panic.

If you know Piniella's managerial history, skip this next section down to the next header, otherwise, it has background you'll need to understand how he got to the Devil Rays.

THE PINIELLIAD
Piniella started his managerial career with the same team he played most for, the New York Yankees, in 1986. He was learning his craft, wasn't great, and did not elevate the team. Working for the functionally-sociopathic George Steinbrenner, he got halfway through his third season before getting fired.

His second gig was with the 75-87 Cincinnati Reds, whose managing partner was The Savage Pinhead (Marge Schott), an angry narcissist. In his first year, he not only took the team to the World Series, but won it against a significantly superior team, the Oakland A's. He had a good, not great team, and Schott had lead him to believe she'd have a healthy budget. Schott believed that since the team won the Series, they were already good enough. A combination of their signing of trivial players (equal parts bad executive judgement and tight budget and The Savage Pinhead's oddball race theory rants which disincented non-Aryan ballplayers from playing for the team) and the difficulties of working with Schott convinced Piniella to try his chops as a turnaround artist again, this time with the Seattle Mariners.

The Mariners were coming off a 64-98 win season, & had never finished above .500. In his first season with the team, they broke that monotony with an 82-80. Within a few years, thanks to some good 1st round draft picks, some other good front line players, and a super collection of rôle players, they became a team that could contend, and get into, the playoffs. But the formula changed. The team got a new mallpark and the consortium of businessmen who owned the team realized they could actually make money with the franchise. They wanted to expert a financial discipline that competing owners didn't rank as highly. They came to view their Goal as making money or at least breaking even. Thus, their bottom line was money, while the intense Piniella's was still wins, playoffs, a World Series trophy.

It's a fact I won't try to prove that the higher your team's current win percentage is over about .550, the more incremental cost it takes to add a win to your record. It costs better teams more to become even better than it costs mediocre teams to become somewhat better than mediocre. General rule: Available talent at the top of the performance curve costs more per added torque than the available talent that's at the middle. So after their remarkable 2001 season, Mariner ownership was satisfied with their level of performance, and having done the benefit/cost calculations, realized that getting better was more expensive than staying competitive. The managing partner did not then know much about the game either -- he was a successful high-tech executive who had worked for a long time at an extremely successful company that was almost a monopoly -- and so shipping good-enough product was good enough while the added costs of achieving excellence couldn't be easily recovered financially.

The team stagnated. Getting older, they had a couple of shots at getting more competitive before the core faded, and they made it into the late Summer as playoff contenders. The ever-competitive Piniella (no other player I know of every tried to kill --really...not drama for the crowd -- the San Diego Chicken because he took the Chicken's hex seriously) campaigned for "trade deadline" acquisitions in late July to bolster the team's on-the-edge chances. But the team's P&L, not winning incrementally more games, was the priority. They stood pat with their roster and failed to get to the Series. The team's frustrated general manager took early retirement, and Piniella had enough and looked for a new gig.

LASHED TO HIS MUST-HAVES
Piniella was determined to find a team that wasn't organizationally where he had come from. As a recognized celeb, and a manager with success to point to in both leagues, he was an attractive comodity. Several teams recruited him or expressed interest, including the New York Mets. But he was originally from Tampa, and his wife preferred living there and he still maintained a sense of home about the place. So when Vince Naimoli, owner of the metro area's sorry expansion franchise with the history of losing badly, showed enthusiasm, Piniella showed interest

Naimoli apparently told Piniella he would ante up and increase the team budget, lowest then in the majors, and give Piniella some voice in staffing. With a crop of promising young players in the pipeline and already on the roster getting playing time (an essential element required for most players to blossom), Lou could visualize replicating his Cincinnati turnaround, or at least his Seattle turnaround. Glue in a few well-chosen parts through free agency or perhaps the trade of some excess youngsters, combine it with his experience at kicking some butts and inspiring some previously-medium performers, and one could imagine surprising the world with a .500 team. And in one's hopes, if the budget grew a little with success, why even a wild card might be possible. Naimoli's promises were exactly what Lou wanted to hear -- the exact opposite of what he was trying to escape.

