Management by Baseball

Art Imitates Life, but The NFL Imitates Baseball

2012-01-09T07:00:00.000-08:00

Back in late 2009, I wrote about (then new) Detroit Lions Head coach Jim Schwartz & his Tampa Bay Devil Rays'-style project to remake the sad sack of the NFL, a team which had gone 0-16 before his tenure. This last weekend, that team not only made its way into the NFL playoffs (somewhat of an accomplishment) but acquitted itself most-genuinely in the game against a superior opponent, losing only in the last quarter. The Management by Baseball description of how Schwartz proposed to turn the team around is worth attending to, especially for managers trying to turn around failed companies or departments.

While pro football has some interesting life lessons, there tend to be few management insights you can apply generally to non-sport management. I don't write about football here, but there's a great reason to introduce my first entry in over five years that will have the NFL as a centrepiece, although as a beneficiary of baseball wisdom, not an originator thereof-like. Specifically, it's about managing Change, the ultimate destination, home plate, in the Management by Baseball model.

Last Sunday, the New York Times sports section had a Judy Battista feature on Detroit Lions coach Jim Schwartz' culture change project with the perennially struggling Detroit Lions whose long parade to the graveyard (seven consecutive losing seasons culminating in last season's 0-16 no-mulligan mulligan) he inherited. Schwartz, faced with reviewing the efforts and failures of so many predecessors, lifted a page out of recent Baseball management achievement and closely recreated (with a few environmentally-appropriate tweaks...back to that later) the ever-struggling Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays' last-to-first-to-Championship experiment that succeeded so well last year.

BASEBALL'S WINNING MODEL
The Devil Rays got new ownership and they were committed to changing not just the game on the field, but the entire organization, not by the contemporary More-With-Less Cult's nostrum of laying off people, having a loud, showy re-org, spraying around a few motivational posters and declaring the war won, only to collapse under the imbecility of their Hank Paulson-y all-posture-no-redesign sham.

As I wrote a few years ago here, Instead of cloning the failed American business model, the Devil Rays owners set out to methodically ask the staff who had been implementing the old management's failures what those staffers had suggested that'd been ignored and what ideas they had been swallowing rather than promoting. Combined with the solid business methods they'd brought in from other fields, they synthesized a "culture" that started winning on every off-the-field level. Then they hired the most fearlessly innovative pedal-to-the-metal field manager candidate anywhere, Joe Maddon, and let him loose to do the same things in the clubhouse and on the field.

Baseball is change incarnate -- and no other line of work on our continent combines such relentless accountability and "transparency" -- but this Rays effort was simply the most magnificent publicly visible and closely measurable change management success of the 21st century. It's no surprise a long-struggling organization (though with smart, committed ownership) in another endeavor would choose to learn from it.

¿WHY CAN'T FOOTBALL BE MORE LIKE BASEBALL? OH, IT CAN.
As Battista wrote (abridged here):

ALLEN PARK, Mich. — When Jim Schwartz, the new coach of the Detroit Lions, quoted Shakespeare on the day he made the rookie Matthew Stafford his starting quarterback, his choice of source material was painfully appropriate.

“Hamlet.” A tragedy. {SNIP}
Schwartz swears that nobody in his vast network of football friends told him he was crazy to take the Lions job; they said it was a great opportunity. Now that he is here, he feels a responsibility to field a team in which the economy-battered city can take pride. During minicamp, he even took top rookies to sign autographs at a truck assembly plant in Dearborn.

But Schwartz also knows there is nothing he can say, no billboard slogan persuasive enough, to change minds like edited-out fan} Mizgalski’s until the Lions win. Instead, Schwartz has changed just about everything else he could.

A new coaching staff was hired. Uniforms were redesigned. Weight machines were replaced by free weights. The locker room seating chart was rearranged. Parking spaces were assigned. The practice schedule was upended.

Schwartz is a student of the disciplined, methodical approach to coaching and personnel management. The objective is not to turn the Lions around, he said, but to improve every day, to lay the foundation for the long-term success he knew with Belichick and Fisher. The difference, Schwartz said, is like losing 10 pounds in two weeks with body wraps and Master Cleanse or by changing eating habits and running on the treadmill. {SNIP}
“From the time they walked in, they could never say this: ‘Same old stuff around here,’ ” Schwartz said after a recent practice. {SNIP}
The Lions have many qualities of successful franchises: a state-of-the-art practice facility and stadium; generous, hands-off ownership; passionate fans. But Millen’s misguided drafts left the team without the traditional building blocks of offensive and defensive linemen.
“Isn’t there a show on Food Network where they give you six ingredients and say, ‘Make something out of this?’ ” Schwartz said. “That is a little of what this is. In Tennessee, our system changed a little bit each year. But it was incremental. One or two new players would come in, and we’d say, ‘This fits us better this year.’ This is a huge melting pot here. That’s probably the most difficult thing — nobody was familiar with the terminology or the system because the system was developed here.”

NOTE: Schwartz didn't quite have the management luxury the buyers of the wretched Devil Rays did in that ownership wasn't turned over from disastrous failures who were so obvious, getting buy-in for change is made a little easier. But the Lions' 0-16 record last campaign was a statement no baseball team could even come close to, even the 1899 Cleveland Spiders.

BEYOND BASEBALL
A lot of suggestions between the Devil Rays' and the Lions' change initiatives. But what Schwartz got from Maddon and his Tampa co-implementors, was, if you have the opportunity, CHANGE AT LEAST EVERYTHING THAT IS VISIBLE & NOT UNSURPASSABLE. Make a clear splash that all the unquestioned behaviors of the past are now going to get questioned...maybe kept, but at least examined. Have no fear about trying something risky that might not work because you can't drop below where you started if you started in last place.

As I was writing this, the Lions, who had been 0-2 for the 2009 season, won their first game in 19 tries.

As I like to say about change management efforts committed to and that yield some results, There is Maddon to Their Methods.

Jon Daniels - Part IV: Rangers' GM Attacks a Diseconomy of Scale

2011-12-25T16:13:00.000-08:00

This is the final installment of the March, 2007 interview Jon Daniels did with me. He'd gotten his first G.M. job as the nexus of a team that had never gone to a World Series, and now with him in place, they've achieved enough excellence to get to two Series in a row.

This part deals with an issue more and more managers have to deal with in a globalized business world -- communicating effectively and keeping people on course and pulling together in a system where the work is distributed over more remote workplaces -- a Diseconomy of Scale that is both common and usually fatal.

And, btw, my arrogance knows few bounds...I suggested in this 2007 piece that it would be interesting to see how much difference his extremely bright approach would help achieve five years hence (that is, this season). I think I was pretty prescient, though DANIELS was he one with the focus, execution and relentlessness to bring the achievement home. He is to be congratulated again for both his leadership and his being such a great team-mate to his team-mates.

In Part III, Daniels explained how his first big initiative on getting the Texas Rangers' GM job was to push for better organizational cohesion through a couple of methods -- organization-wide meetings to integrate people who, while dependent on each other for success, didn't have opportunities to meet face to face, and personal notes to people on noteworthy occasions to reinforce their view of how the organization valued them.

NOTE: The first issue he addressed, face-to-face meetings, is a critical ingredient in large organizations and one, in a globalized world, is decreasingly present. From cohesion to clear communication to sharing of common mission/values, face-to-face interaction is close to indispensable for success, an issue I dependency on what I call "proximity". I won't elaborate on this here: I've written a lot about the failure to achieve Proximity and its costs here and here; I wrote an article recently for Redmond Magazine about the counter-example...how a creative software company, eProject, skillfully balances its choice to offshore some of its development against the need for Proximity.

He let me read one of the letters he was about to send out as an example.

{he let me take a minute to read the letter}

Jeff (MBB): I especially like the part where it says “Be creative, don’t hesitate to experiment”. You’ve worked outside of baseball, so you know how much more experimental baseball is than most lines of work. Business should be that way.

Jon Daniels (JD) : There’s no doubt about that. And even in Baseball, unless it’s really well-defined, explicit expectations, then people are hesitant.

A hypothetical example… you have a hitting coach in A ball. He’s got a top prospect there and you’ve been handed a program to use…these are our hitting drills and these are the things we do, and you have a prospect wh’s not responding. The coach knows he’s a top prospect, maybe he represents some top money, he’s in the Carolina or Midwest or the California League…kind of out on an island, and not connected to the big club. He’s thinking like “Yeah, yeah, these are the drills I’ve been given. I’m not going to mess with it. I’ve seen something, I’d like to try it, but I’m not going to be the one to stray from the program.

I’ve been encouraging these guys to try. I say, “you know our general belief system, you know what we’re about…don’t stray from that. But within the parameters defined, innovate. I say “You played this game a long time. You had a coach somewhere along the line who got through to you. What did that coach do? Are you trying those things? We hired you because you’re an intelligent guy – you’re not a robot. You want to try some new drills? Do it. You want to try something drastic? Call the farm director, call the coordinator. Let them know – let’s not get crazy, but at the same time, I’m going to hold you accountable if he doesn’t get better so if you’re seeing this isn’t working, he’s not responding…well, everybody responds to things differently.

One of the things I’ve really tried to drive home is don’t be afraid to try something different. I expect you to put your stamp on the organization.

MBB: “Everybody responds to something differently”. That’s another piece of consciousness that seems intrinsic to baseball but not so much beyond it – so much so in baseball, a lot of people take it for granted. But for someone managing a doughnut shop, for example, it should be the same principle. A manager of a customer service department, for example, might luck into a whole group of people who respond to the same practices and drills, but baseball knows a lot more about your principle than most lines of work.

I loved you making it explicit, too, in your letter. What kind of people do you send them to?

JD: This letter is going to everybody in the organization. The works.

It’s just a little thing to recognize we’re about to kick off this season. I try to personalize each one with a little note at the bottom, rather than just having copies.

And the message I’m stating is: everything we are facing is a competition – how are you going to help us win today. I want to empower them.

I haven’t been an area scout. When I talk with those guys, they think I’m joking, but I think I’d want to be an area scout one of these days… to me it’s one of the more exciting jobs in the game. Say you’re out in Idaho looking for players every day…you couldn’t be more removed from this thing. You might feel like “what am I really doing to help us win every day.” It’s the Fall, there’s no baseball going on…are you going to that basketball game, that football game, meeting that two-sport star. You can sit in the stands, hear what his friends are saying about him. That gives you and advantage…especially if you’re the only team there and there’s no Angels or Oakland scout there, you just beat them. So we’re really trying to empower these guys.

And we haven’t done it, but we’ve talked about a financial reward if a guy (you scouted) gets to the big leagues should that scout get something. During the draft a scout is going to fight for his guy over someone else, they all are; would it make sense to have the whole scouting department get something if you get a guy up to the Big Leagues. And how about development? We haven’t done anything there yet but we’re trying.

MBB: Have you heard of any organization trying to re-design traditional incentive systems around scouting and development?

JD: I think some have. I don’t have any details for you.

Anyway, That’s the biggest non-player/personnel impact I’ve tried to have. Stability, family, we’re in this together, Ranger Pride, and you’re part of something special. And it’s critical for me to spend time with people like our minor league coaches. Touch base with or amateur scouts have a phone call with them every once in a while.. This Winter I had Barbara, my assistant, put the name and cell phone number of somebody different in front of me every day, both Thad & I. One day it was an A-ball trainer, the next a Dominican scout, the next day a major league coach, a AA pitching coach. Whatever it was…somebody every day was getting a call. I’m just trying to connect the organization.

MBB: Management by calling around.

JD: I know I play a little harder when I have a personal relationship with the guy I’m working for. It’s “we care. How are you doing? How are the kids?”

MBB: That is a fantastic method.

His idea, not fully explored yet, that scouting and development should get an incentive bonus for the success of the individuals who went through their personal workflows, is one I've advocated for organizations beyond baseball for a long time. It's a little easier to implement in Baseball than beyond because Baseball takes measurement seriously and executes. Most non-baseball organizations have little idea of the output of their staffers, and wouldn't do it if they knew how. But if H.R., in part as a department and in part as individuals, saw a significant part of their compensation depend more the on high performance of the people they recruit and get into the organization and a little less on avoiding error (what Daniels here put in his letter as "Be creative. Don't hesitate to experiment") and a lot less on just feeling like they're feeding a boiler -- they shovel it into the system and never see it again, I believe H.R. would perform better through immediate behavioral shifts and over time by attracting more entrepreneurially ambitious folk to the discipline. The mechanics of the system would be imperfect, as all compensation programs are, but I've built a few context-specific proposals, and it's not hard to come up with one that's significantly better than the status quo with less risk than the status quo has.

And the personal involvement he talks about is a vital advantage small organizations have over large ones which suffer the Diseconomy of Scale that comes when the executives at the top of the organization don't run into every staffer every day. Daniels is doing what's doable to address it.

He's top-flight to have noticed it makes a difference and even better in that he sets aside time to attack the limits scale imposes. It'll be fascinating to see what the Texas Rangers will doing in the 5th year of his regime, because it takes a while to turn around diseconomies of scale.

¿Why are you waiting on it?

Jon Daniels - Part III: Lessons in Changing Direction (A Reprise from 2007)

2011-11-03T08:13:00.000-07:00

In the last entry, I continued the conversation Texas Rangers' general manager Jon Daniels had with me in March, 2007. In this segment (one more to follow), Daniels talks about his initial moves on first inheriting management of a organization that has plenty of room for improvement. First moves are, as I try to hammer home, critical and usually set the limits of what a manager can achieve in the organization. His approach worked well enough that three years later (the planning/change horizon in major league baseball is usually six seasons, sometimes five) his front office team participated-in/led a very unusual accomplishment -- having a franchise get to the World Series in back-to-back years.

In the previous two entries that resulted from the interview Jon Daniels worked with me in Spring Training this year, we covered a couple of lessons from him. This part of the interview covered his approach to his early moves.

I asked him how he looked at his personnel and what kinds of moves he thought might need to occur. The reason I asked was partially too try to reveal how his management mind operated.

Jeff (MBB): Last year in Spring Training, the Rangers had one of those Hollywood disaster movies. You guys had an extraordinary string of injuries. This year, it seems more in the normal range. Given that, is there any spot on your roster that’s at the top of your list as a place to be looking for reinforcements? Or is it too early (March 20)?

Jon Daniels (JD): We don’t have a ton of depth in position players. And long-term, we don’t necessarily have a slam-dunk heir apparent center fielder. Those are things I’ll be looking out for.

I think in the past, we’ve always erred on the side of bats. As an organization, we’ve redefined ourselves, what we’ll be about. We going to clearly err on the side of pitching. It’s why I think we’re fine this Spring anyway. We’ve got some depth there – we have more guys who deserve to make the club than we have spots.

But I’d much rather be in that position than I was last year.

I counsel managers to make a big (but thought-out) splash early on in starting a new management gig because one never again has as much chance to act unimpeded, ever. Daniels had a factor that might have been either a severe constraint, or perhaps liberating: his relative chronological youth. If he had chosen to let it be a constraint, it could have made him err on the side of caution -- but as you can see, it didn't. BTW: there's a long aside here that's not classic MBB material -- Jon's relating to me how that first press conference he did came about. I left it in because I thought it was interesting to me personally, and I thought it might be to some readers, too..

MBB: {SNIP} On the subject of starting a new job...I always say when a manager starts a new job, it’s critical to have some serious achievements right away. There are some GMs, Doug Melvin and Bill Bavasi for a couple of examples, who view themselves more as stewards, less inclined to tear things up than I usually advocate for my (non-baseball) clients. When you took the GM promotion with the Rangers, you were quoted as saying something like “we’re going to do many different things”. I don’t know if the reporter munged the quote…if perhaps you had said “we are going to do some things differently”. When you took the promotion, had you already developed ideas on which you had wanted to execute?

JD: I did have a few things…but first, I want to say, I’d take that first press conference with a grain of salt.

A quick chronology for you.

Season ends on a Sunday. We have a staff meeting with ownership on Monday. John (Hart), Buck (Showalter), me, one or two guys from the staff, Tom Hicks and his son Tommy, who’s involved in the business. We go over a lot of things – I’d prepared a good amount of information for the meeting. And John throughout the meeting is constantly deferring to me. A couple weeks back John had told me he was going to come back for another year. We get up and we go to leave and John take my hand and says, “hell of a job today”. A little differently than usual. So I leave, fight through traffic, get back to the office about 6 o’clock. And I have a 7 a.m. flight to the Dominican Tuesday morning, and I have an e-mail message from Tom Hicks saying please call me when you get back to the office. He doesn’t usually do that, but he has contacted me directly before.

So I call Tom, and he says, “Jon, what do you have planned for tomorrow,” and I told him about my trip to the Dominican…we were working on opening a new academy there and I’m overseeing the project. He said, “I’d like for you to cancel your flight and come to the office tomorrow morning at 10 o’clock.” When the owner tells you to cancel, you cancel. I said, “No problem. Is there anything I can prepare?” and he said, “Just be prepared to talk about the future direction of the franchise”.

