Management by Baseball

Back in January I wrote about the "Roger Clemens Move" the A.L.'s 39th best starter pulled during the off-season.

Paul Byrd had retired to spend time with his family, but he left the option open to play part-time during a team's stretch run. And that's exactly what today's news ("Byrd set to resume career with Red Sox")indicates he successfully pulled off...in this case after coming out of retirement for four starts in the last couple of weeks for minor league affiliates of the Red Sox, The Louisville Hugger has been called up by Boston to fill in for the ailing Tim "The Vicarious" Wakefield.

According to the linked story, Byrd's plan almost didn't work -- as of a month ago, he hadn't heard from any teams, but he had kept himself in shape, and he has a history of having the ability to throw strikes when he wants. Even an old Byrd can succeed for a team with a productive offense, because he has that skill.

BEYOND BASEBALL It's an interesting move more organizations should consider: tapping into reasonably-skilled talent to fill in sporadic gaps.

With Byrd back in the nest, though, I thought a reprise of the January piece would be informative:

Byrd Plans Late Return... to a Feathered Nest

Baseball podcaster Jimmy Scott does weekly interviews, most frequently with ex-players, and the gem of his recent interview with former American league pitcher Dick "The Toledo Titan" Drago was during a discussion of various managers Drago had played for.

Drago, btw, had an unusually interesting career. He started with an expansion team; he was a jack of all trades...after his rookie year, he was a starter for four years, a swing man for one and a reliever for the last seven seasons -- one of them as "the closer" for a legendary World Series hopeful, the 1975 Boston Red Sox).

Metro was the worst kind of bad manager (beyond Baseball, anyway): the manager (usually a guy) who believes that being a stern disciplinarian is the most effective way to reach your goal. According to Drago:

...he was a tyrant. Charlie Metro was in the organization, and he was one of these disciplinarians who had crazy ideas that didn't work...One of his favorites was he was always running the pitchers. he always had a stopwatch in his hand. We'd go out and do our sprints and he would have his watch (and time everyone).

We ended up finding out the watch didn't even work.

BEYOND BASEBALL
One of the first surprises I learned to prepare for in my management consulting work was innumerate managers who faked being in command of their numbers. They generally choose one of two techniques to blind you with pseudo-science:

1. Waving around, locked elbow style like Jack Cust hunting a flyball, a Balboni-size volume of output that is waaaay too elaborate to be of any use because you can't ever find within it the handful of points that were insightful or actionable, OR
2. Fabricated nonsense, usually proprietary, they could claim you couldn't possibly understand (and, secretly, they don't either). I call this nonsense Potemkin Metrics.

When you meet managers who use #2, made up spit, especially numeric spit, it tends to be not only someone who's innumerate, but someone whose management "theory" predominantly involves ideas that usually get resisted, and they're going to try to shove the objected-to practices down employee throats using the impression that they really know what they're doing.

Baseball is the perfect test lab for measuring the relative merits of competitive strategies, so the lessons I'm about to share (generously coughed up by Oakland A's manager Bob Geren (who was once traded for Hall of Famer Rollie Fingers).

But before the lessons, and because I can hear that whinger in the back of the room getting ready to complain that business and war are a lot more competitive, let me reiterate why this is Truth.

For one thing, competition in Baseball is a lot more fierce than the endeavor you're in because success is zero-sum. For every win there has to be a loss -- none of that rising tide lifts all moats stuff. That's not true in business or in War. The second unarguable reason is that in baseball, you have to win right now, and you have to do without seriously affecting your chances of winning tomorrow. It's a long haul, and you can't just do what most publicly-traded corporations do (or the Governor and legislature of California do) and slide gains or losses between fiscal quarters to make things look good. The daily table of standings in the paper prevent any corporate-like attempt to fog the truth. Finally, winning is inevitably measured on a balanced scorecard. You need to win in the measurable ways (game wins, attendance), but just as much in the immeasurable ways (development of young players, resting of old ones, level of "good will", intensity of interest of current fans and kids who could be paying fans in a decade). Sandy Alderson, the brains behind the gathering of brain power that built the A's when they were a persistently excellent franchise, is as successful a formulator of scorecard balancing as you can find anywhere in North American management (a lot on that in an earlier entry). Baseball's just better at all these competitive challenges than is the norm for "good" in any other endeavor.

In sum, you have to win today and tomorrow, in measurable and in immeasurable ways in a zero-sum system where every win guarantees a loss in the system. And I promise you that in your endeavor, you have it easier than that.

BOB GEREN'S WISDOM The Oakland Athletics are having a tough season on the winning-today measure. Both the batters they acquired in the off-season to boost the immediate value of a line-up filled with young, unproven players were disappointments relative to what the team had hoped for. Those two are now gone and one, Matt Holliday was the most productive hitter they had this year. They're in last place by a long dangle as of today...

As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle's Steve Kroner:

Before Thursday's 6-4 loss to the Rangers, a team fighting for a playoff spot, Bob Geren was asked if, at this time of the year, he manages any differently whether the opponent is in the race or not.