Given the promises, the manager accepted the job. But in his second season, the Devil Rays had a surprising start. They were 40-38 by July 3. Piniella wanted the owner to make the mid-season moves the team required to get to the next level, some good vets to go with his over-achieving youngsters. The benefits aren't even just winning in the now, but reinforcing the idea of being winners, of getting to learn lessons from peers, of sensing there's momentum, of "learning to win".

By Naimoli was lying. There was no investment, no cavalry to change the balance. The team collapsed, going 30-51 for the remainder of the season, including a 12-game losing streak. Now the team, in Piniella's third year, is swirling the drain, in last place again and no hope. Some details about Piniella's views from this story:

"This is going to be a difficult year here, sir," Piniella says late one night in his Tropicana Field office. "This is not a year for contending." {SNIP}

Unfortunately, little has gone the way Piniella hoped since his arrival in Tampa Bay before the 2003 season. He returned to his Tampa roots with a fat four-year contract and a grand vision of winning where no one else seemingly could. Through the sheer power of his personality, armed with the undeniable force of his competitive fire, Piniella would cut through all the dysfunction and make the lowly Rays a contender in the American League East.

"I'm not a passive guy that's just going to sit and watch and see the same things over and over and over again," he told me in March 2003. "I'm just not. That's just not my nature." He also spoke of "changing the mentality" and refusing to let his young players "get used to losing" and how "you've got to fight it every day." He sounded quite convincing.

A little over two years later, Piniella strikes a very different tone when discussing his lousy team.

The payroll still sags way down at $30 million, easily the lowest in the majors. So much for the promises managing general partner Vince Naimoli made during a whirlwind courtship that kept Piniella from pushing harder to join the New York Mets instead. {SNIP}

Pitching? The Rays, with the second-worst run differential in the majors, don't have much of that, either.

Opening Day starter Dewon Brazelton? He was sent back to the minors last week after losing for the 11th time in 12 decisions.

Before his final start, Brazelton walked into his manager's office for a pep talk. Only it wasn't the typical Sweet Lou treatment of flashing eyes and machismo-dripping rhetoric. "I told him it's not life or death," Piniella says. "He'll still get a paycheck, you know? He's still going to get a paycheck and his mom is going to still love him. It's not the end of the world."

Wait a second ... huh?

"Don't think of it as wins and losses," Piniella continues, recounting the conversation. "Think of it as going out there to have some fun and I'm going to go out there and compete."

Oh, I get it. A group of alien body snatchers must have replaced Piniella's spirit with Dr. Phil's. Losing will do that to a man. Even one as seemingly indomitable as Sweet Lou.

There have been 217 losses in the two-plus seasons since Piniella got to Tampa Bay, and there will be plenty more before he leaves. Ask him about the progress of the grand plan, and he stares back blankly.

"I don't know what the grand plan is," Piniella says softly. "I've learned to condition myself here to one game at a time. I can't -- I won't -- allow myself to look out into the future and I don't look into the past. It's tomorrow's ballgame, and that's it. Do the best we can tomorrow."

He looks away and glances around the empty room, perhaps considering a life unkind. "I don't know what the grand plan is," he says again. "I really don't."

Piniella seems to be coping by disconnecting. That can work temporarily, but is a poor strategy longer-term. Subsuming one's competitive edge and just taking the paycheck is very hard, even on the most self-aware & mellow person, and Piniella is not very self-aware nor mellow in the slightest (ask the San Diego Chicken).

And to compound it, it's not just "the now" that's got him down, it's hope for the future and the lack of his faith in executive management to be able to change their behavior. According to this Larry Stone story for The Seattle Times from a couple of Sundays ago:

Devil Rays manager Lou Piniella told Sports Illustrated that, at age 61, he burns to win another World Series.

"I'm running out of time, running out of time," Piniella said. "[Washington's] Frank Robinson, he's what, gonna turn 70? I don't want to be managing when I'm 70. I want one more chance to manage a club that can go to the World Series. Here or elsewhere."

Contrasting the Mariners and Rays, Piniella told SI, "In Seattle we had smart owners, from Microsoft and Boeing, and we'd meet regularly and talk about what we needed to do to win and how our payroll should grow."

He was asked if the Rays have similar sessions.

"Not much."

Mariner ownership looks better to him, in retrospect. Whether they chose to make moves or not, they at least made a study of what was necessary. Lou's palpable bitterness is amplified because he chose to get into this assignment that has turned into a hole, and because it was a promise broken. SIDE NOTE: He used his Sports Illustrated platform here (bolded text) to campaign nationwide for a better job...smart.