So I called John, and I asked him what was going on, and John said, “When you left, I went in to tell him I was going to step down and I recommended to him that you get the job.” It’s now 8 p.m., I call my wife and tell her I’m not going to be home, that I’ve got some preparing to do. Including thinking “am I ready?” You may get one shot at this…do you want to blow it? Or, you may never get another shot at it.

Prepare. Don’t sleep much that night. Walk the dog at about 4 in the morning. Go into Tom’s office at 10. And at 11:30, he’s extending his hand to me and offering me the job. About 45 minutes into the meeting the questions stop being “If you were to get the job what would you do,” and the tense changes to What are we going to do? How are we going to handle this situation?” Offers me the job. At 12:30, we have lunch. At 1:30 we call a press conference, and at 5 o’clock, we’re in front of the cameras.
There wasn’t a lot of time for me to prepare my thoughts.

MBB: So the things you had in your toolbox you thought you might introduce, what have you done, what have you put off that you may or may not do, and what were the ideas you had planned on acting on that you decided not to?

JD: I think that there are two global or philosophical changes things that I have really tried to introduce. The first is I’ve tried to gear the organization more towards pitching – that’s more a result-oriented, tangible difference.

The other one is something I did in response to the fact that the organization had become too fragmented. I think in the previous six years, I’m the 3rd GM since Doug (Melvin), Ron (Washington) is the 4th manager, we’ve had four scouting directors and four farm directors. That’s way too much change. And we talk all the time about success being the result of stability and ability. We didn’t have the first, and the other was lacking because of it.

So we had our first organizational meetings this past off-season…the first, I think, since Doug left…seven years.

MBB: Wow. That long?

JD: Yes…as a whole organization. We’d had met as departments.

MBB: So the organization-wide meeting…that was your initiative?

JD: Yes.

One of the things I want to do is create more of a family atmosphere. Yes, accountability, and goals and deadlines. But…we’ve done a lot of little things. The front office, we write little cards to everybody on their birthday on their kids and wives birthdays, their anniversaries, Mother’s Day. Here…here’s an example of the kind of letter we’re sending out….we’re looking to build that kind of ethic.

{he let me take a minute to read the letter}

BEYOND BASEBALL - BATTLING CREEPING QUAQUAVERSALITY
On the field, the Rangers had tried, and failed to get back into the playoffs, as an offensively-driven team in an offensively-lush home ballpark. (Though it's important to note, Don Malcolm realized the offensive-boosting park has at times actually -- pre-Daniels -- fooled the team into thinking its offense was better than it actually was and undervalued its current pitching.) Daniels has made a commitment to try the other side of the equation.

Off the major league team's field, the Texas Rangers had become a quaquaversal organization, radiating out in all directions simultaneously: geographically, departmentally, and as a result, socially, too.

This Diseconomy of Scale is near-universal in large organizations beyond baseball. As the size increases, the likelihood of quaquaversality increases, the Scylla and Charybdis of Us-Them-ism and lack of coordination increases. How can you maintain the mission, support goals, keep generating objectives in harmony as this happens?

Conscious effort applied to connecting people and methods across the organization, showing each individual how they matter and how other individuals they don't yet know matter. Every organization is going to need its own plan for the creating a centripetal force to hold counteract the Diseconomy of Scale as best they can. Daniels' initiatives here make excellent sense, and we'll pick up more of them in the next part of this interview, in a subsequent entry.

Jon Daniels - Part II: Rangers' GM Gives a Lesson in Resource Management (A Reprise from 2007)

2011-10-28T07:13:00.000-07:00

In the last entry, I started covering the conversation Texas Rangers' general manager Jon Daniels had with me in March, 2007. In this segment (more to follow later), Daniels talks about the process of making decisions. Specifically the interplay of managing resources, here an apparent excess capacity of good relief arms.

Most managers beyond baseball have a hard time knowing what to do with excess capacity, especially how to choose among what look to be equal options. I asked Daniels about what he might do to resolve the apparent surplus.

MBB: Let me get away from a chronological approach here for a bit.

There was a story recently about relief pitching. Apparently you have this bullpen that other people think is strong enough that you should be trading some of those arms. And your response was something like, “We’re keeping an inventory of others’ interest”.
So I’d like to get your insights on decision-making in general from this example. If the time comes that you’re going to trade, how will you go about deciding who in your bullpen you are most open to trading?

There seem to be a number of possible ways to anchor a decision. You want to keep the widest range of “looks”; last year you seemed to have a wide number of looks out of your pen. Choosing who you keep or let go might be based on pure ability…who’s the “best”. There’s who might offer you the best return. Or would you base it on what you can get back. Or something I haven’t thought of.

JD: It’s a little bit of all of the above. That might seem like a cop-out.

MBB: Do you try to anchor it on something though?

JD: It’s really a balance of two factors. It’s building the best bullpen we can right now, and measuring what the return is, even if that means giving up one of your seven best guys.

After my experiences in the last couple of years – I think in this game, we have a tendency to overthink sometimes – I do anyway, try to get too cute. Will I consider trying to do something with one of our best seven guys? Sure. I’ll never just say “no” to any offer – I’ve got to consider everything, weigh all our options. At the same time, I put a lot more emphasis on putting our best club out there, protect our depth. We do have some guys with options. It’s inevitable we’ll need more than the seven relievers we have right now. I’ll put more emphasis on our own needs. Unless the return for one of our best seven is overwhelming to the point where it’s a deal you couldn’t turn down.

So Daniels' model (which should be your own, too, in most cases) he's going to balance the present against the future. He gives a slight extra nod to the present "I put a lot more emphasis on putting our best club out there", but without ignoring the future "It’s inevitable we’ll need more than the seven relievers we have right now". But this is not an absolute. If Daniels gets a return he couldn't ever match with present value, he'd go for the "overwhelming" return.

The balance of present against future is specific to the 2007 Rangers, and for them, today is a little more important, But as with all baseball organizations, both are taken into consideration -- you have to win today, and you have to win in the future..

At the same time he knows, he's prepared himself for the idea, that in spite of his initial setting (leaning towards the present against the future) there's some level of return at which , because if its magnitude, he can shift his balance to garner the better part of a deal.

BEYOND BASEBALL
Beyond Baseball you should internalise this Daniels method.

Balance the present and the future...you have to win today and win tomorrow. Know if your organization/workgroup needs to emphasize one a little more than the other in the current context. Be prepared to be flexible, to slide along the now/future spectrum if an opportunity that's so juicy comes along it just outweighs your current balance objective.

Jon Daniels - Part I: Rangers' GMGot Mentoring From a Star(A Reprise from 2007)

2011-10-26T10:01:00.000-07:00

A reader asked me last week if I had any idea why the Texas Rangers had been able to make it into the World Series two years in a row, and if it has anything to do with their management. It certainly does, I believe. When Jon Daniels was selected as G.M. five years ago, he was very young, but already very, very astute. He had been generous with his time and we spoke for a long while about his background in and Beyond Baseball, and his approach for building a franchise that had been in the middle of the pack for performance. I'm going to reprint the results of that interview piece-by-piece, because I think you'll be able to see what he was doing that led to this level of success.

In the 40% of management jobs that require a significant element of domain-specific craft to achieve excellence, it's normal, and usually necessary to have one or more identifiable mentors.

That doesn't mean there aren't successful self-made managers in these positions. The self-made, in fact, can be the most brilliant innovators (someone had to invent the Baseball GM job as it exists, in this case Ed Barrow, and he was, by definition, self-made as a GM). But running without inetrnalised standards leads more often to underperformance, and that underperformance is usually a result of the self-made nature of the manager, the using up of cycles/energy/ergs/torque trying things the standards "know" are no- or low-return. I read a circa 1983 study that confirmed this logic -- it found the managers who scored in the highest and lowest quintiles in independence were disproportionately represented in the least-successful and most-successful achievement quintiles. (I've been looking to find that old study now for about a decade with no luck -- all leads welcomed).

A Baseball GM with one of the most interesting backgrounds generously gave me a ton of his time this Spring. Jon Daniels of the Texas Rangers is usually thought of as being inexperienced because he is young, and generally regarded as the youngest person ever to get a Major League team's GM job. While his ascent was rapid, that thought is off-kilter for a couple of reasons. The first is, he'd taken on diverse responsibilities in multiple organizations.

The bigger one is, he had activist mentoring in systems from a team of people who trained under a management leader who actively mentored (that is, made a serious point of it, deliberately carving out time and resources to see that it was done), and who delegated and built of a team of talented people who would take on that deliberate mentoring model and apply it.

The mentor is John Hart, who built the management that grew the Cleveland Indians into the 1990s powerhouse they became, and produced innovators who played and play significant roles in the development of other franchises' competitive theories and action: Oakland, Arizona, Colorado, San Diego, the Los Angeles Dodgers of Los Angeles, Boston and of course, even after several years, Cleveland itself.

Beyond Baseball, this approach, selfless on the surface, can lead to great results, if not always recognition. More about that later. Here's the beginning of an interview that will end up being a multi-parter, thanks to Daniels' generosity in sharing his insights and time.

Jeff Angus (MBB): Jon, you were brought into the Rangers organization by John Hart. So many roads in today’s baseball management lead from his regime in Cleveland. Was that an important part of your decision to come to the Rangers?
Jon Daniels (JD): (laughs) That would imply I had a lot of options.

MBB: You were working in Colorado…

JD: …yes, and Dan (O’Dowd) had offered me a chance to stay on there as an intern. It was right after 911, my family was in New York and I had been long-distance with my wife (then my girlfriend) for quite a while. There were a number of reasons I didn’t stay in Colorado. The lure, the idea of working for John was very attractive. I had worked in Colorado, so I had specifically worked with Dan and Josh (Byrnes) who had spent a good amount of time with him in Cleveland. And they have had a great deal of success, as well as others from there – Paul DePodesta, Mark Shapiro, Ben Charrington, Ruben Amaro Junior, Bud Black.

A lot of quality people started under John. He’s a critical person in my career development. He’s one of the most dynamic and engaging personalities you’re going to find. I have told John my only regret is that I didn’t get to work with him when he was building Cleveland…there are so many great stories that came out of there. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from John.

MBB: Cleveland was the most important innovator from that time.

JD: Well, there are a few different trees. You’ve got the Pat Gillick tree, to some extent the Dave Dombrowski tree…the John Schuerholz tree.

MBB: I consider the Pat Gillick tree comes from, as the Schuerholz one does, from Baltimore. John, I think, worked for Harry Dalton, who was his mentor.

JD: Pat’s tree is really dynamic from the standpoint of scouting. You’ve got Gord Ash, you don’t necessarily have a ton of front office types, but you do have a ton of scouting types.

MBB: True.

JD: You have Don Welke and Bobby Mattick, Al LaMacchia, even some more recent guys…Logan White worked with Pat. He was a cross-checker in Baltimore. Some guys in Seattle…Ken Madeja who’s now a special assistant over there. He drafted John Smoltz, Derek Lowe, JJ Putz, Ryan Feierabend...he’s got a tremendous track record. There’s no doubt that’s it’s a great thing on your resume that you learned under John.

MBB: When you came here and started working for him, what were the most important things you learned from him?

JD: Well, everyone in the game now wears a label. You’re a “stat guy” or a “scout guy” or “new school” or “old school”. You’re a “this” or a “that”. John, having played a little, having managed in the minor leagues, he’s easily accepted into the old school ranks. Very easily accepted into the scouting ranks and the on-field culture. But some of John’s strongest relationships in the game are with the Mark Shapiros and Chris Antonettis…Paul DePodesta, Josh Byrnes and me, who didn’t play professionally and guys who are labeled the stat guys.

John embraces it all, he wants all the information: medical, make-up, on-field, off-field, statistical, objective, subjective and that’s an ethic I’ve really tried to embrace. From my background, what used to come more naturally is looking at things objectively…statistics. That’s why I’ve surrounded myself with guys like John and Don Welke, Jay Robertson, Mel Didier, Gary Rajsich on down the line. Ron Washington…he wasn’t the kind of guy the industry expected me to hire with my background.

It’s critical for me to get information from every possible direction. John Schuerholz had a great quote…I’m going to butcher it… “He with the best and most information wins”.

That’s true.

{SNIP, for now}

Key lessons here.

Winners embrace everything. That's not saying every component is equal -- but no shred of potentially useful knowledge is to be ignored up front. Winners further balance their weightings of various forms of knowledge in response to context.
Embracing everything is not a contained strategy in itself. There are a number of ways to act off of an embrace-everything strategy -- Daniels points out several trees and branches off a tree. As managers who've been mentored work with it, they tweak the rules or make some new ones. That intellectual process is precisely parallel to cultural evolution of other domains. Daniels may end up making a branch or entire new tree of his own (Jon thinks Schuerholz has started his own tree).
Note how people-centric his knowledge/apprenticeship is. A couple of these names come up multiple times. In a The Talent Is The Product endeavor, that is, a value-added and not a commodity one, people are not only the key (immediate) production asset, but the key long-term growth (capture, organization, refinement & dissemination of knowledge) asset, too.
...and this is less clear from this interview than what I've gotten from other Hart protégés...taking personal credit is less important to successful players in this kind of management environment that making sure the things for which credit could be taken get delivered and shared.

In the next part of the interview, we'll talk about multi-factor decision trees and on how you make (or avoid making) a big splash on starting a new job.

Management By Wishful Thinking #163: Kurkjian's Krazy Kwack-Up

2011-10-03T11:29:00.001-07:00

Making a prediction on significant events that have significant unknowns that play into the outcome, and you're likely to be made a fool. Beyond Baseball you see this a lot, most often in the corporate world, more often than not in corporate social structures where the system doesn't hold people accountable.

Virtually all organizations need to apply analysis to strategy. The most transparent billion-dollar endeavor is Baseball, so Baseball makes for some pretty clear examples of strategic planning and allocating resources from the results.

Major league baseball teams, with rare exceptions, use advance scouts to capture and analyze data about upcoming opponents. The scouts summarize this into information that their team uses to plan for immediate series, as well as keep it archived as part of a baseline of information for later tussles.

For teams that are likely to make it into the playoffs, this effort starts being more critical around mid-September. In most years, it's becoming obvious which opponents are the most likely. This'll sound like a big "duh", but playoff-bound (or still-playoff hopeful) teams have access to a limited pool of skilled advance scouts, so allocate them to the games/teams stochastically: They neither choose a single-most likely opponent and put all their resources into one (a deterministic approach), nor do they allocate an equal fraction to every single team that hasn't yet been eliminated (a random approach). With their stochastic approach, they are most likely to pay some attention to all possible opponents, but invest proportionally more in scouting most likely opponents (tweaked by how much they've been playing against them recently and have on hand immediate intel) .

Well, yes, that is a big "duh", but in the corporate world, this tends not to work as elegantly. There's an entire field of study on this, and some useful, applicable research, such as the paper "Detecting Regime Shifts: The Psychology of Under- and Over-Reaction" by Cade Massey & George Wu, available here. Over- and under-investment in allocating analysis is a daunting problem in corporate social structures, because of Angus' First Law of Organizational Behavior: in general in corporate systems, accumulated leadership tends to be individuals who diminish accountability (something Baseball can't allow).

If the probabilities are murky because there are a lot of uncertainties operating or if the events are based on a small number of binary outcomes, or both (for example, any October best of 5- or 7-game baseball series; think, for example, of the 1995 Cleveland Indians, the strongest team of the previous 20 years, getting shredded in the Series that year by a perfectly-fine-but-not-exceptional Atlanta Braves team) corporate analysts tend to "freeze up". The risk becomes high of choosing incorrectly, and more often than not in the corporate world, leadership's cognition will devolve into MBWT (Management By Wishful Thinking) as an energy-conservation tack -- that is, why invest a lot of intellectual effort when the outcome is uncertain -- just go with your gut...and your gut is driven by hopes and wishes.

KURKJIAN'S KRAPPY KOGNITION
You won't see a lot of this in Baseball management. But there was a howler last week when, thanks to fate and relentless baseball practice, both the American League's and National League's wild card teams, and therefore all four playoff set-ups, were in flux going into the 162nd (last) game of the season. So there's a great example of it around Baseball.

One of the most experienced and bright Baseball pundits, ESPN's Tim Kurkjian, talked about going into the last day of the regular season, with the extraordinarily strong finish of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (behind by 9 wins for the wild card with 26 games to play) tied for the wild card with the Boston Red Sox in the A.L., and the Struggling Atlanta Braves tied for the same pseudo-honor with the surging St. Louis Cardinals.

Neither league's wild card contenders were playing against each other, so the results of four different games would decide the regular-season outcome. If in either league both contenders had the same game outcome (a win or a loss), they would have to play a one-game head-to-head tiebreaker, but if one league contender lost while the other won, that would be the decider.

In all four games, the contender's opponent had zero "incentive" to win, except as a spoiler, so Kurkjian's assumed they'd be easy pickings, that all four contenders would win. And in the corporate world, or even in other endeavors that are less competitive than Baseball, say the NFL, that might be probable. In Baseball, though, Jocketty's Law applies: Whatever doesn't make you stronger, kills you.