"Not at all. No way," he said.

"You try to beat everybody everyday. I can't even comprehend managing a different style against one team or another. It's all about winning, if you're in first place or whatever place you're in.

"You want to win every inning. You want to win every game. You want to win every series. Who we're playing is irrelevant."

And that's an essence of Baseball you need in your own management. Geren is putting a lot of rookies on the field, players who at this moment are not as good as their opponents. He doesn't give up; he Like Geren, you try to bring your best game every single day, every hour. And if you can't, you build up the other areas of your scorecard. You win by relentlessly experimenting with young players' talents and in training and in never stopping observing the results of your experiments and then incorporating your analysis into action, and then seeing what happens and doing it all over again.

There's no resting in Baseball management, no slack-off. There shouldn't be in your line of work, either. To repeat Geren:

"You want to win every inning. You want to win every game. You want to win every series. Who we're playing is irrelevant."

One of the easiest management assignments in the world is when you work in a struggling workgroup that's been doing the same things over and over again without success, resulting in the purge of a manager and your ascencion to the position. It's less exciting than coming from the outside as a fixer -- more latitude that way -- but when you've been promoted internally, you already have a ton of detailed knowledge about the mechanics of what has been failing and working, personalities, workflows, processes, and unquestioned assumptions. "Where all the skeletons are buried".

I recommend that course for all employees, even those without management ambition, because it makes even a dull job more interesting. But when you have a job like Jim Riggleman has had, bench coach for a struggling team, that's one of the critical pieces of your very job description...to be a "shadow manager" and to be there at the right hand of the manager for advice and perspective.

But it appears Jim Riggleman, 16 games ago given the job of interim manager of the struggling Washington Nationals, is about to let an essential personality trait, personal loyalty, get in the way of doing the things he needs to do to achieve enough success to be the not-interim manager. It's sad, because in overhearing him interact with other coaches and staff last year and in watching him prepare for games, I found him to be thoughful and studious and intelligent.

RECENT RIGGLESAGA
When before the 2008 season, lifelong baseball man John McLaren got his first chance to start a new year as a major league manager, he chose to hire a powerful combine of experts as coaches, many of them former major league managers themselves. This requires a lot of self-confidence -- many managers hate to have anyone around who might replace them, but McLaren has high emotional intelligence as well as traditional baseball knowledge, and recognized that each of his College of Cardinals, er, of Mariners, would be non-backstabbers. His bench coach was Jim Riggleman.

McLaren, with his college, put together a master plan that included the cognitive DNA of his expert & loyal staff and launched the season with it.

The 2008 season was a frelling mess for the Mariners, the core reasons being it was a pitching-and-defense team with pitchers who were playing injured (Erik Bedard), or underperforming (Jarrod Washburn), or meeting head on The Bigotry of High Expectations Not Justified By Skill Level (Carlos Silva), declining defense, and not enough middle-of-the-lineup oomph to even provide a hint of success. The roster was the limiting factor, McLaren wasn't squeezing the most out of what would have been a last place team anyway, and he was sacrificed after game 72.

The same roster + the same game plan + a different personality making slightly different decisions = minimal, if positive, change.

Washington Nationals' manager Manny Acta hired Riggleman to be his bench coach in the off-season with the thought that the team would benefit from his knowledge and experience and that Acta could count on his personal loyalty which, as it proved, he could. Because when the Nationals' G.M. Mike Rizzo fired Acta from his position at the helm of the woeful and woefully-underperforming even their intrinsic woefulness , Riggleman had nothing but considerate things to say about his friend Acta at his kick-off press conference, as reported at Nats320.

Question: Mike Rizzo said a couple of days ago that sometimes you just need a different voice. The things that Manny may have been doing were fine, but need to be presented in a different way. How will Jim Riggleman’s voice be different from Manny Acta’s? Riggleman: “I don’t know if it will be much different. But there is something to that. That is the kind of statement I made in Chicago. I was there for five years (as manager for The Cubs) and I was let go there. And I felt like that if I were in the General Manager’s position, I would have done the same thing. I would have let Jim Riggleman out of there because I know he was saying the right things but we need to get someone else to give this message because the players are not getting it done. So that’s basically what it amounts to. I don’t think you can change a lot. I know Manny wouldn’t change anything that he did. And I wouldn’t question anything that he did. I just want to try to continue to pound the message in and maybe coming from someone else maybe they will respond or maybe they won’t—but we have got to try that.”

No one, not even Manny Acta I suspect, would have considered him disloyal if he had said as part of his answer to the question quoted above, "We've been underperforming and I'm going to have to do several things differently from what Manny was trying, including X and Y", X and Y being the items he most noticed as the "shadow manager".

When you take on a new management assignment, you have a very short period, not even the Cloud-Cuckoo-Land "100 days" U.S. Presidents are imaginarily given, to have a high impact. You need to choose concrete changes (even if only small ones), implement them effectively, and tell staff and other management you're doing them, and point out the differences they made.