BEYOND BASEBALL
When I was very early in my managerial career, I took employers as honest with their word until proven otherwise (lowest effort). Later I came to believe if you talked it all out and made sure they told you what they really wanted and you made clear what you really wanted, it would work out. Later, I advanced my methods. If I had the slightest doubt at all that it might work out, I asked them to put it on paper and we'd both sign it.

In the early 90s, I left a job at a place that had been gone from being a quality-oriented manufacturer to a low-margin commodity seeker. The executive team brought in by the venture folk were under-experienced in our sector but determined, like a three year old boy in his parent's parked car, to play with all the knobs and dials and controls...to feel like they were in charge. I was running a marketing department filled with excellent talent, but not allowed to make any decision of more import than office supplies reordering. So when I was ready to move on, I just wanted to work for someone who either knew so much about marketing they could teach me, or someone who knew so little they would know they knew little.

I cleverly found the company, a software developer with super products, fading margin, great reputation, internal inefficiencies, and clever owners who had the worst marketing in the entire time zone. This was easy. Turnarounds don't get easier because they had a product customers required, and respect from them. At the same time, the limiting factor for them was the very thing I would have the power to change -- and even if I just used cheap resources to get them to C+, it would be a giant advance (Baseball lesson already mentioned: The resources you need to get from F to C+ are smaller than the resources you need to get from B+ to A-).

In my preliminary conversations with the negotiating owner, it became apparent he had some preconceptions, some of which were the reasons they had such putrid, amateur marketing. He thought marketing was a euphemism for sales (and it is in some palces). I corrected him and explained I was not a sales person by nature or by training or by tendency or by appetite. Worst, from his point of view as a buyer of talent, I had close to zero aptitude for sales. We talked and talked. There was some risk for me in working for his company-- I would have to move about 400 miles. I finally drew up a Memorandum of Understanding stating everything and asked him to initial each point and that we could sign it...not as a contract, but as an expression of our agreement. He wriggled and wriggled, but I held fast and he finally signed.

I reported for my first day about a week later and the first thing he did was tell me he wanted me to build a schedule for sales calls all over the region. I countered I needed time for planning and executing marketing and it soon became apparent from his words he had no intention of letting me do marketing. He had hired me to do sales.

I mentioned the memorandum. "Oh that, that's just a piece of paper," he said with a little twinkle in his eye, as though I could share in the joke with him.

I gave them a year for family reasons, but by month four it was apparent there was no hoipe for this working out. They had terrible marketing in part because they had a tin ear for it, but also, in part, because they would rather sit behind the steering wheel of the car truned off and pretend they were driving.

How I ever allowed myself, knowing what I knew, to go from from the frying pan into the next, parallel frying pan, is beyond me. How Piniella did the exact same thing probably a bigger mystery to me.

How long do you think you could hang around in his job, knowing you were managing the worst, lowest-funded team and that was okay with the owner? What would you do to trun it around, if anyhting? What would you do to get through the day? How could he have avoided it and how can you?

In the previous essay I wrote about management credibility, how that requires honesty in the general case and how, equally, management needs to judiciously use disinformation to gain temporary advantages (but without pasting their credibility). Knowing how to find the balance and when to execute this maneuver, which I'll call "a Dusty", is one among the trickiest and most complicated things a manager will ever have to calculate.

PICKING YOUR SPOTS
In that essay I referred to Baker's disinformation about players taking walks. An e-mail correspondent asked if he always disinformed/lied, and referred to the April 24 shift in the Cubs bullpen when Baker claimed he was going to reformulate his relief pitching routine by shifting to a strategy he labeled Bullpen by Situation.

According to an A.P. squib:

After Saturday's ninth inning collapse, manager Dusty Baker said he had to make some changes in the bullpen, starting with RHP LaTroy Hawkins, who blew a save for the second time this season.

"Whatever's happening is happening, and we need to get it straight," Baker said Sunday.

He also defended Hawkins. "It's not all on him," Baker said. "We've got to tighten up our total game. If our game was tight, he wouldn't even be in that situation."

Baker said he'll probably go with a "bullpen by situation" philosophy.

So, two things worth talking about here. The first is, did he tell the truth?