Really, though, what the pundit was hoping for was that all four contenders would win so there could be an additional day of intense, winner-take-all baseball. Not a bad hope...it would have been fun, but the odds were against it

The Red Sox faced their division's "doormat", the Baltimore Orioles, so Kurkjian was probably as safe in choosing that outcome as in any of the four contests. But there were two factors he chose to ignore: Baltimore was playing at home where they had been 5-4 against the Sox during the season (certainly not roadkill), and O's manager Buck Showalter's relentless determination to squeeze every possible gain/win out of every moment/game. He didn't exactly ignore a third factor, the Sox' 17-27 play since August 10th, but he dismissed it as ephemeral. The O's refused to play dead, and came back in the 9th inning with some serious heroics.

Kurkjian didn't under-rate the quality of the Devil Rays' opponents, the New York Yankees, but he did grossly underestimate two factors that affected the Yanks' determination to win. First, the Gothamites were already in the playoffs, meaning if they lost to the Devil Rays and the Tampa team faced them later in the championship series, their opponent would have a psychological advantage, perhaps not massive, but in a system where whatever doesn't make you stronger kills you, not to be ignored. Second, the Yankees, from both a pride and profit position, practically prefer playing the Red Sox (a legendary rivalry with both richer revenues and blood lust at stake). So the Yankees weren't going to roll over, even if they weren't going to compromise their playoff chances by squandering their best starting pitcher or reliever in the effort. The Yankees put away the Devil Rays early but Joe Maddon's relentless and loose squad came back and won it in 12 innings.

In the National League games, he did the same, presuming the Braves' 11-19 record since August 24th was a short-lived swoon and that they would rise to the occasion. The Braves were certainly an appealing and skilled team, but they were playing the team with the best record in Baseball, the 101-61 Philadelphia Phillies (and you don't get to 100 wins without playing every pitch for keeps). The Phils, further, had the same incentive the Yankees had; the need to win for psychological advantage in case the Braves would make it into the championship series against them. The Phils wouldn't lie down and they beat the Braves in 13 innings.

It was certainly the most exciting last day of regular season baseball in my lifetime, with four games that absolutely counted, three of which were decided in the 9th or later inning.

But in his MBWT, the pundit ignored completely the Baseball precept he absolutely has every reason to know and internalize: Jocketty's Law.

The next time you have to engage in strategic planning, don't fall into Kurkjian Kraziness. Do what analysis you can do, and be prepared that with a lot of competitive uncertainty, you could be wrong. Just because the outcome is fuzzy, do not allow yourself to surrender to Management By Wishful Thinking because it's much easier than serious analysis.

A Revelation From Fred Claire: How to Negotiate With a Competitor

2011-08-21T11:02:00.000-07:00

In closed or limited organizational ecosystems, you have to be able to negotiate with competitors. Not all of us work in closed systems, but unless you're the rarer than rare person who has so much power he can force his will on everyone (say, Saparmurat Niyazov or Lloyd Blankfein) sooner or later, you'll be negotiating with a competitor. It could be external...a company that's a direct competitor, or internal, a territorial manager of an adjacent department or a department you are competing with for resources.

Baseball is an almost-entirely closed system. Whenever you make a deal with another team, you are pushing hands with an antagonist who, in a zero-sum system, is seeking the exact same end goals you are: a World Series trophy. So any asset to your side of the equation is most likely a debit on her side. In a zero-sum system, it's pretty rare to get to a win-win outcome. (Bill Bavasi told me this, btw, is one of the reasons some GMs far prefer free agent signings -- it doesn't collide with the zero-sum nature of trading in a closed system.)

SO HOW DO YOU DO IT?
Well, if it can be done anywhere, it will happen in the most vibrant, flexible, advanced management arena in the world, Baseball. And the way you do it is to analyze the situation in agonizing depth, or at least to a level considered agonizing in the bush league management arenas that are the ones Beyond Baseball.

I'll give you a great example I read recently in Fred Claire's 2004 book My 30 Years in Dodger Blue. The situation is this: In 1998, the Bums' catcher and primo team star, Mike Piazza, and coming off arguably the best-ever offensive season a catcher had ever had, was to become a free agent. Claire and the Dodgers fiercely wanted him to stay, but new corporate ownership (Fox) was focused elsewhere, and enforcing the normal post-takeover budgetary tightness, while Team Piazza was indicating they were seeking the fattest contract in Baseball history. Pre-season negotiations had failed to close the deal, so Piazza entered the season unsigned, an indicator to other teams that he might be traded (since a team that holds on to a good player who leaves for free agency & signs w/another team is very unlikely to recover "full" value for the loss of services). Other General Managers, such as the Florida Marlins' Dave Dombrowski, a leading practitioner of negotiating arts, would float offers, in the hopes of adding immediate wins, or adding wins and signing the star, or alternatively, flipping him to another team looking for immediate wins in exchange for a handful of promising cheap youngsters.

So, this excerpt from Claire's book:

In that call, on April 10, our negotiations with Piazza on hold, Dombrowski had inquired about Mike. His approach was very direct -- "Fred, would you trade Mike Piazza and a young, low-salaried pitcher for Charles Johnson, Gary Sheffield and Jim Eisenreich?"

I knew Dombrowski was under orders from Florida owner Wayne Huizenga to unload payroll after the Marlins had won the World Series the previous season and yeat had lost money in the process. Sheffield was at the top of the Marlin salary list in that he had just signed a six-year deal that paid him $61 million from 1998 through 2003.

Dombrowski figured if he could trade Sheffield for Piazza, the Marlins would be free of the bulk of their future payroll obligations. Furthermore, Dombrowski would be in a position to acquire young players for Piazza in that Mike was in the last year of his contract.

I went to Graziano [Claire's boss] and told him {snip} I wanted to reply to Dombrowski that we weren't interested in discussing Piazza because we wanted to sign Mike, but we were interested in Sheffield.

My reasoning: I felt that as long as Sheffield remained the focus of trade discussions, Charles Johnson would remain a Marlin. The two made an attractive trade package, the high-priced slugger paired with the lower-priced but highly-valuable catcher. If Fox decided Piazza had to go, Johnson would be just the replacement we needed. {snip}

A subtle, masterful playing of the chess board that can only happen because Claire's workgroup has come to a blisteringly thorough understanding of the other side of the negotiating table. The Dodgers still want to sign Piazza, but they may not be able to, for whatever financial or corporate-political or personal reasons. The Dodgers would like to keep the Marlins' younger, cheaper catcher (and not as fine a player, but already Johnson was an All-Star and had won a Gold Glove) in the trading pool so the Dodgers might snare him as a contingency if Piazza left. But Johnson was a most-attractive player beyond his on the field value; he was a logical pairing with Gary Sheffield, the personally difficult but extremely productive and extremely expensive slugger in a trade.

So to keep Johnson from leaving the Marlins, Claire hoped to pin the Marlins by expressing more interest in Sheffield than the Dodgers really had. Getting Sheffield's and Johnson's prowess and payroll obligations wouldn't necessarily be a tragedy, but why not try to get the sweeter benefit/cost pairing alone (in Johnson)?

ADVANCED NEGOTIATION 400, IN, AND BEYOND BASEBALL
To attempt this required nothing less than the striving for total data omniscience.

Claire and his group needed to:

examine the dollar and playing values,
learn and interpret the other side of the table's motivations and short- and long-term plans,
interpret the Marlins' valuation systems and measuring factors as well as their own, and
come up with either a win-win match-up, or, barring that,
a ploy that would freeze the Marlins pursuit of other deals as long as possible .

And, oh yeah, without totally burning the other side of a table, because (especially) in a closed system, you don't want to set off a neutron bomb (a deal so bitter that it guarantees one side will never again do business with the other).

In your own management, consider how complex the preparation for this negotiation was. Are you good enough for Baseball (that is, do you prepare this way)? You can in most cases, of course. It requires a level of research most managers Beyond Baseball are unwilling to take on.

Maybe you can't be as skilled as Fred Claire, but I promise you it's worth trying.

Yellow Dandelions Trump Black Swans & Blue Oceans

2011-08-11T09:35:00.000-07:00

"Luck is the residue of opportunity and design."
--John "The Bread Street Bomber" Milton & Branch Rickey

The global Business of Business Advice is an odd industry. People write articles or business publications on a theoretical idea. They try to spin the idea in an original-sounding way, and if a publisher thinks the sound resonates, it becomes a book. If the book and the publicity around it becomes widespread enough, becomes a cult. Hundreds of thousands of readers, some of whom have a lever, a fulcrum & a place to stand, think they might apply the theory in their own workgroup or organization.

Roughly, for about every 1,000 copies sold, I estimate there are about 1,500 people who learn enough about the underlying principle to talk about the one sentence description of the core theory. I estimate 600 of the books get read through, maybe 30 people try to implement a project, initiative or makeover based on the theory, and of those 30, you can count on the normal rate of success (Angus' Second Law: 85% of corporate projects fail absolutely or are euthanized (or forgotten) before completion, 10% deploy based on their original goals and 5% deploy based on original goals and succeed). So for every 1,500 people who can relate the core idea, 2 (rounding up so as to be a bit optimistic) turns Business Advice into useful action. For the other 1,498, it's just plaque, perhaps entertaining or diverting, but nothing that delivers on the mission -- the explicit promise of business, leadership or management advice.

Two of 1,500 is only an average. It can go up (or, more likely, go down) from that proportion. There's an underlying reader trend that undermines the chance for implementation. As a mass, readers would rather read about big ideas than small ones, and they'd rather read about theory than practice. So the largest readership goes to the big theoretical idea books than the practical (something you do that creates positive action). And there's another factor that literary (book) agents will tell you, too: Readers don't want to act on any of this Business Advice - they just want to be entertained and feel good.

Here are two favorite examples of fun best-selling global Business of Business Advice that are pre-destined to never reach the 2-in-1,500 successful implementation norm: The Black Swan Theory and Blue Ocean Strategy. They are both giant ideas based that are probably quite true but close to impossible for any individual or team to apply to anything bigger than a lemonade stand. The Black Swan is based on the giant idea that, "A black swan is an event, positive or negative, that is deemed improbable yet causes massive consequences." Blue Ocean, "explains how to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant while charting a new path to capture new market space that is ripe for growth".

Well, Yellow Dandelions trump Blue Oceans and Black Swans...not for popularity and sales, but on two counts:

You can actually implement this idea in any organization, and
The net benefit of deploying it will give you actual (not just theoretical) returns.

The Yellow Dandelion was second-sacker Fred Pfeffer, one of the first baseball players to write a book on "scientific baseball". As explained in Paul Dickson's exquisitely informative book The Hidden Language of Baseball: How Signs and Sign Stealing Have Influenced the Course of Our National Pastime,

In 1889, N. Fred Pfeffer, the bare handed infield star and tactician with the Chicago White Stockings of the 1880s...published a manual called Scientific Ball {snip} At the heart of his defensive science was a "Code of motions so perfected" that every man on a club knew what kind of ball was to be pitched next. "Knowing this in advance, the men can so place themselves so as to give the man in the box [the pitcher] the most effective support.

{SNIP}

"Pfeffer believed that the fielder's job was to move at the very last moment, when the pitcher was in his delivery, and that once a play had begun it was imperative that the players knew how to back one another up. "Failure to 'back up' players and positions has probably been as disastrous a feature of losing clubs as any other which can be specified," he wrote. "Because of this fatal weakness, scores of otherwise well-played games are needlessly sacrificed each year."

The Yellow Dandelion Deployment is one that, because Baseball is so transparent and overwhelmingly meritocratic (both useful attributes wholly missing from corporate workplaces) you can just plain see works out.

The teams that grab the every-event, small but attainable advantages (in baseball parlance, "execute") tend to win more games because they don't leave games' outcomes as much to chance. If you watch a game for Yellow Dandelion Deployment, watch the fielders "cheat" on many pitches, cover each other on defense in a variety of ways based on the situation, you can see how absolutely effective this is. Sadly, televised games, while great to watch, rarely expose the Deployment. But I urge you to watch a major league game live (preferably from the upper deck as close to directly behind home plate as you can) and watch the extraordinary clockwork of a skilled major league team that has mostly veteran players. Pick one non-catcher fielder out for each two-inning span and try to follow what they do on every pitch, every ball in play. You'll see 120 years of refinement beyond Pfeffer's actionable principles, a level of teamwork and management acuity beyond everything in the non-MBB management world.

BEYOND BASEBALL
Unlike Blue Oceans and Black Swans, you can absolutely apply Yellow Dandelion tactics to your benefit in the workplace.

Make sure that on tasks that must succeed for your organization to succeed, each responsible person knows she has one or more teammates to back her up, own some responsibility for overall success. You have to start this overtly, not with a memo. Good managers always take on the responsibility themselves of each contributor's success, being there to back him up, but once a manager can break out beyond merely taking on that backing-up personally and deploy it to the contributors nearest the task-owner (not all others -- the right fielder can and will back up plays to 1st base but it's a waste of energy to have him try, futilely, to back up plays at 3rd) the useful contributors will learn the right back-up moves through repetition.

What's the best way to kick this off?

By both explaining the back-up theory in advance and then starting to assign back-up contributors to every task. These back-ups can be "editors", or "timers" or "ambassadors".

"Ambassadors" are most useful when a task is multi-departmental and the contributor assigned to the task needs to enlist allies or try to push through work happening outside her span of control; the ambassador helps with that external pressure.

"Editors" I use to be the second pair of eyes for quality control; the editor is someone the task-owner can bounce ideas off of and who can check deliverables for conceptual or trivial kinds of accuracy.

What I call "timers" are teammates who help the contributor stay on schedule and co-own the deadline. The timer is not a non-com issuing orders or applying pressure. The timer relieves pressure by being equally responsible for knowing the task schedule and helping out the task-owner without having to be solicited.

You probably won't have to delegate each rôle on each project. You can certainly invent other rôles that make sense within the context of your own endeavour, but invent a one- or two-word name for each, so you can use the name as a shorthand. But you should make a habit of assigning one or more back-up rôles to most every task.

At the completion of every meaningful task with an assigned back-up, you should get the participants to talk to the team about winning moves, or problems that would have been smaller with new back-up ideas.

After a series of successes, you invite contributors to deploy themselves as back-ups or invite back-ups on their own. (In Baseball, it's terribly inefficient -- that is, a losing strategy -- to have the manager assign every back-up on each pitch or every play in the field; players need to be able to do this for themselves based on established principles refined by their own practice and experiences.)

AVOIDING YELLOW DANDELION DEPLOYMENT PROBLEMS
There are two common problems in Yellow Dandelion Deployments: non-accountable or otherwise anti-team oriented contributors, and over-or under-management.

Some contributors resist help, being too egocentric or believing teamwork shows them to be weak. Some of these people are tractable, for example, if you point out how hard it is for a single person acting alone to execute a double-play. But some are simply too insecure or introverted to be comfortable having back-ups. You have one of two solutions to this problem: if the person is a great contributor with great success (think Barry Bonds) then exempt her from the routine; if he's not, get rid of him.

And you can control the over- or under-management. Over-management is removing from the contributors the chance to have rôles delegated to them (which is the equivalent of a major league manager trying to coordinate all players on the field with every pitch). Under-management is not selling the teamwork benefits hard enough, re-deploying people to the rôles they seem to best while still giving them chances to be good at other rôles, or not monitoring the evolution of the system and its outcomes.

The odds of you becoming enriched through successfully identifying a Black Swan and then deploying a counter are not 2-in-1,500, rarer than a no-hitter. The odds of you identifying and deploying a Blue Ocean Strategy are no better.

But 1,500-in-1,500 managers in any organization that has seven or more employees can apply Yellow Dandelion Deployments with success. Not only does it work, but it's actually fun.

You may not actually ever have three hits in an inning, like Fred Pfeffer had in a game on September 6, 1883, but you can knock out a bunch of hits everyday using his "scientific baseball" principles.

The Peavy Principle: Every Technology Enables New Abilities & Disables Existing Ones

2011-08-01T06:39:00.000-07:00

Clarke's Second Law of New Technology (paraphrased):
For every human capability a technology creates,
it disables what exists; this may net out as progress or retardation.

In Baseball (and Beyond Baseball), new technologies that create the capability to do things we've never been able to do before (say, Field F/X, which can measure infinitesimal speed and trajectory and rotational measures for a batted ball) tend to add to human knowledge and "ability".

New technologies that merely make it easier to do the things we can already do (broom-->vacuum cleaner, for example, or texting instead of voice telephone), change the things we do in foreseeable and unforeseen ways, and they don't always represent net progress. Author Arthur C. Clarke wrote a classic sci-fi story that illustrates this counter-intuitive reality from a military/industrial perspective.

There's a great Management By Baseball example that happened recently that makes this effect, what I call The Peavy Principle, very easy to understand.

PEAVY'S PITCHING PREEMPTS POWERFUL PARAPHERNALIA
According to Adam Kilgore's story in the Washington Post,

CHICAGO — The answer to how the Washington Nationals would achieve their latest win seemed to reveal itself in the second inning Saturday afternoon. Chicago White Sox starter John Danks walked off the field, a strained muscle having ended his day after six batters. The Nationals could feast on Chicago’s bullpen and chalk up another win. Just the usual.

“I thought we got a break,” interim manager John McLaren said. “I thought we were going to hit their bullpen.”