Because this is baseball, the perfect mechanism for accountability, we have a hard record to examine -- the box scores for subsequent games. Like many (not all) situations beyond baseball, when you lie or disinform, it's not that difficult for people to expose you.

He did tell the truth. Here's the game by game line for Cub pitching subsequent to Baker's declaration to the press. He did use a bullpen by situation for 13 games until he got his starting pitching in a set up he wanted and then moved one of the starters, Ryan Dempster, into the closer role.

For each of the games, it's date, a short explanation of the pitching, and an abridged pitching line (including pitch count so you could see when a reliever's heavy use was enough to affect when Baker might use that arm next). When you look this over, you'll see he's being very flexible, even beyond the dictates of fatigue, in removing himself from the classic pattern of the last 20 years of having "6th inning guys" and "7th & 8th inning guys" and a "closer".

April 25                      Scoreless through early            

Pitchers	IP	H	R	BB	SO	HR	PC-ST
M Prior (W, 4-0)	6.0	6	2	2	10	1	106-68
C Bartosh (H, 1)	0.2	2	1	1	1	0	22-13
M Wuertz (H, 3)	0.1	0	0	0	1	0	4-3
L Hawkins	1.0	1	0	0	1	0	17-11
C Fox	0.1	1	3	3	0	1	30-12
M Remlinger	0.2	0	0	0	1	0	5-4

April 26                      Early departure   

Pitchers	IP	H	R	BB	SO	HR	PC-ST
C Zambrano	4.2	7	6	3	5	1	104-62
G Rusch	1.1	2	1	0	0	0	18-12
M Wuertz (L, 1-1; B, 1)	0.2	2	3	1	1	0	21-13
M Remlinger	0.1	1	0	0	0	0	7-4
W Ohman	0.2	2	0	1	1	0	18-10
J Leicester	0.2	1	1	1	1	0	12-6
C Bartosh	0.2	0	0	2	1	0	21-10

April 27                      Late comeback

Pitchers	IP	H	R	BB	SO	HR	PC-ST
R Dempster	5.1	8	6	5	7	1	97-54
W Ohman	0.2	0	0	1	0	0	7-3
R Novoa	1.0	2	1	1	0	0	24-14
G Rusch	1.0	0	0	0	0	0	7-4
L Hawkins (W, 1-1)	1.0	0	0	0	2	0	10-7

April 29                      **Late win

G Maddx (W, 1-1)	6.0	7	2	1	3	1	87-55
M Wuertz (H, 4)	1.1	0	0	1	2	0	24-15
W Ohman (H, 1)	0.0	0	0	1	0	0	6-2
R Novoa (H, 1)	0.2	0	0	1	1	0	14-8
L Hawkins (S, 4)	1.0	0	0	0	1	0	13-10

April 30                      Down 1 in 5^th

K Wood	3.0	4	3	2	6	0	54-34
C Bartosh (L, 0-1)	2.0	2	1	1	4	0	37-24
M Remlinger	1.0	1	0	0	1	0	10-7
M Wuertz	1.0	2	3	3	0	0	30-11
R Novoa	1.0	1	0	0	1	0	11-9

May 1                      Losing early

Pitchers	IP	H	R	BB	SO	HR	PC-ST
M Prior (L, 3-1)	5.0	7	8	3	7	2	107-78
G Rusch	2.0	4	1	2	2	0	50-27
W Ohman	1.0	0	0	1	0	0	15-8

May 3                      Lost low-score  in 6^th

C Zambrano (L, 2-1)	7.0	7	3	4	10	0	96-62
R Novoa	1.0	2	1	0	2	0	21-13

May 4                      Close all the way

R Dempster	6.2	6	3	5	6	1	107-58
W Ohman	0.1	2	0	0	1	0	6-5
M Wuertz	1.0	0	0	1	1	0	15-7
R Novoa (L, 0-1)	0.2	1	1	3	0	0	22-7

May 5                      Behind early caught up late

G Maddux	6.0	8	4	3	5	1	100-60
M Remlinger	1.0	0	0	0	0	0	6-4
M Wuertz	1.0	1	1	0	2	1	17-12
L Hawkins (L, 1-2)	0.2	2	1	0	1	0	14-10