But after spending two weeks convincing themselves they can’t lose, the Nationals lost to the White Sox, 3-0, before 23,008 at U.S. Cellular field, just their second defeat in 14 games. The Nationals managed two hits and struck out 11 times over 7-1/3 innings against the White Sox’ bullpen, which received a dominant cameo by veteran ace Jake Peavy, making the first relief appearance of his career. {SNIP}

Peavy dominated for four innings, allowing a single and no walks while striking out seven.

Before each series, the Nationals’ hitters gather in a small room adjacent to their clubhouse. With hitting coach Rick Eckstein, they watch video and study tendencies of each starter they will face and the relievers. Peavy, who started Wednesday for Chicago, fit neither category. “I didn’t see Peavy’s name on that list,” McLaren said.

Though the Nationals never mentioned Peavy in their hitters’ meeting, they still gave credit to his pitching. “The bottom line is, we just didn’t swing the bats well today,” third baseman Jerry Hairston said.

In the last fifteen years (depending on which team, a little earlier or a little later), video library software has given coaches the ability to create, with just a few hours of assembly by the coach or other team aides, wonderfully organized and informative video tutorials on how opponents play, their biases and tendencies and quirks and tells. This new technology replaces a prior, non-technological way of doing it; word-of-mouth verbal sharing of information, three-ring binder collections of data points, exchanged tips in the batting cage before the game, exchanged tips in the dugout during the game.

It's not that none of that pre-video library software information happens; it just has become secondary, delivers less impact than the new way and, therefore, becomes relatively devalued by most of the participants. By making a high-tech system THE WAY to get 'er done, the other ways seem to be "old fashioned" or lower yield.

But for every ability an augmenting technology increases, it undermines an existing capability. By being able to hyper-focus intense information about the White Sox relievers, that attention gets invested, and so a resting starter, Jake Peavy, who comes into a game as a reliever, is glossed over in the chosen techno-path to success. ¿Did the Nationals have three-ring binder back-up? I'm not sure; when interim Manager McLaren skippered in Seattle, I saw him carrying two. But as a recently-appointed interim, he would work with the protocols the team had already worked out. Even if they did have it, the batters would have already tapped their cognitive investment in other, more fluidly-acquired accustomed ways of getting data. They cannot have helped but instinctively valued the video information over the old-fashioned.

In Baseball (an endeavour much more brutally zero-sum competitive than the easier work domain you manage in) a Jedi Master of finding a cognitive edge like White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, undoubtedly knew there was some tiny (not giant) advantage in putting on the mound an unscheduled reliever, but in Baseball, because it's zero-sum, tiny advantages loom large. The reality that Jake Peavy is a monster pitcher when he's healthy had to have been a consideration as well. And Guillen is as prepared as any manager in any field; he and pitching coach Don Cooper would always, every game have a Plan B for who would come in early in a still-close game if the starter is injured or blown out.

In Baseball, technology that replaces manual + verbal methods may enable people to do what they did before faster or cheaper, but it makes the knowledge more brittle, less hands-on, more shallowly textured. Technology eats some of the nuance while spitting out better volume...what I call The Peavy Principle.

THE PEAVY PRINCIPLE BEYOND BASEBALL...
...is actually quite wide-spread. The most wide-spread example is cell phones replacing land-lines. It's not technology that gives us unprecedented abilities, but does augment the span of places we can use a telephone or type messages or play games or execute frozen pork-bellies futures contracts. Mobile gives us mobility, the capability to call from most anywhere (unless you're a Sprint user in suburban Chicago or an AT&T victim in San Francisco). But the quality of communication goes down as the degraded fidelity eliminates audible intonation and voice affects. Is the trade-off worthwhile? For most users, I suspect the answer is probably yes, but for communications that require clarity (business, romance, intelligence), the loss is palpable and costly.

I'll give you a concrete example from my own practice. I was one of the earliest users of project management software, but I didn't learn on it. Before there was software, PMs worked with a surprising range of physical tools. I used mechanical pencil on graph paper and, of course, had to do trial and error, making copious use of the Eberhard Faber Eraser Stick (known in the trade as a "poodle penis"). I wouldn't describe this as "the good old days"; it was truly challenging, and I welcomed my SuperProject and later my TimeLine (a now-gone package that was at least 4x as productive as anything on the market today). I was project director on a USEPA contract that had 23 people who through the project worked asynchronously in 10 cities...a massive logistic effort that additionally required a lot of knowledge about the individual talents (no two of whom had the same strengths and weaknesses) and concurrently was an attempt to prove to the agency that a co-op could deliver comparable quality at lower cost.

Setting up a project was faster this way than it is using even good project management software. Recalculating in software is much faster than erasing/rebuilding-by-trial-and-error. Getting the first draft done is much faster in software. But woe to the software-only solution when the plan veers away from the original plan enough that it requires resequencing, or re-applying the individual talents of non-commodity labor from one sequence to another. Because project management software "believes" people are commodities, and it's almost impossible to program human interdependencies or stored knowledge into the database that sequences decisions.

I could actually do this significantly faster by hand. So can most professionals who did or do it by hand, because the physical drawing and erasing of lines, not delegating that to a machine, gives the PM a much stronger and more textured understanding of the interdependencies.

People who learned on software (most contemporary PMPs) and at the same time never do it by hand tend to undervalue the aspects of project management that the software is counter-productive for or simply doesn't do. Most learned-it-using-software suffer from The Peavy Principle, that is, they can do it fast, but by delegating the knowledge to a technology, they can overlook details the technology ignores, filtering out valuable information simply because the software developer didn't value it, or because it was costly or perhaps impossible to embody in software.

By stuffing the data into a digital container, removed from the visible and manipulable world of physical artifacts, they master technology, but undermine the fullness of their craft -- as my associate Athena explained to me when she was taking a PMP certification course, they were teaching people how to operate software, do effective data entry and report their results thoroughly, not how to manage projects.

I'll give you a another equally-painful example, in case you have no experience with project management. Handling data.

Many of us who analyse data for a living actually comb through the raw data before we start analysing it. It's time-consuming, and doesn't always have big rewards, but we find that the exploration gives us a better handle on it and makes it easier to track the exceptions that indicate valuable insights or dirty data. Some of our peers, though, trust data enough to make it an unseen artifact that's hidden in a digital container. Even when they use other software to flag exceptions or pinpoint certain kinds of out-of-scope points, they can miss subtle flaws that the technology helper wasn't programmed to recognize.

Even famous and brilliant scientists who don't respect the data (the noun, the reason for the analysis) as much as the tool used to analyse it (the verb) are missing a key piece of the grammar of data analysis. A few years ago I read a serious clever baseball researcher's article on platoon splits (the ability, for example, of a right-handed batter to hit left-handed pitching overall better than right handed), and he had come to the conclusion that it was not a skill (not a repeatable event, but one driven by luck or other external factors). His results were quite unequivocal.

I was surprised but interested, because platoon splits are a piece of unquestioned protocol and I love to question the unquestioned protocol. I'd fiddled with this problem before without coming to useful conclusions, and he had taken a very different tack in the analysis and had compiled a great swathe of data. I asked him if he would give me a copy of the data to work with, and he generously shared it.

I opened the file with great anticipation and started combing through the individual rows, associating codes with the players they referred to, their seasons, all artifacts I'd never had the pleasure of examining as consolidated numbers. But you can imagine how disappointed I was when I saw that much of the data was flawed, the result of a bad transform routine, one that repeated two of the fields every so many rows (not all rows, not all fields, but regularly making false certain rows in a predictable sequence). Each one of these rows was within scope, and every one, taken alone, was feasible. There were no out of scope characters or out of scope row lengths -- it was a giant pile of broken data that smelled fresh to data cleaning routines, and turned the research conclusions from significant to not. Only a human eye and brain considering patterns would detect the underlying errors.

I did send the deck back to the mathematician with a note, and thanked him. His push back was that I must be mistaken and that errors would have been caught by his technology. He had evolved out of being a scientist and into a technology midwife. If he ever opened his file and looked at it line by line (honestly, an exhausting task), he would have known. The technology that enabled him to adsorb vast piles of data and clean and analyse it and deliver insight by a thousand slices had left him exposed to intellectual death by a thousand cuts. It had enabled vast quantity while degrading critical quality.

What technologies do you use that threaten to impose the Peavy Principle on your efforts? If Baseball, the most productive and accountable user of technology can get screwed up by the Peavy Principle, I'm telling you it can mess you up, too.

Umpires Go Lean; Deming Does Baseball

2011-07-28T09:46:00.000-07:00

I'm not the smartest batter in the blogosphere, but I'm blessed by having the smartest readers. My perpetual high-performing cloud teammate Joe Ely, an implementer of Lean Manufacturing practices and other management & process refinements, is a noteworthy example. I already know he's a student and a renderer and a teacher of the genius of W. Edwards Deming who also blends in a panoply of other lessons he's absorbed and knitted together to create his own toolbox.

What I didn't know until this week is he's an umpire, as well.

I knew that he and I both use continuous improvement techniques along with staff knowledge and morale-building processes to try to simultaneously increase productivity through quality and employee-customer-employer satisfaction. And we are both deeply into Baseball as a process and as an entertainment.

But a note from him this week about the umpiring win-now-while-setting-yourself-up-to-win-later-too process I wrote about in the previous entry has set me to thinking more about our parallel interests. Perhaps a large part of the reason both Baseball and Lean/Deming appeal to us is that Deming is really a lot about Baseball or that Baseball is really a lot about Lean, or both. ¿What if there's a continuous refinement loop that Baseball embodies that approaches the ideal form that each of us, in somewhat different configurations, is trying to embody in our management implementation practices?

A wild-axed thought. Perhaps errant, but if so, only as errant as the long liner that just wraps itself on the wrong side of the fair pole.

As you may remember from the Genius of Umpire Process entry, the Umps have worked out a most-elegant process of assigning talent to provide arbiters for the Playoffs and World Series, blending senior, other veteran, and relatively-young umps, and then rotating them so the youngest are guaranteed the opportunities to get experience at the most important spots on the field, but when the stakes are relatively the lowest. And this reserves the most likely to be pressure-filled, intense spots on the field for the games that are most likely to be the most pressure-filled and intense.

Joe Ely at work knows how to do this, but it turns out that Joe Ely the Umpire does this Lean-like process on the baseball field, as well. Here's a lightly abridged version of his note:

The insight on World Series umpire rotation is huge...it all makes sense if you think about it. Get the most experienced guys progressively behind the plate as the pressure builds. Game 2 just isn't that tough, relatively speaking.

And a further example, from Little League.

Last Wednesday, I was assigned to work the plate for our District finals for the 11-year old division. I had three other guys assigned to do bases but the assignor did not tell me who to put where. So, when I got to the field, an hour ahead of time, I made my decision and put the least experienced guy at first base and two equally veteran guys at 2nd and 3rd.

When the guy working 2nd, a good friend of mine for many years now, arrived and learned who was working first, he pulled me aside and said "Joe, do you know what this guy will do at 1st?? That's crazy!" I explained I felt it was key he get some good experience and we had to do this sometime to develop new umpires. We stayed with the assignments.

Well, the game progressed. The guy did make one out and out blown call at first, calling an out on an obvious safe situation. But he got everything else right. He was in the frying pan on one check swing I had to go to him for but got it right (though not for the right reason). He also made two less-than perfect movements on balls to the outfield. No one noticed but the other three of us, though and we discussed it during and after the game. And his one blown call ended up not being a factor.

Following the game, he thanked us for the assignment, having learned a lot. He'll do better next time. Both coaches thanked us, as a team, for a good game. It all ended well.

Gotta do this to build a future. Weber was right. And it works in a hidden corner of Indiana Little League as well as the bright lights of the World Series.

You have to respect the vitality of Joe Ely's thinking, incorporating with variation his work improvement methods to this avocation. This requires understanding the context and incorporating without a rigid copy process.

But Ely's process -- overwhelmingly harmonic with Deming, is pure baseball, as well. I wonder how much Deming consciously borrowed from the National Pastime.

PS: A few of my own favorite Joe Ely insights, always actionable, insightful and stuff that has hard, measurable value:

Process improvement how-to.

On personal organizers.

A simple but powerful example almost anyone can understand & apply in their own shop.

My all-time treasure (particularly the work-bench illustration).

Baseball Umpires' Staff Development Genius: Balancing Winning Today With Winning Tomorrow

2011-07-25T07:20:00.000-07:00

Baseball is sharper about managing in competitive environments than corporate or military or government arenas are. It's zero-sum (for every win there has to be a loss) & transparent, both of which mean failure can neither be hidden, denied, or without consequences. So if you manage Beyond Baseball, learn this lesson about one of the hardest things to do in Baseball and Beyond.

You need to balance your resources and staff time/energy not only to win today but in all the tomorrows coming up.

IN BASEBALL...
...managers do it, front offices do it, even the Umpires do it. The manager in the dugout needs to win this game unfolding today. You put up your best available rested pitcher, skipping anyone else even if it's their turn. You save your best pinch hitter for the most important situation you intuit may come up. You try to put out on the field your best line-up of today's available talent, and craft the line-up for the best possible immediate results. At the same time, in the same game day, you need to give your other players chances, because if you don't, you're going to end up late in the season with rusty skills and when some key player gets injured or tired or slumping, not only are you slotting in a lesser talent, but one who's not tuned to succeed at even her own level. Further, by not using your subs, you're losing valuable chances to see what they are best at, where they succeed and fail, and the chance to refine their game through coaching informed by observation.

Front office management has to assemble winning rosters right now and for the future but they will not be in their jobs long if they trade too much of their future for some immediate this-season advantage. And the irony of it is, if they do the reverse, build a sensible plan for an elevated long-term success without winning enough right now, they may be cooked before the planned schedule for improvement gets to the intended results (case in point, Seattle Mariners GM Jack Jack Zduriencik's attempt to turn around a team that unwise ownership has undermined now for close to a decade, an effort that looked on the surface like a four- or five-year plan that's now in year 2.5, is in a hazardous position because the team on the field today has a truly sorry present and at the 2.5 year mark, unsurprisingly, hasn't gotten to Year 5 of the Five Year plan yet).

And, I just found out Umpires do it, too. I've been reading Bruce Weber's fantastic book on Umpires, As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of Umpires (Scribner, 2009). On the surface, it sounds like a marginal topic, but the New York Times' Weber is not just a good writer and insightful observer, he went through one of the two official schools for pro umpires, so he understands the work as an insider. I'll write a review of the book in a later entry (if you are already convinced, his Fresh Air interview was cool, too), but the joy of it is the same frisson a management person gets on an industrial plant tour (like the Rainier Brewery tour or the Tillamook Cheese factory tour or the -- now decommissioned -- IBM PC factory tour). It gives you a ton of insight and knowledge about an everyday "object" or endeavour you think you understand, but from such a different -- and intimate -- perspective, that it opens up your eyes to a big world you thought you pretty much understood.

One of the great moments of this book is a Management By Baseball one: How the Umps balance putting their best product on the field today without strip-mining their future.

Playoff and World Series umpiring crews are balanced with more-experienced individuals and promising younger professionals. Okay, well that's normal throughout Baseball and one of the reasons Baseball is the most effective endeavor in North America at professional development. But the mechanics of how the umpires deploy the talent is worth thinking about and a wonderful example for anyone who manages staff and wishes to deliver best effort today while not undermining best effort tomorrow.

Weber explains how they do it with the six umps in a World Series crew (one at each base and two added umps for the outfield lines), all top notch talent in a field that has been hyper-winnowed already, so they are Seven-Sigma, at the very top of the top notch of a top notch.

Generally, the crew chief...works the opening game, dealing with the initial spectacle; then the crew rotates in order of reverse seniority, so the younger umps get their experience, and the older ones take their turns as the stakes get higher. In a seven-game series, the crew chief returns to the plate for the ultimate game.

Sounds reasonable as a way to balance opportunity, but for the minority of managers who read this blog who haven't already noticed it, it's a perfectly crafted staff development scheme.

Game One...everyone has butterflies (yes, even the umps), so the crew chief handles the most calls by being behind home plate. You don't know where the toughest calls are going to be (Weber explains why), but you do know the home plate arbiter will have the highest quantity and the most eyeballs for the most time, so they go with the chief talent. Then, the rotation puts the least senior ump there and as the games progress (and are more apparently consequential) the experience level gets higher until, if it does get to the ultimate zero-sum crucible, a seventh game of the World Series, the most experienced talent, the crew chief, is at home plate to take the pressure and deliver the needed work.

BEYOND BASEBALL
I'll know I'll get mail (I always do when I write on balancing winning today with tomorrow) pushing back (usually it's from finance people or sales managers) that try to convince me I'm wrong & that corporate management is wiser and that this balancing thing is over-rated.

Not close, IMNSHO. Most people who work inside publicly-owned corporations labor in shops that almost never preserve their resources for some later date and overlook testing/training opportunities for the less-experienced talent to get their cuts at what they haven't mastered while observing, measuring and analysing their performance so the manager can deliver targeted coaching. So the best stay the best, even if their skills decline, because the prospects don't get built up as a matter of course. They may develop on their own, but can you imagine what would happen in Baseball if management never provided targeted coaching and opportunities for prospects? Exactly, they'd be the 1981-86 Pittsburgh Pirates or the 2004-2008 Seattle Mariners, dreadful teams dominated by older talent simultaneously getting neither younger for the future nor better for immediate wins.