May 6                      Close until late lead

M Prior	8.0	4	1	2	10	1	105-68
L Hawkins (L, 1-3; B, 3)	1.0	2	2	1	2	0	25-14

May 7                      Close all the way

G Rusch (L, 2-1)	4.2	8	2	1	3	0	81-51
T Wellemeyer	2.1	0	0	0	4	0	25-19
M Wuertz	1.1	2	2	1	0	0	33-18
M Remlinger	0.2	0	0	0	0	0	8-4

May 8                      Close all the way

C Zambrano (W, 3-1)

9.0

5

1

3

5

1

136-88

May 9                      Comeback in 6^th

J Leicester	3.0	5	4	1	3	2	59-37
T Wellemeyer	2.0	0	0	1	3	0	26-17
C Bartosh	1.1	2	0	0	3	0	33-20
M Remlinger	0.2	0	0	0	1	0	5-5
L Hawkins (L, 1-4)	1.0	2	1	0	0	1	17-9
R Dempster	1.0	4	2	0	2	0	27-19

 

Baker did not waste his time trying to force his staff into slots when he knew that players on the disabled list would be coming back in a month or so and he would re-work it anyway. He didn't let the job title dictate the job description -- preferring to rotate people around, ride what he thought might be a hot hand (there weren't any). And when the time came to release Dempster from his starting slot, Dempster-as-closer became the next evolutionary model.

It's flexible, it's adaptive. Bullpen by Situation didn't turn the Cubs fortunes around, though Bullpen-by-Situation-As-Long-As-You-Don't-Let-LaTroy-Pitch seemed to work better than LaTroy-as-Closer.

Baker picked his spot for truth-telling, and sensibly, for two reasons.

The first reason is anyone can look at the record and see the pattern of what he's doing. He didn't declare Dempster would be the closer when the injured starting arms came back because that might have been a distraction to Dempster and it couldn't help anything. For Baker (and for managers beyond baseball) it's almost always necessary to tell the truth when the declaration is measurable and public. The exceptions are few, almost not worth measuring. If he hadn't delivered on this it would start a nasty cycle of mistrust with the press and his players, the kind of thing that derails many a managerial career in and out of baseball.

The second reason is there's no significant competitive advantage in disinforming, so if he had, he'd take a credibility hit of some indeterminate amount, and for no possible gain. Unlike the disinformation about hating walks, no opposing coach beyond a little league one is going to build a pre-game strategy based on an opponent's bullpen design.

POSITIONING: THE BATTLE FOR YOUR SCORECARD
The second reason this move was worth discussing was Baker used one of the immutable rules of marketing. He named his scheme "Bullpen by Situation". He gave it a name -- it wasn't just something that happened, it was a design, a plan, a theory. And by giving it a name, he didn't let any legitimate sportswriter name it "bullpen by committee", the term illegitimate sportswriters gave a 2003 Boston Red Sox attempt to apply a parallel form of flexibility to their bullpen. "Closer by Committee" became a lightning rod, a surrogate for a dozen bloody sectarian clashes between the forces of experimentation and a the forces of tradition. Both sides deployed their shock troops in a battle for the minds and souls of baseball fans.

Baker had to say something about his plans -- for his players, at least. And that meant the plan would get to the press sooner or later, probably sooner. And if he didn't give it a label, they would have jumped on the "if it bleeds, it leads" headline "Closer by Committee", which this wasn't (if you think I'm wrong, read those pitching lines again).

In marketing, we call this move "Positioning". Discussed most usefully in the book Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind by Ries and Trout, positioning establishes an identity for something, a definition that if made clearly, can't be spun by competitors. It's the single most important valuable book about marketing available, and takes about two hours to read. I cannot recommend it strongly enough for any manager who wants a little bit of marketing ammo. If you follow the rules, you may not always succeed, but if you ignore the rules, you are almost certain to fail.

A few non-legit sportswriters tried very hard to label Baker's approach a "Closer by Committee", but it just didn't stick, both because it wasn't true and because Dusty had already labeled it something different. And the Cubbies continued to lose games, though not necessarily because the bullpen blew up, making his de-fusing of the subversive reporters even more amazing. Note, though, positioning something through a label is most likely to succeed if true -- if it really was a closer by committee, the reality would have outed him. You can't expect to label Matt Stairs a base-stealing phenomenon and have it catch a wave of popular support .