Upper management can make line management act this way even when line management knows it's counter-productive. If every project/effort is sold as the Most Important Thing Ever, if every Pet Rock is sold to employees and stockholders as The Pyramids at Giza, no one ever gets a test or a rest. The trend, therefore, is Gene Mauch 1964...your best get worn out, becoming less good, but it becomes (realistically) scarier to take a chance on the other talent because they are untested. So the best may still be the best, but they are not as good, and the others are not as good because they haven't been studiously developed, so (and I'll get push-back on this conclusion because, amazingly I always do, especially from the innumerate people who dominate both finance and sales management) the composite average performance of the workgroup goes down. And simultaneously, the options for the future are diminished, too, because of the lack of development.

It's a corporate habit that's lose-lose: In trying to be stronger right now and ignoring the future, they undermine their present so they can be weaker in the future (hey, maybe it'll be someone else's problem).

Learn from the umpires, a much more difficult and transparent craft than your own. Be meticulous with staff development to be great fright now and be great for the future.

This play-for-today-only ethic is a form of strip-mining, to heck with the future. It's bad business for Baseball, and it's bad practice for your own organization

Michael Humphreys' Wizardry: Imperfect But Critical Analytics

2011-07-21T06:37:00.000-07:00

Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all. -- Charles "The Dudmaston Devastator" Babbage

Social systems are determined by technological systems -- Leslie A. White

In business as in Baseball, technology triggers innovation which affects comparative advantage. The spread of relatively inexpensive business analytics tools in the late 1990s proliferated an immense cadre of people with various combined levels of skill, of insight, and of training to attack the kinds of large-dataset problems that have much to yield to such technology. Business, as always, lagged behind Baseball (Government did too, but, as usual, not quite as much), because Contemporary Corporate governance is almost always following financial aspirations, while Baseball's aspiration portfolio is broader.

Because Baseball is intrinsically far more accountable than the corporate workplace, it has embraced more advanced accountability engines, such as the only-recently capable of deployment video capture technologies that can identify events such as true balls and strikes, the exact trajectory, speed and rotation of a pitched or batted ball, the distance and vector paths a fielder takes to get to a batted ball.

The majority of the data loaded and analysed from these systems has decoded pitching for umpires, coaches and pitchers themselves. But the most important data loaded and analysed from these systems has been that aimed at decoding fielding. That's because judging fielding has been Baseball's most gaping knowledge lag. There are good data to have a glimpse at the value of batters and, to a lesser degree, pitchers, but all pre-contemporary high-tech analysis to judge fielding has been interesting but under-infused with hard facts.

So the arrival of that technology has been good. But there's a sad background to that, an Internet-inspired trend in the background that dulls the innovative advantage of this magnificent innovation. It needs to be proprietary, because the Internet has enabled people who don't respect intellectual property (the idea that inventors deserve compensation for their inventions, creators deserve compensation for their creations) to expropriate public instances of others' private property for their own private profit.

"Content wants to be free" is the mantra of the non-creative free-market types who want to reap the creations of creative people at their own whim for their own profit. It's a perfectly parasitical paradigm, perniciously peddled by pseudo-intellectual free-market rent-boys like Laurence Lessig. In a society that values money > creativity, creativity will gravitate towards serving the purpose of money so people with money but no creativity will buy creation while people with creativity will tend to constrain their focus to serve uncreative people with money.

This twin-killing has made it very difficult to achieve much with the Business Analytics tools our technological innovators have made possible, in part because the ubiquity of the Internet intellectual-property-theft tools our technological innovators have made possible. Beyond Baseball, probably in your own organization, innovation and mission advancement is stunted by the same trends.

If the companies that invested in the high-tech creations that have brought so much actionable information to baseball were not very protective of their data, they would be rich in insight and poor in money, with no chance of earning back their investment. So all this wonderful "batted ball" data that decodes fielding skill and enables baseball teams to make better, more informed decisions is kept proprietary, not shared with the vast cadre of analysts I described earlier. And so fewer informed ideas get tested, vetted, argued for and against -- that is, refined with the scientific method.

HUMPHREYS HATCHES A HARBINGER Into this scientific gap plunged Michael Humphreys, with an attempt to see what could be synthesised using only publicly-available data, and using what fragments of the proprietary data had been publicly-shared to "test" it.

The result was a few years of peer-review and dialogue that culminated in a book, Wizardry: Baseball's All-Time Great Fielders Revealed, (Oxford University Press, 2011, New York). In it, Humphreys devises a system that approximates the knowledge that could be uncovered using proprietary systems.

It's a most noble effort, one I found flawed in some ways, but one that I believe achieves its very useful mission: putting ideas that benefit from the scientific and analytic method into a public dialogue. The book, therefore is not an end in itself, but a means towards that end, and end that's very difficult to achieve in our finance-led society which gravitates in the other direction.

Wizardry has two parts. Part I is a detailed, open-book description of Humphreys' analytic methods (which I like much for its insight and openness). Part II is a position-by-position and "era"-by-"era" application of the methods to name names and built stacked lists of bests and worsts (which I didn't like much).

On the eccentric side, he proposes pitchers' fielding be credited with infield pop-outs and shallow outfield flies with long hang time, rather than any individual fielders' numbers, as he views them as automatic outs and not really something with which you should credit an individual fielder or the rest of the team. Unless I mis-read his intent, I suspect this should be credited to the pitcher's pitching instead (like a strikeout is credited to his pitching and not to the catcher's or the pitcher's fielding). But it's an interesting and thought-provoking assertion.

And in tribute to the now-widely accepted but laughably wrong "Wisdom of Crowds" cult, he proposes at one point that the only way to posit one aspect of outfield defense is to take two existing obviously-flawed systems and make a simple average between the two. Yikes...that's like suggesting that averaging the coordinates of two pitches called balls are the best way to determine what a strike is.

Disputes like this aside, he's made his analysis something others can build on by making it an open systems effort and bases it on publicly-available data. It doesn't need to be perfect; it needs to be sufficient and something good enough that others can build on it, and Humphreys' work is both.

BEYOND HUMPHREYS & BASEBALL I want to encourage you, if you are an analyst or have any management affect on analysis departments to grab a copy of Wizardry and read it for ideas for your own efforts.

First, absorb how he spread his ideas around to different people with very different points of view and used their critiques to synthesise refinements to his own system. In your own shop, that could mean circulating the answers and questions they engender to other departments with very different kinds of insights or could mean combining with other organizations that are not direct competitors to synthesise your mutual wisdom. It's not fully open source (though going fully open source is a strategy that was at least as effective as secured analysis for the Oakland A's Moneyball strategy), but pushes the energy in that direction and the comparative gains that has to offer.

Second, see how you can use available non-proprietary data to blend in with your own, the way Humphreys has. Analysts, I've found, too often restrict their span to their own perimeters of collected data.

Third, try posing naïve questions, Paul DePodesta style. Play around with your questions in eccentric (not out of this universe) ways, parallel to Humphreys' crediting pitchers' fielding with pop-up outs.

BALANCING SCIENCE & CREATIVITY In Baseball, at least, there are solutions to finding a workable balance. Don Malcolm has some ideas, hinted at here & to be described in full at some later date, I hope.

Beyond Baseball, as long as as a society we find money more worthy than anything else, the Internet and skilled lobbyists for Red China's industrial plutocrats ("we mustn't offend them, and free markets demand we respect their needs, and it makes everything so cheap to buy, so it feels good") make it seem inevitable that innovation and creativity must serve as the midwife to the uncreativity of finance. I'm pretty sure it's not inevitable, but it does require people working and thinking and acting like Humphreys, as well as being willing to pay innovators and creators instead of cheap idea cloners and purveyors of cheap toxic crap.

It just takes will and enforcing accountability, something Baseball does every minute.

Parlaying Pee-Pee Passes into Pennants: Florida Marlins' Master of Change Jack McKeon

2011-07-18T07:22:00.000-07:00

Jack Aloysius McKeon came out of retirement in June to take over the Fish Tank, the cellar-dwelling, on-an-eleven-game-losing-streak Florida Marlins. McKeon is a self-important martinet, old enough at 80 to not give a hoot about what his employees think of him, but amazingly, he knows exactly how much pressure to apply and where. His ability to attend to every detail, learn from his mistakes, and fearlessly act on both his instincts and learned lessons make him one of the rare managers in any field who has gotten all around the bases and to Home Plate in the MBB Management Model.

While I last wrote about him eight seasons ago when he took this same team to an upset World Series victory, the front office chose him for this 2011 task for the exact same reason: changing the existing culture and exerting discipline over a very young discount-budget team. And McKeon chose to take the job for the same reason; because he was finding life away from the most challenging, complex, compound managerial job on the face of the planet too un-stimulating for his 80-years-old lifestyle.

The Marlins this year were actually above .500, 32-30, before this single swoon. But the front office believed that his resigned predecessor Edwin Rodríguez was not going to be the manager to take this recipe, still a ways from being fully-baked, into the playoffs, and believed McKeon's relentless discipline is what the youngest roster in the league needs now.

MASTER OF CHANGE
As I've written about before, McKeon has mastered change, maybe as much as any manager in the league not named Joe Maddon. He learned from his predecessors, and remarkably, learned from his own mistakes, and did not view his past mistakes as approaches-to-be-universally-rejected, as I explained in that piece linked-to two paragraphs previous (in brief, he started his management career by burning out young pitchers; he learned to stop overusing young pitchers, but instead of never riding a successful starter hard, found spots where he could occasionally optimize his team's chances by stretching out a young starter. This is a very rare ability...the ability to reject what you thought you knew, but not demonize it to the degree that what useful elements it contained are unusable).

One critical element of change for any incoming manager is to shock your employees enough for them to get out of ruts they may not even understand they are in. Maddon does this more completely and more entertainingly by making it clear every protocol that's optional (batting order, kangaroo court fines, dress codes) will be changed, that seemingly everything is changing -- a lesson that's impossible to miss. McKeon addresses the small range of things that are most symptomatic of what he's trying to change.

PEE-PEE PASSES
As is the norm for Bob Dole Generation managers, McKeon not only wants to be fully in control of anyone he's not convinced is fully-self-disciplined, he wants each employee to know he's in charge. No subtlety. Again, though, in trying to institute a change initiative, it's critical to shock the employees into understanding change is happening and expected. I prefer defter, more enlisting means, but McKeon's can work in this environment -- a young outfit under-performing in part because of lack of diligence.

According to an insightful story by the Miami Herald's Clark Spencer,

When McKeon took over as manager in ’03, one of his first priorities was to break (Josh) Beckett and (Brad) Penny — two pitchers with high ceilings but poor work ethics — of their lackadaisical habits. “I just hammered,” he said. “I just stayed on them.”

McKeon demands that starting pitchers sit in the dugout on days they’re not pitching to study and learn. When he discovered that Penny and Beckett weren’t on the bench one game in ’03, he stormed into the clubhouse between innings and tore into them. He ended up having the clubhouse door locked so players couldn’t go in during games.

He said Mark Redman had fun with that and made index cards into restroom passes for players during the game.

There was “a poo-poo and a pee-pee card, so if you wanted to go poo-poo or pee-pee, you had to get a card,” McKeon said, adding that players had to come to him to get one of the passes.

There is some technique in here to go along with the risible aspects of it. Mark Redman, one of the oldest guys on that team, made a bit of a joke about it, but McKeon leveraged that. He didn't punish Redman, he took it, aikido-style, and sideswiped it into his system. And by having something as ridiculous as hall passes (further coded by #1 and #2), what might have been pure conflict became amusing, and made the absolutely serious disciplinary needs (pitchers sitting in the dugout on non-start days so as to study and learn), seem more reasonable.

BEYOND BASEBALL
In your own change initiatives, I don't recommend hall passes (unless you're a middle school teacher or an investment banker). But the McKeon Ploy...to find the key ability shortfall, then identify the cause, then institute a surprisingly non-obvious but noticeable method to short-circuit it...is worth your consideration.

This Marlin team is unlikely to pull off the 2003 surprise. But McKeon is building a platform for his successor, a learning organisation that can take the next step when the time comes, ownership permitting. The ~47% of males and ~61% of females lucky enough to live to be 80 should aspire that if we do, we could still be achieving positive Change initiatives if we get there.

Dick Williams' Lesson in Establishing a Reputation (A Memorial Reprise)

2011-07-15T07:07:00.000-07:00

When Dick Williams life ended earlier this month, he left behind a legacy of management excellence -- and several different reputations. In the previous entry, I took a quick your of his useful methods, but left out one at Second Base of the Management by Baseball Model: Managing People, forgoing that topic for a full entry on it. The following essay, focused specifically on a Second Base method -- establishing a reputation to improve effectiveness -- is a reprise from January 2004.

When you start a management position in a new company or in a group that doesn’t know you well, there will be many staffers who don’t want it to be too easy for you. One or two of them might have been angling for your job themselves.

There are many males who compete by a zero-sum equation; like frat boys’ hazing rituals, they believe you have to earn their compliance. There are many females who manage their environment by manipulation, testing your resolve and determination.

You’re going to have to learn to establish a reputation that has a full spectrum of possibilities, because different people are best managed with different incentives and approaches. If you’re a natural hard-ass, you’re going to need to learn to establish a reputation as a cooperator. If you’re a nice guy, you’ll need to show your assertiveness. And once established, you’ll need to reinforce your reputation with consistent “marketing”, that is, presenting yourself a certain way, but you equally may need to alter your reputation in response to group needs or events.

Dick Williams was hired by Charlie O. Finley to take the Oakland A’s to a new level. The team had built a roster very wisely in the late 1960s and had two second place finishes in a row, In 1969 and 1970 with aloof, businesslike managers Hank Bauer and John McNamara. Finley understood that a different style can frequently bring out new strengths while holding on to strengths already internalized.

Williams was more a one-of-the-guys manager, but when he got to the A’s, they were already swaggering, feeling like champs, and, according to Williams, he had three clubhouse leaders. There was Reggie Jackson, the vocal one, Sal Bando, the quiet clubhouse emissary, and Catfish Hunter, the ace pitcher and campus clown who kept everyone loose. As Williams said in his book No More Mr. Nice Guy:

“I’ll let players lead themselves, particularly veterans like Catfish, as long as they recognize and respect the ultimate authority. Me.

“…We had opened that first A’s season by losing four of our first six games…I was a little worried about a pitching staff that had allowed 40 runs in those games. Then I became more worried after Charlie called me and pitching coach Bill Posedel to his apartment and asked what the hell I was going to do about it .

“By the time the plane landed in Milwaukee to begin the trip, I had advanced from worried to angry.”

His players were loose, but in a bad, unproductive way, and not listening to their manager. Williams knew he needed to change the established shape of the manager-player relationship in a way that asserted his dominance, but not in some hysterical Captain Queeg out-of-context rant. Fate handed him an opportunity right that minute in Milwaukee.

The players got off the plane an boarded their bus. A flight attendant from the plane came running out to the bus, jumped on it and explained that someone had stolen a megaphone from the plane at they had to return it. “I sucked in my breath,” Williams said, “It was time to stop staring in awe at my Athletics and start shoving them.”

He stood up in the aisle and announced he was going to stand there until they coughed up megaphone. Silence, jostling and nudging, snickers. He turned red.

“I don’t know if you guys know this, but we aren’t exactly burning up the damn league”. More silence, more snickers.

“I know some of you think you can be assholes…well I can be the biggest asshole of them all. And if you have a problem with that, just call Charlie…but he ain’t her now and I am, and you’d better learn to live with-”

Clunk. The megaphone had been returned.

It turned out it was ace pitcher Catfish Hunter who’d stolen the megaphone. “I knew and the team knew but I never did anything about it. As it turned out, I should have given him a bonus for feeding me the slow curve that enabled this team to feel my swing.”

“I was never told how they reacted to it, but then I didn’t need to be told, I saw. We won 12 of our next 13 games. Six days after my meltdown we went into first place and were never caught.”

BEYOND BASEBALL

Beyond baseball sometimes (rarely) a tantrum is just what’s needed for a relatively-new manager to cement his authority. Usually it’s something else. But you have to wait for the right opportunity, because if it’s too out of context or feels staged, it will actually degrade your authority.

My wife works in an organization that has an affirmative action program for hiring older people who had been career military. A few men who came in this way got into positions of hiring power and started hiring a lot more retired military men until the organization had a strong strain of this particular style of management. It's a style that doesn't work well in most non-military settings.

The ones that succeeded in the new role were the ones who established early on that their management style was different. They did this by demonstrating an almost over-the-top "warm fuzziness", very explicitly differentiating themselves from the expected pattern. The ones who failed to set a tone early were likely to waste time struggling against the reputation of the retired military archetype.

Set a tone, establish who you are early & clearly. Maybe you'll be a legendary success like Dick Williams.

Remembering Dick Williams, a Management by Baseball All-Time Great

2011-07-12T07:33:00.000-07:00

Dick Williams (1929 - 2011) is all over the Management by Baseball book, because he was one of the greatest management and life teachers I've ever had. He advanced through all four bases of the MBB Model, and if you never saw him manage or hear him talk about the game, the quick stop at each base I'll put farther down the page will give you some insights into what made him so special.

I can't say he was a personal friend...we had a thin, professional relationship, first when he managed in Seattle towards the end of his manager career and I was doing some work for the A.P. covering the team, and later when I was lucky enough to be assigned the work of writing his biography for the Society for American Baseball Research's Baseball Biography Project.

Reporters were usually scared of him or hated him or both. And he was a notorious "red ass"; he could deliver devastatingly acerbic responses to what he considered dumb questions. A lot of Bob Dole-generation managers (for example, Ralph Houk, John McNamara, Billy Martin) were that way.

I noticed, though, he was different from those other red asses in two major respects: he was skeptical and he was fair. He didn't automatically presume a question was stupid, he waited for the question, listened and then judged whether it was dumb or not (while those other three for example, didn't bother to listen because they were so convinced the reporters were dumb that they would not get asked any interesting or smart questions). "Skip", which is what a lot of his coaches and players called him at that time, as much stress as he was under, seemed to always listen and then judge the question itself, and even if a reporter had asked him a bunch of dumb questions every night for most of a homestand, Skip would listen and only diss the reporter if the immediate question was dumb. He didn't hold a grudge that way -- which is one of the reasons, btw, he was such a great manager -- he presumed improvement was possible and that reinforcement (in this particular case, the negative reinforcement of calling into question a reporter's acuity) made improvement more possible. He certainly didn't hold it against one of the most ignorant baseball reporters around, Bill Plaschke who covered the M's at that time, and if Williams had held a grudge for the accumulation of a scary number of very ignorant questions presented arrogantly by a know-it-all without a shred of useful knowledge, he would never have chosen Plaschke to be the as-told-to for his autobiography (No More Mr. Nice Guy).

If Dick Williams didn't believe in the perfectibility of humans, he did believe that improvement was possible and always a good thing worth expending energy on.

So my trick back then was to let everyone else ask the vanilla, predictable questions you could win money betting on would be asked (e.g., What did you think of <insert starting pitcher's name>'s performance tonight?, or How costly was Yeager's error tonight, or the immensely vapid, pointless and hollow How did you feel when <such-and-such> happened?, or the always good for a big cringe Why didn't you pinch-hit with <so-and-so> instead of letting <whatshisname> ground into that double-play?). I had an advantage over most of the press guys in this...for one thing, I worked for the wire service, which only wanted colorless predictable words; with rare exceptions, anything extraordinary or insightful got snipped out (and the New York sports desk held against you the extra work it took them to homogenize and sterilize your prose). So I could just take dictation and pass the most appreciated part of the responses back as part of the story. The trick part was staying after everyone had left (or coming back later) and asking the kinds of questions an aspiring manager would ask. What was his insight on this or that, had he changed his views of constructing a line-up over the years, and if so, how...essay questions. And even though I was no smarter than any of those other writers, I asked questions that were unexpected and it was obvious I wanted to learn.

Skip loved to teach and see the learning acquired and used. I can say that in the couple of dozen conversations I had with him, he never once ridiculed my ignorance or quest for understanding; more often than not, he acted enthusiastic about sharing his insights. And he was never once rude to me.

I used his lessons in my management practice for over a decade before the SABR Baseball Biography Project started up, but when it did, I asked Mark Armour and his editorial team if I could write Williams' bio, and they were kind enough to let me do it. It enabled me to have about a half-dozen more life & baseball conversations with him, and much of that found its way into the biography. I still called him Skip and he still was willing to teach if I was willing to ask meaningful questions and learn. And this round, the interaction still wasn't as "friends" (can't do that as a biographer), it was closer, less guarded and more like the "relationship" I imagine his coaches had with him.

He was a great interview, a great baseball person, and one of Baseball's five or six best managers of the 20th Century.

WHAT MADE HIM SO SPECIAL?
Well, too much to scribe here. But I'll give you a single choice piece at each of the four bases.

FIRST BASE - MANAGING THE MECHANICS
Most of what professionals call management is here at First. What people mostly remembered about him until he died this month was that if an employee didn't try to improve, he was a red ass and that was true. But Skip excelled at giving people (with extra patience for the younger ones) a chance to prove what they could do and for using people for what they had proven themselves good at. He wasn't a glass-half-empty person, he didn't pretend they could do what they didn't/couldn't, and he didn't resent people for not being able to turn full effort into the high results he always hoped for and drove people for.

SECOND BASE - MANAGING PEOPLE
The next essay I post will be a reprise from January of 2004, where I discussed his approach to establishing a reputation, and that's all about 2nd base. But here I'll tersify it: Williams knew that if you had a diverse roster/staff, you would need to work with different egos and personalities and that there was no one right way to do that, because those personalities would be different, need different inspiration and motivations to succeed. Very very few managers Beyond Baseball work as though they know this, and Williams was expert.

THIRD BASE - SELF-AWARENESS
Too many managers bring their childhood or family issues into their management style. This is a severe mistake only 100% of the time. The most common tack managers who have not been professionally trained as managers (that is, most managers in the U.S.) take is to use as a foundation for their managerial style either their dominant parent or the exact opposite.

Williams was an abused child, physically beaten by his dominant parent -- his father -- and driven to achieve the maximum in every way. Since he was most adept at athletics, he pushed himself to please his dad there: he lettered in baseball, football, basketball, track, tennis, and swimming. In handball, he didn't just letter, he was city champ. But his father withheld full approval -- almost as though he believed that if Dick thought he was good, he would stop trying.

When he became manager, he neither used his father as the model, nor embraced the opposite. Instead of totally rejecting his father's "management by disappointment" approach or using it wholesale, he found he could use a piece of it with modifications. By demanding high effort and rewarding high effort, by letting physical errors pass by without tormenting the perp but at the same time pointing out all the mental errors & their consequences in blunt, sharp language, he was able to use his father's ghost without either worshipping it or avenging himself on it. Very very few managers Beyond Baseball ever master third base, understand how their own ego and personal experiences color their management style -- and Williams not only understood his own demons, but channeled them to improve himself and his work.

HOME PLATE - CHANGE
Dick Williams was one of two great turnaround artists in Baseball between Joe McCarthy and Lou Piniella. There's probably 1,000 words on what and how he did this, in both leagues and with very different kinds of teams and I won't elaborate that deeply here.

What Skip knew about Change was that to succeed in turning around what had been mediocrity or worse, you couldn't just address talent issues and you couldn't just address attitude -- you needed to deploy the full panoply, not let anyone stand in your way even if they were using reasonable sounding reasons for hesitancy, and you needed to be completely aware of the realities of the resources and people at hand, and let everyone know they were welcomed along for the ride but if they weren't working at helping, they were off the bus.

Beyond Baseball, managers rarely have the courage to try and the sensitivity to carry this off.

Williams, well, he was just an extraordinary manager, an all-time great practitioner of management skill rarely found in Baseball, and present in under 1% of the managers Beyond Baseball. I wish I'd have had a few more interviews, a few more lessons.

It's Claire as Day: Why in a "Free Market", Corporate Initiatives Tend to Degrade Quality

2011-07-08T07:14:00.000-07:00

In many posts including the previous entry, I touched on the set of issues in Baseball that gets exacerbated when there's an imbalance between the Baseball bottom line (game wins) and the Business bottom line (dollars won). And while it's true that a great, winning team on the field can have persistent business issues, the imbalance is generally in the other direction: the team's ownership or front office values some business consideration more than wins to a degree that the product itself becomes degraded and then the business side tries to figure out a way to diminish the baseball part of the product (in favor of mallpark or other distractions) to cover that up.

I'm about to tell you about an example that beautifully illustrates an almost universal feature of what passes outside of Baseball as management in this "Free Market" era. It is a beautiful illustration because it simultaneously:

Exposes the intrinsic inability of conglomerated corporations to deliver quality,
Illustrates the contemporary hubris of corporate management in believing decision-makers don't need domain knowledge, because "we're management, we can do anything we want", and
Provides an additional nail in the coffin of the idea that a publicly-owned corporation can act as a vessel for real capitalism.

I recently lucked into a bit of dialog with Fred Claire, one of the longest-tenured general managers of contemporary times, and one of the more successful ones. He was kind enough to send me his book, My 30 Years in Dodger Blue (Sports Publishing, 2004), and it was a great read that covered some only-in-this-book MBB topics (proper book review in a later post). But the insider commentary most striking to me is what I'll cover in this post: the breaking of a multi-decade covenant between the Dodgers and their fans and staff that just about inevitably followed the team's ownership transfer from family ownership (the O'Malleys) to a contemporary conglomerate (a set of entities ultimately owned by News Corp.)

BASEBALL BACKGROUND
To reiterate what I've discussed previously, Baseball differs from Beyond Baseball business in that Baseball is almost perfectly accountable. The wins and losses (individual, team, league) are fully measurable, visible to any who take an interest. And competitive capitalism is at its finest when the accountability is most knitted into the institution. There's no Enron in Baseball, no ability to cook the books and fool the observers into thinking a 37-51 team is a great team, or that a batter putting up 180/250/205 should be batting as DH in the heart of the order of a team that intends to win games. Pretty much no-one will accept that in an accountable system like baseball.

And true Baseball ownership learns that over time, and the relentless nature of Baseball sharpens that awareness, so (as stated by Angus' First Law of Organizational Dynamics: All human institutions tend to be self-amplifying) over time, owners that hate accountability flee to other, less accountable organizations, like Business or Non-Profits, and owners who either actively like or can live with high-accountability environments stay or recruit others like them.

Family or single-endeavor owners like the O'Malleys' can be ruthless and make sub-optimal or even dumb decisions, but the accountability they choose to operate within guarantees some balance, some respect for the covenant between the team as business-entity and the fans, players, community. The owners that rely on the team itself for their livelihood and self-image can't escape accountability for all their decisions. And they have many tough ones (Fred's book is a gem of a tour through a single team's everyday challenges).

THE CONGLOMERATE AS ENGINE OF UN-CREATIVE DESTRUCTION
Balancing the Baseball factors with the Business ones is extremely hard. But when the O'Malleys sold the Dodgers to Fox Entertainment Corp., a conglomerate owned by the conglomerate of conglomerates, News Corp., that balance was ignored.

Actually that's not exactly correct; in reality, the Baseball disappeared into a set of News Corp.'s existing balancing schemes that were designed to maximize the returns on various forms of assets through "synergy", the wild, more-often failing idea that if you sell both cotton candy and nuclear reactors you can cross-market to your customers, sell you cotton candy to your power plant as insulation material and ship your nuclear waste to your cotton candy manufacturing plant as an additive that makes the confection glow in the dark.

So in 1998, the Fox executives who took authority for the Dodgers' corporate decisions immediately evaluated the team and its individual "properties" (in Hollywood, a performer under contract, a script, a set, a sound studio, an owned film, et.al.), and realized they could strive to increase the value of another piece of the conglomerate, a regional sports-broadcasting network in Florida, if they sent Mike Piazza, already then the most prolific slugging Catcher in the game's entire history, and a very popular fan symbol for the team, to the Florida Marlins, where he would presumably increase the lustre of Marlins broadcasts, ergo the value of this other piece of Fox Entertainment Group. "Property" then, becomes commodity, and commodities are not given deep consideration (any more than one ton of Powder River Basin 8,800 Btu, 0.8 SO2 Coal is treated differently from any other particular ton of it, or one vanilla teen sitcom is treated differently from another).

BTW: They didn't consult Fred Claire or any of the Dodger baseball or Dodger business people about the trade. With zero knowledge and experience of Baseball or baseball business, they executed a restructuring, just like they would if they had taken over a small chain of radio stations or cotton-candy plants. With the kind of grandiose domain-ignorance corporate heroes almost invariably have, they act out deus-ex-machina movements of people, craft, buildings, debt, credit, customer service and product quality without little to no consideration of employees or customers in the name of shareholder. And the irony of it is, this usually bits the shareholders in the pocket, though with the sub-Baseball accountability enforced in the corporate world, this usually doesn't have consequences for the Barons of Botch.

Not amazingly, given their total lack of domain knowledge -- combined with a religious faith that domain knowledge is not a necessity -- Fox's executive, Chase Carey, arranged for the Marlins to send a player in the trade who had a no trade clause in his contract. The Marlins' front office, of course, had reason to know that the Dodger "negotiator" knew this public bit of information, so presumed that this was something for the Dodgers to negotiate with the player. Well, Hollywood properties don't have no-trade clauses in their contracts, so Carey didn't realize the implication, and then, when it blew up, shifted the responsibility to the Dodgers' real front office.

The trade served the Dodgers neither from a Baseball perspective, nor further, given the importance of Piazza to the franchise's image, the business side of the Dodgers. And ironically, it did not pan out in service of the conglomerate's interests either, because the Marlins knew they couldn't force Piazza to sign a contract with them they could afford, so they very quickly flipped him to the New York Mets for the kind of acquisitions they like better, promising young (cheap) players whose asset value might go up. So it was a total lose-lose-lose from every angle, even some aspects we haven't discussed. Not a shred of the plan worked for Fox or the Dodgers in any way whatsoever....a total write-down-to-zero.

The bigger and more diverse the conglomerate, the less true to any piece of it tends to drift, the less likely any piece of it can achieve quality (because quality becomes ever-more-tenuously understood and control of quality ever more removed from people who value it and because the equation of what "works for" the amalgamated behemoth becomes ever more disconnected from the core of the quality of any one operation inside it.

ACCOUNTABILITY CRIED
In Baseball, someone who behaved like such an outrageous chump like Carey and his cadre did, would be purged like so many aging back-up catchers or relievers who can no longer get anyone out. Beyond Baseball, for example the world of publicly-owned companies where accountability is something to be sluffed, hidden from or even ridiculed, people like Carey and his cadre can escape. Carey, for example, is now President at News Corp. and has a C-level title to go along with it.

Fred Claire's Dodger career was inevitably affected...the trade was not good on the baseball side, perhaps worse on the business side. So he took some of the blame for the trade he opposed but (accountability) worked hard at to make functional. More painfully for the book's reader, it's clear that not only is he accountable, but he's a person who makes a thoughtful and serious effort to be ethical. Because Claire was not a jolly cheerleader for their buffoonery, it made it more likely he would be sacrificed for show, and so that came to pass -- Claire was let go along with manager Bill Russell in an effort to fool the rubes that management was going to make changes to the team for the better.

The Dodgers' lustre eroded, the asset became less strategically valuable, so Fox dumped "the property" (the Dodgers). This eventually resulted in the team passing into the feeble hands of the McCourts, unleashing another wave of eccentric and un-accountable non-Baseball foolishness.

BEYOND BASEBALL
There are good lessons here, even if your own endeavor is not about to be taken over by a conglomerate.

If you are, I think you already know that you are about to be a commodity and that, far more often than not, the people taking over strategic (and even tactical) decisions will more often than not be unaware of the fine points of your line of work, and unconcerned about making critical decisions about it even from ignorance.

But the lack of accountability and the willingness to make decisions without regard to social contracts or, for that matter, regard for a foundation of domain knowledge, is an affliction that transcends the conglomerate.

There two viable paths, and the most commonly-taken one, which isn't viable...that is, being a jolly co-conspirator, generally hiding and hoping the madness doesn't touch down in your own little world. It doesn't work because that lack of accountability is self-amplifying, so you either stoke the anti-accountability decay, or get devoured by it regardless of your apparent fellow-traveling. Remember that within the organization run by people who got to be decisionmakers by shifting blame away from themselves, your own blamelessness will become ever-more irrelevant.

The two viable paths are to work, conspire, collaborate with those who find this model unappealing or realize how ineffective it makes the organization or start working on your exit strategy. The latter is easier, though the present Permafrost economy makes that a less clear choice. The first viable path, conspiring to glue accountability by being responsible oneself while also making sure people who try to weasel out of their own responsibility are always called on it, every time, is a long, challenging path to follow.

If you're taking a middle-class or better paycheck from an organization, you owe it to them to try the challenging path. The alternative is a world dominated by Fox Entertainment Group-type buffoons.

Rigglemania: Knowing When to Walk as a Win-Win

2011-07-06T07:04:00.000-07:00

"Why am I wasting so much dedication on
such a mediocre career?" -- Ron Swoboda.

As I've repeatedly explained, major league baseball managers have more diverse and challenging responsibilities than 95% of CEOs of billion-dollar corporations and have to make more decisions on a day a game is played than most such corporate executives make in a fortnight. Even the most unremarkable-seeming dugout strategist is a stunningly capable management practitioner, able to successfully take 2nd base (at least) in the MBB model in almost every instance, able to work in a position where accountability is almost absolute. It takes decades of concentrated learning in a broad spectrum of skills, constant attention in thinking about winning in both the present and future -- it's a breathtaking investment in achieving excellence.

So when Washington Nationals' manager Jim Riggleman walked away late last month from one of the only 30 positions (zero-sum) in the world to which he could apply that vast investment, many bloggers and other naive folk chose to call him "a quitter".

They're wrong. And further, Riggleman's process and execution is something every manager Beyond Baseball should master, or at least understand well enough to know how to plan their own exit someday.

BACKGROUND OF A GOOD "ORGANIZATION MAN"
Jim Riggleman has been a major league manager for four franchises, all relatively weak ones when he started working with them, all populated largely with young players with a lot to prove or roster-filler veterans considered cost-effective (that is, not great but good values for their price). He non-charismatic (intentionally, as well as by nature), and I can tell you from small personal experience, he's a thoughtful man who intentionally gives dull interviews.

His focus beyond the mechanics of the game, has been on maximum organizational- and personal loyalty (a strong thread within baseball management), making the most of what he has at hand and stewarding the organization's resources. This style Beyond Baseball is known as "Good Soldier" or "Organization Man", and the Baseball management pipeline is always replete with this model. Most importantly to executive management, he doesn't bad-mouth his budget or his roster, takes orders from people who know far less than he does about the content and consequences of those orders, and doesn't make himself a story if he can avoid it.

Unlike more charismatic models (for example, Bobby Valentine, Chuck Dressen, Dick Williams), the Good Soldier doesn't make his or herself the story, doesn't attract attention except to deflect attention away from someone the organization needs protected.

The insightful Doug Glanville, who played for Riggleperson in Chicago describes this loyalty thusly:

That story for me began in my rookie year as a midseason call-up. I wasn't slated to walk in and take anyone's job. The Cubs had Brian McRae holding down center field, and he was on his way to a multiyear contract. Since I wasn't a power hitter, I would never be able to lay full claim on a corner outfield position without naysayers talking about how I didn't hit enough home runs.

So I was stuck. I would get sporadic starts and eventually get sent down to Triple-A. But along the way I learned how Riggleman ran his team. He was always positive, only having harsh words when he didn't like the effort. Sometimes this approach didn't click with veteran old-school players who thought it was not hard-core enough, but he seemed to do well with developing players, getting them to achieve their potential.

{snip}It wasn't until my first full season in 1997 that I attained a deeper understanding of Jim Riggleman. The Cubs were struggling and McRae was also having a tough season. I began the year as the platoon left fielder against left-handed pitchers. To top it off, we started the year 0-14, and during that run Chicago radio personality Dave Kaplan vowed to eat, sleep and shower at McDonald's until the team won. He was stuck there for nine days. But Riggleman was gracious throughout -- he even went over to check in on Kaplan.

Meanwhile, my platoon partners had the difficult assignment of trying to hit against the Marlins and the Braves that year, when those two rotations were full of Cy Young-capable starting pitching. Pitchers like Kevin Brown, Al Leiter, Alex Fernandez, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, etc. Our young outfield got its head handed to it, first with Brant Brown, then with Brooks Kieschnick, and so on. {snip}The Cubs tried everyone under the sun, yet quietly I was hitting .300 all along. They seemed set on a scouting report that said I couldn't hit right-handed pitching, but Riggleman started to get frustrated that he had to play who he was supposed to play and where they were supposed to play.

So he would pull me aside every couple of weeks and say to me, "Hey, you're doing a good job, you will be an everyday center fielder one day, just keep doing what you are doing." As a young player, that really helped me stay focused on the prize of playing every day. No matter what may have been dictated to him from the powers that be, he made sure he told you what he thought when he really believed you had something more to add.

Before the trade deadline, there were rumors that McRae was about to be traded. We lost our hitting coach, Tony Muser, to a managerial job in Kansas City, so we were just waiting to see what would be next. McRae was ultimately traded, but they brought in another center fielder, the Mets' Lance Johnson, so I would still have to make do by playing in left field. By then, left field was my job to lose and Riggleman made sure he said to me, "You are the best defensive outfielder in this organization, for now, with this move, you can most help us by continuing to do what you have done in left field, your time will come."

He certainly didn't have to tell me anything at all. I have played for managers that would just do what they had to do and not say a word, or they would endorse every decision that came from above. But when Riggleman had your back, he had your back. He felt obligated to let you know that he believed that you had more to offer than the role you were in. Then he would quietly and steadily fight for you, while talking to you directly.

This is successful "managing down" (players/staff) and "managing up" (owners/executives). He's taking orders, not bad-mouthing his frustration to the players, not bad-mouthing his players to ownership. And he understands and works within the key awareness of Sandy Alderson...that every decision the front office and manager make have to balance the baseball factors and the business factors...that as field marshal, he will have to deploy many sub-optimal solutions to fulfill the business desires of ownership or front office (think Ken Griffey Junior's dreadful lack of production in his final stint with the Seattle Mariners coinciding with the need to keep rolling him out not only almost every day, but in the middle of the batting order where he could relentlessly implode potential rallies, undermining his team's offense by ~12 runs in a single month)

THIS YEAR'S TICKING CLOCK
As a rule, the person who plays their career hand as an Organization Man, while never being overtly ostracized because she or he is a safe bet, will almost always be passed over by someone charismatic, someone fans can create legends around, someone who can help sell tickets to non-baseball fans...a celebrity. The Organization Man needs to get as much loyalty as she gives, or the system gets gummed up, freezes. The players realize, in spite of the manager's solid appearance, he doesn't really have the ear of the front office, and, sooner or later, starts to lose their professional (not usually their personal) respect, and Baseball, like some other lines of work, has so little slack for slack, that this can be fatal.

So Riggleman has, since his taking the Chicago Cubs to the playoffs in the mid-1990s, been seen as a placeholder, an interim solution for the Seattle Mariners, when John McLaren got dumped, and an interim solution at Washington when they dumped Manny Acta in 2009. Riggleman's professional skills and particular attributes make him a useful rook on a chessboard, a relatively inexpensive utility that will never embarrass owners off or on the field.

But after in the pair of decades since he was a 39-year old playing that role, he wanted evidence of the same level of loyalty back from the front office and/or ownership. Everyone, even in Baseball, needs to know their limit.

So when Riggleman piloted the Nationals, a team with ignorant ownership much more interested in the business side of the decisions than the Baseball side (much more interested in the bottom line of dollars than the bottom line of winning percentage), he asked for the loyalty he'd been giving. He was looking at this stage of his life (yes, not just "career") to be treated as the talent he is.

After piloting the sad-sack Nationals to an above .500 record after 75 games, and the second-best winning streak of his career (16-6, behind only a 19-7 stretch for the '98 playoff-bound Cubs), Riggleman asked for a contract extension. He realized that this team, with its budget lower than 22 other teams (lower, btw, than the Oakland As') would not sustain this pace this year, and to go to the playoffs again, he'd need at least another year after this one of seasoning young talent to get there, and the odds of winning a trophy slim. Without a contract extension, he was going to be merely a midwife to others' glory.

The front office declined to return the loyalty he'd given them (perhaps a good business decision for them, though if they had shown him loyalty, at worst it would have been a cheap business 'loss'), probably expecting him to suck it up again. He walked away from a lose-win situation, his head held high in his own mind. It was one he had probably put up with, though playing with smaller stakes, numerous times over his professional Baseball management career.

¿Did he trash his team's chances for this year and/or beyond, as some bloggers and fans believe?

Not close. Undoubtedly, some players who felt Riggleman had their back are disappointed. But management used fellow-Good Soldier and consummate professional John McLaren as an interim (un-ironically, the very manager Riggleman had been the interim for previously), and put the celebrity manager, the proven-success Davey Johnson at the helm after a few games. Both McLaren and D Johnson on their worst days are significantly better managers than 90% of the CEOs of billion-dollar corporations or any U.S. President since Lyndon Johnson.

¿Did he overestimate his leverage as some writers and fans believe?

No. He just knew it was extremely unlikely that he would ever have as much leverage ever again. If he was 39 years old (or maybe even 44), he might again get a chance, get another team on a building cycle into a shadow of a dream of a wild card race, but frankly, this was Jim Riggleman's likely sole moment to see if he could alter the trajectory his career was on.

¿Will he never manage again as some bloggers and fans believe?

Perhaps. But I suspect that's no loss to Riggleman. He knows what outcome he's been able to achieve right here and right now. His loyalty will be paid back, at least in small ways, by most of the Baseball people he's shown loyalty to. He hasn't lost the respect of many, if any, of the baseball lifers he's worked with and against over the years.

BEYOND BASEBALL
One of the best survival techniques in the corporate or governmental or non-profit arenas has been being a competent Good Soldier. It's less optimal in the globalised economy where most non-executive positions are viewed as commodity and readily sacrificed for quality in exchange for a few temporary yuan or even jiao.

If you take on this rôle (it can be quite comfortable, especially for those who grew up comfortably as middle children), you should have a contingency plan in place, at least in your mind, for what level of disloyalty you will trade for temporary apparent job security. As a rule, Organization Men are not risk-takers, but this must not be an absolute avoidance. At some point, you need to be loyal to yourself if you have any talent at all.

Riggleman had such a plan. He knew, in advance, just what kind of accomplishment it would take for toxic executive management to return the investment. He delivered the outcome making the decision relatively easy. If he got his extension, it was a win, and if he didn't, the act of not returning it was all he needed to know about the utility of soldiering on.

Can you figure out what level of loyalty you need to get from an employer for you to soldier on? Don't ever put yourself in the position of having to decide how much it is in the heat of a moment. If you can be as good at thinking it through as Riggleman has, you'll benefit

Hall of Fame Voting: Where GroupthinkPulls a Massive Verducci

2011-02-14T07:03:00.000-08:00

Baseball off the field sometimes pulls a business-quality boehner.

One of the nastiest and most pointless Business boehners is when people who have decision authority come to something it's their job to understand, but either don't have sufficient background (and don't want others to know it) or are just plain lazy, choosing to conserve their ergs to invest in office politics, schmoozing or organizing office pools for the NCAA tourney.

The most common behavior that results is that people do one of two things or combine them into a big mutant mess:

A) The Decider goes along with the most assertive pundit in the crowd, and this bandwagon effect tends to pull along others of their ilk or

B) The Decider declares facts are irrelevant because perfect knowledge is not attainable, and therefore she openly chooses to base the decision on her feelings.

If the "B)" is the most assertive or apparently-powerful, some "A)" Deciders will follow the "B)". It's the kind of overt Groupstink I see predominantly in large organizations, military & government, but most often in corporate and non-profit settings. I had a client who was taking a bath on employee health insurance every year, but when a group I was consulting with ran the numbers, it turned out the amount of health billings the employees were creating were far lower than what the firm was paying. Their insurer was making a massive profit off of them, so self-insurance was the obvious alternative to explore. On the surface, it looked like the experienced health costs plus the cost of administering a program were enough below the insurers' rates to be a slam-dunk worth at least exploring..

But the Business office had no idea how to go through setting up the self-insurance, and no one there had peers who had done it, so instead of learning what what needed, they used (probably) twice the energy researching failed self-insurance schemes, and by digging in and making a major fuss, launched a successful campaign to hack back employee health care benefits. (NOTE: This not unusual approach backfired, as it usually does, because their insurer jacked up their rates, and the firm amplified their previous boehner by further hacking their benefits, which inspired the insurer to raise them again the third year).

IN HALL OF FAME VOTING
We can see a beautiful example of this boehner in the most recent round of Hall of Fame voting, where it's actually quite common. The Poster Boy for "B)" is the intelligent but feeling-based Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated. I had a discussion with this opinion leader a few years back at a Winter G.M.s meeting about Bert Blyleven (when that now-enshrined candidate was still struggling for votes). The core of Verducci's argument wasn't that the numbers didn't support Blyleven, nor that the numbers didn't matter; he wasn't being a Sophist. The core of his honest argument was that Blyleven didn't feel like a Hall of Famer to him. And I respected his intelligence and his honesty, and while I'm comfortable with someone with a Verducci attitude having a vote, I'm not comfortable with someone who's an opinion leader who can drag people along having that attitude.

The challenge is that a Verducci attitude produces unashamedly unfair outcomes in Baseball, which is spitting into the eye of about the fairest arena we get to experience in life. The most recent Hall atrocity was perpetrated on Larry Walker, a perfectly deserving candidate who managed to get only on one in five Hall voters' ballots. It wasn't that they voted against him that is such a boehner, it's the really shallow excuse they used. (Jim Caple left him off his ballot because he didn't have room to include him, but made a beautifully-reasoned argument why Walker career was Hall of Fame).

They didn't like the fact that he accumulated 31% of his offensive cachet playing games in Coors Field, a massive booster of extra-base hits. What they chose to ignore was merely the 69% of his plate appearances away from Coors and his defensive play in Coors Field. The former is ridiculous because for every at bat he had at Coors, he had more than two away from there; the latter is ridiculous and inconsistent because in the perfect double-entry balance that is Baseball, if Coors is an offense-booster, it's a defense-stressor, and Walker earned Gold Gloves playing there. These two things are classic Verducci-feeling kind of decisions. (NOTE: That they ignored the fact that Walker was one of, if not the, savviest baserunners and corner outfielders of his generation is just a massive irritation to me personally, since I care a lot about those skills).

In case you doubt how much of a howler this was, lets look at the hard facts of the 69% of the plate appearances Larry Walker delivered playing away from Coors Field:

Split	G	PA	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	SB	CS	BB	SO	BA	OBP	SLG	OPS
WALKER	1391	5529	800	1346	293	31	229	790	156	60	627	940	.282	.375	.501	.876
per 154 g		612	89	149	32	3	25	87	17	7	69	104	.282	.375	.501	.876

Walker had the equivalent of 9 full seasons of games not playing at Coors Field. The argument that he was on the injured reserve a lot evaporates some when you consider that number of games.

Furthermore, other National League players who toiled in the 1995-2005 zone where we are excluding Walker's Coors games got to play some in the Denver park.

So let's ask the question, even punishing Walker by letting him have zero plate appearances in Coors Field:

¿Are Larry Walker's Not-Coors numbers alone comparable to Hall of Fame numbers?

To answer that, let's look at the equivalent playing-on-the-road numbers for the most recent Hall of Fame corner outfielders and corner infielders, (by definition, these are Hall of Fame numbers).

AWAY	Split	G	PA	R	H	2B	3B	HR	XBH%	HR%	RBI	SB	SB%	NetSB	BB	BB%	SO	BA	OBP	SLG	OPS	GDP%	HBP
LWalker	Away	1002	4034	566	967	203	23	168	41%	4.8%	564	109	72%	25	469	12%	685	.278	.370	.495	.865	1.8%	56
Winfield	Away	1501	6369	864	1650	287	47	247	35%	4.3%	941	116	68%	8	601	9%	901	.289	.356	.485	.841	2.4%	13
ADawson	Away	1315	5447	676	1406	255	44	231	38%	4.6%	805	141	69%	13	255	5%	777	.278	.316	.483	.800	1.9%	58
Murray	Away	1509	6540	825	1660	316	18	262	36%	4.5%	983	49	73%	13	657	10%	776	.286	.356	.482	.838	2.2%	8
JRice	Away	1041	4551	568	1148	166	35	174	33%	4.2%	649	26	60%	-8	322	7%	732	.277	.330	.459	.789	3.5%	30
Gwynn	Away	1220	5233	685	1586	281	36	69	24%	1.5%	596	172	70%	26	397	8%	198	.334	.384	.451	.835	2.7%	17
RHenderson	Away	1538	6857	1207	1600	283	34	162	30%	2.9%	589	743	83%	435	1111	16%	892	.284	.404	.432	.836	1.3%	56
Boggs	Away	1197	5325	664	1387	216	32	48	21%	1.0%	481	13	42%	-23	655	12%	358	.302	.387	.395	.781	2.2%	10

Source: Baseball.Reference.Com

I've bolded the leader in each category, and italicized the next two best in each.

Walker's numbers away from Coors Field are very competitive with recent Hall of Fame electees. He's the slugging-est of this tribe, even considering zero of his Coors Field work, and even though we've credited some of these players with Coors appearances. His OPS is the highest, his Extra Base Hit percentage and his Homer percentage lead this set of Hall of Famers. He has a gaggle of diverse italicized categories, from speed numbers such as good steal percentage and good grounding into double play avoidance, to on-base numbers. His weakness in this comparison is pure volume...he only played nine full seasons worth of road games, good enough to surpass at least five-dozen Hall of Fame players who got there for their on-field accomplishments.

To be fair, a few of the current voters cited Walker's time on the injured reserve as a reason to exclude him, and while I personally consider his number of games played (more than 98.6% of all major leaguers all time) to be adequate, like a Verducci argument, at least this appears to be an honest objection.

Answer: Larry Walker's Not-Coors numbers alone ARE comparable to Hall of Fame numbers.

Are the voters right or wrong in not voting for Walker? I think they're wrong, but that's just my opinion -- the breathtaking foolishness, though, is not about right/wrong, but the extreme inconsistency of their choices. Since most of the voters who shorted Larry Walker were voting for the most-recent crop that I used for the comparison, it's obvious the played-in-Coors argument, that is, the most-cited one, is irrelevant, either a mere canard or gross, willful ignorance.

¿So what's the real reason? I don't know, but I have one suspicion. While I never interviewed him, I do know people who have, and the feedback I got was he was not a cooperative interview or a quotable-quote guy. Since the voting population is (significantly) writers, I suspect this could be one of his perceived deficits. In an endeavor such as Hall of Fame voting where Verducci-like feelings can take precedence over hard facts, it's possible that a Walker would get downgraded for his off-field demeanor.

In Baseball or business, it rarely pays to ignore facts. My ex-client's generally competent executive management choosing to pour $$ into decreasingly useful health insurance payments by following a noisy objection is one sad example. And while Baseball doesn't come close to competing with non-profits' and corporate silliness this way, perhaps that makes it seem more ugly when a boehner like pimping Larry Walker's Hall of Fame vote springs up.

Remit, Rad-aptation & Redemption: Rangers Rate Righteously

2010-12-05T16:27:00.001-08:00

"About the only problem with success is it does not teach you how to deal with failure" - Tommy Lasorda (from Baseball's Greatest Quotations)

There are still two kinds of infidels who, embedded in sports up to their armpits, choose to believe one of the following two fallacies:

Baseball management is not significantly wiser than management in any other field, or
Baseball management, regardless of its standing overall, is inferior to that of other sports.

The most recent error in this zone was from the generally-clever Joe Posnanski, writing for Sports Illustrated's site.

In 2008 Texas Rangers manager Ron Washington led all of baseball with 20 intentional walks that bombed. Bill James has been keeping this intentional walk stat for a while now. He breaks down all intentional walks into three categories:
1. Good — these are the intentional walks that “work.”

2. Not Good — these are the intentional walks that don’t quite “work” — a run scores — but doesn’t lead to a big inning.

3. Bomb — these are the intentional walks that lead to big innings.

There is a more detailed explanation in The Bill James Handbook, but for our purposes that’s enough. Washington led the league with 20 intentional walk bombs in 2008, which was more or less in line with his philosophy on the subject. He intentionally walked his team into 11 bombs in 2007, which was also a very high number. I would not try to explain how Ron Washington manages baseball teams — it seems to me some combination of feel, improvisational jazz, likability and Wile E. Coyote — but it seemed pretty clear that he did not want other teams’ best players to beat him. This seemed to be a core philosophy. And this led to baseball disaster quite often.

Then in 2009, all of a sudden, without warning, Ron Washington basically stopped intentionally walking people. His total intentional walks dropped from 44 to 14. And his bombs dropped all the way to three. This actually led the American League in FEWEST bombs. Last season, though Washington intentionally walked a few more guys (from 14 up to 24) he became the first manager since Bill has been tracking this stuff to not have a single intentional walk blow up in his face. Not even one.

That’s a pretty remarkable turnaround. So … what happened? Bill and I both figured that Wash probably had a heart-to-heart with the Rangers front office folks, who are savvy people, and they probably came to the conclusion that the intentional walk was hurting the team more than it was helping them.

But more … we both figured that it spoke well of Washington that after getting burned a few times he stopped sticking his hand in the fire. One of the striking things we both have sensed after years of writing about sports is that it is absurdly rare that people actually CHANGE in sports.

But in core ways … well, here’s the funny thing: It sometimes feels like some people would rather be wrong than admit that they are wrong. There are a million examples. A manager or general manager will pay someone a lot of money, realize quickly that it was a mistake, and keep playing that person even if it hurts the team.

I'm going to guess that with the exception of a gaggle of newsrooms, Mr. P. hasn't spent much time either in the military or in the corporate world, because compared to sports, it's so absurdly rarer that people in the corporate and military worlds change the way they manage in response to measurable feedback that I doubt he'd jump on sports, and most especially baseball. During a two- to four hour baseball game, the manager will change tactics almost certainly every inning, and both/either the baseball manager and the catcher on the field adapt to the current situation every pitch (otherwise the game plan would get laid out before the game and generally followed, which never happens even at the AA level of play).

In the corporate and military world, of course, this would make sense as an optimization strategy, but how many CEOs or even line managers are prepared to tweak their tactics and strategy multiple times per day (unlike the the multiple times per inning or sometimes even multiple times per minute Rangers' manager Ron Washington or any of his peers execute daily during the season)? Not very many.

The least-capable D- major league manager (that omits Maury Wills and not a whole bunch of others in the last 110 seasons) is significantly more attuned to rapid change in the face of mutating circumstances than 85% of corporate CEOs and than 75% of successful line managers. If feels a little disrespectful of Washington's acumen that Posnanski and James seem convinced the reason he changed was because the front office told him to. I believe it's very possible the data-savvy Rangers' front office sent him a report and asked him to look at it, knowing that he would respond to his outlier (and net-negative) behavior and change accordingly.

But don't underestimate any major league manager's ability to remember getting bombed by a bad decision. If Washington got bombed 11 times in a single season, I'd stake Kid Rock's life on the fact that Washington remembers either every single one as an individual failure that cost his team or, alternatively, all of them together as a big ugly pile. If he didn't, he wouldn't be able to get his team to .500, or win a single playoff game.

Accountability is inescapable in baseball. Unlike the corporate or military worlds, the baseball manager can't blame underlings or have his lobbyists arrange a bail-out. To get to be a D- or better major league manager, you have to embrace accountability, that means to last, you have to adapt your decisions to deal with reality. Some baseball managers overshoot by oscillating between binary opposites (do the intentional walk, get burned; eschew the IBB, get burned; repeat), but it's rarer than you would think, and most certainly rarer than it is in the corporate or military worlds.

I worked as staff at a place once where free-cash flow was so vast that every manager got out of the habit of ever saying "no" to any reasonable sounding expense -- if it sounded reasonable, it got funded. When the rest of the economy decided to invest in empire-building adventures and financial speculation, their market for products shrank -- an unprecedented turn of events for the firm. And at that point, managers were instructed to always say "no", no matter how useful or needed the investment was.

You been there? Of course you have. You ever seen a baseball team do this in mid-season, crack up and then keep pursuing it (or doing the exact opposite back to the original again). With the exception of the 2002-2010 Seattle Mariners, I can't think of any.

Try to think of a line of work that's more adaptive to minute-by-minute, inning-by-inning, series-by-series, month-by-month and season-to-season change than baseball is.

Give yourself a few days. But don't hold your breath.

Myth, Hoax, Lie or Exaggeration? Texas Starting Pitching & The Ryan Express Protocol

2010-10-24T15:25:00.000-07:00

The pitchers especially improved in their ability to stay in the game longer which benefits the individual and the team since you aren’t exposing your bullpen every night to four or five innings. The Rangers with Ryan at the helm are set for long-term success and don’t be surprised if many other teams follow suit with their pitching philosophy because of the 2010 Rangers’ success. - Buck Martinez

With the very well-run Texas Rangers team getting into its first-ever World Series, you are not going to escape a guh-zillion repeats of the assertion that the Rangers' pitching has been remade because Nolan Ryan has convinced the organization to have starters pitch longer.

A lot has been made all season of this. Nolan Ryan, starting pitcher extraordinaire, advisor and now part-owner of the Texas Rangers, has been driving the organization to remake itself, apparently, in his image. Well, the part of his image that could pitch 300 innings in a season and (I'm not making this up) in a 33-day period for a losing team throw consecutive starts with pitch counts of 148, 135, 147, 146, and 164. The 42-year old got 11 days rest after that final one.

Ryan's Protocol, described one main way and with several subtly-different variants, simplified is: "Get starting pitchers to go deeper into games, and not let pitch count automatically trigger bull-pen use".

Ryan's Protocol appears to have been deployed by the Rangers, but it's not what its being presented as. Before we're done with this entry, I'm going to show you which of the following, in reality, the Protocol is: a Myth, or a Hoax, or a Lie or an Exaggeration.

Here's the take of Bob Nightengale of USA Today:

Ryan, who won 324 games in his Hall of Fame career, preached along with (pitching coach Mike) Maddux the importance of conditioning for pitchers. They ran more than they ever have before. They exercised harder. They tossed aside the pitch counter. And the staff was conditioned to pitch deeper and longer into games, going until the opposing hitters let you know you were done.

RYAN AS (IMPROBABLE) MODEL Ryan, one must note, was an extraordinary outlier in several ways, but physically at least stands alone in the history of baseball since WWII. No other primarily power pitcher was a regular starter at 45 years old, and no other successful starter I can find consistently yielded less to hitters in their 3rd and subsequent plate appearances in a game against him than he did in their 1st and 2nd appearances against him in a game. Part of his extraordinary success was physical conditioning, part was extending his career by mastering a breaking pitch after a long career as a simple flamethrower, and part of it was mental toughness.

The main way observers and pundits have explained this is that starters have become soft in the years since the every-fourth-game, 300-inning-per-year guys, and that toughness or performance have suffered as a result. There are a lot of announcers and columnists who have turned this into a moral or even religious issue, and even very good ones miss the facts because for them, it's faith based, an issue of character or manhood. It's somewhat a BITGOD (Back In The Good Old Days) meme. It's more a television thing than a print thing, but among the print guys, its most intelligent advocate is Bruce Jenkins, who presents it as a character issue most tartly in an April 2009 blog entry, and in an well-written but naïve two-part feature I dissected with hard evidence here and here.

The BITGODs advocate not only no pitch count, but frequently a four- instead of five starter rotation as well. And sometimes pitching on shorter rest. This would give most every starter Ryan-type work loads. The math is roughly this. At 95 pitches per start average (not always getting to the 105-120 pitches a successful starter gets to because almost all good starters occasionally have a bad game where they throw only 60 or 70 before being pulled) and 32 games started a year, the typical contemporary starter would throw about 3160 pitches in a regular season. With a four-starter rotation that includes a spot starter for ugly rest-free stretches of the schedule, you're going to have about 39 starts, and at 115 average pitches per game (about another 1-1/3rd innings), about 4485 pitches in a regular season. That's a 42% workload increase, without occasional Lefty Grove or Walter Johnson-like occasional relief appearances or getting moved up a day to take on a critical game, which the BITGODs would love to see, too.

Ryan is a fantastic hero, but a lousy model, because almost all who model themselves on a once-in-fifty-years anomaly (in Baseball or Business or any endeavor) are going to fail...like the most successful of the kids getting Baby Mozart training will top out at being Baby Kenny G.

REALITY CZECH: HOW THE RANGERS STARTERS HAVE CHANGED UNDER THE PROTOCOL If Ranger starting pitchers are having longer outings as a rule, it shows up in the statistics. But it needs context. Let's look at the 2010 Rangers compared to the 2008 Rangers, the last season before pitching coach Maddux took over that position, and before Ryan was being officially acknowledged as a guru of the old school approach for the franchise.

In 2008, the average Ranger starter went 5.4 innings and 91 pitches, lowest in the league in both categories, and a half an inning and 4 pitches below the league average (5.9 innings, 95 pitches). Conceptually, it's better to remove Texas from the League composite (so it's Texas compared to A.L. without Texas, but it doesn't move either innings or pitches average off what you can see below.

2008 American League Starting Pitching

Tm R/G CG GmScA sDR lDR IP/GS ▾ Pit/GS <80 80-99 100-119 ≥120

TOR 3.77 15 54 6 66 6.3 99 16 54 86 6
LAA 4.30 7 51 0 94 6.2 100 8 62 90 2
CHW 4.47 4 51 11 76 6.1 97 12 70 77 4
CLE 4.70 10 50 1 89 6.1 95 20 77 63 2
TBR 4.14 7 52 2 84 6.0 96 15 70 77 0
BOS 4.28 5 52 2 89 6.0 96 17 70 74 1
KCR 4.82 2 49 1 78 5.9 98 11 65 84 2
MIN 4.57 5 49 1 70 5.9 92 26 83 53 1
LgAvg 4.68 5 49 4 77 5.9 95 20 71 70 2
DET 5.29 1 46 0 86 5.8 95 24 66 69 3
OAK 4.29 4 50 1 76 5.8 94 18 89 54 0
SEA 5.01 4 46 13 65 5.6 94 27 58 77 0
NYY 4.49 1 48 3 66 5.5 91 33 79 50 0
BAL 5.40 4 44 4 69 5.5 93 27 68 65 1
TEX 5.97 6 43 7 72 5.4 91 26 78 57 1

4.68 75 49 52 1080 5.9 95 280 989 976 23

Tm	R/G	CG	GmScA	sDR	lDR	IP/GS ▾	Pit/GS	<80	80-99	100-119	≥120
TOR	3.77	15	54	6	66	6.3	99	16	54	86	6
LAA	4.30	7	51	0	94	6.2	100	8	62	90	2
CHW	4.47	4	51	11	76	6.1	97	12	70	77	4
CLE	4.70	10	50	1	89	6.1	95	20	77	63	2
TBR	4.14	7	52	2	84	6.0	96	15	70	77	0
BOS	4.28	5	52	2	89	6.0	96	17	70	74	1
KCR	4.82	2	49	1	78	5.9	98	11	65	84	2
MIN	4.57	5	49	1	70	5.9	92	26	83	53	1
LgAvg	4.68	5	49	4	77	5.9	95	20	71	70	2
DET	5.29	1	46	0	86	5.8	95	24	66	69	3
OAK	4.29	4	50	1	76	5.8	94	18	89	54	0
SEA	5.01	4	46	13	65	5.6	94	27	58	77	0
NYY	4.49	1	48	3	66	5.5	91	33	79	50	0
BAL	5.40	4	44	4	69	5.5	93	27	68	65	1
TEX	5.97	6	43	7	72	5.4	91	26	78	57	1
	4.68	75	49	52	1080	5.9	95	280	989	976	23

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table Generated 10/24/2010.

Countervailing the general trend, 2008 Ranger starters were used more aggressively than the average AL team, though not by much. They had basically an average number of complete games (6 compared to the AL's average of 5). They delivered 7 starts on short-days-of-rest over the season compared to the AL's 4 start average (the column labeled "sDR") and 72 starts on longer-days-of-rest than the AL's average 77 ("lDR") which can be (and was here) affected by injuries to starters that pull them out of the rotation. But in further support of their shorter-than-league-average stints, they notched 104 starts of under 100 pitches (the "<80" plus the "80-99" columns) and 58 of 100 pitches or more, compared to the league average of 91 of under 100 and 72 of 100 and above.

It's clear the pre-Ryan/Maddux Ranger staff was putting up shorter starts, and if you glance at their R/G column (runs allowed per game), you can see one reason...they were getting their brains bashed out, about a half run a game worse than the next worst-performance staff (Baltimore).

I'll tell you another significant reason, but first I'm going to show you the much-bloviated-about "deep into games" Texas starters of 2010.

2010 American League Starting Pitching

Tm R/G CG GmScA sDR lDR IP/GS ▾ Pit/GS <80 80-99 100-119 ≥120

LAA 4.33 10 52 4 68 6.3 102 9 42 106 5
SEA 4.31 11 52 2 69 6.3 97 12 74 73 3
CHW 4.35 6 51 2 87 6.2 99 11 58 88 4
BOS 4.59 3 51 3 90 6.2 103 7 38 110 7
TBR 4.01 6 53 2 92 6.2 99 14 51 94 3
LgAvg 4.42 7 50 2 80 6.1 98 15 60 83 4
MIN 4.14 9 51 1 99 6.1 94 22 79 60 1
OAK 3.86 7 54 1 62 6.1 97 15 68 77 2
NYY 4.28 3 51 1 71 6.0 97 24 55 80 3
DET 4.59 6 50 5 79 6.0 100 14 59 74 15
CLE 4.64 10 48 2 79 5.9 97 12 64 86 0
TOR 4.49 5 51 2 89 5.9 96 17 74 70 1
TEX 4.24 7 51 3 73 5.9 98 19 54 84 5
BAL 4.85 3 48 2 80 5.8 97 18 59 84 1
KCR 5.22 7 46 1 80 5.8 97 16 67 76 3

4.42 93 50 31 1118 6.1 98 210 842 1162 53

Tm	R/G	CG	GmScA	sDR	lDR	IP/GS ▾	Pit/GS	<80	80-99	100-119	≥120
LAA	4.33	10	52	4	68	6.3	102	9	42	106	5
SEA	4.31	11	52	2	69	6.3	97	12	74	73	3
CHW	4.35	6	51	2	87	6.2	99	11	58	88	4
BOS	4.59	3	51	3	90	6.2	103	7	38	110	7
TBR	4.01	6	53	2	92	6.2	99	14	51	94	3
LgAvg	4.42	7	50	2	80	6.1	98	15	60	83	4
MIN	4.14	9	51	1	99	6.1	94	22	79	60	1
OAK	3.86	7	54	1	62	6.1	97	15	68	77	2
NYY	4.28	3	51	1	71	6.0	97	24	55	80	3
DET	4.59	6	50	5	79	6.0	100	14	59	74	15
CLE	4.64	10	48	2	79	5.9	97	12	64	86	0
TOR	4.49	5	51	2	89	5.9	96	17	74	70	1
TEX	4.24	7	51	3	73	5.9	98	19	54	84	5
BAL	4.85	3	48	2	80	5.8	97	18	59	84	1
KCR	5.22	7	46	1	80	5.8	97	16	67	76	3
	4.42	93	50	31	1118	6.1	98	210	842	1162	53

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table Generated 10/24/2010.

The 2010 Ryan Protocol starters moved up to 5.9 innings per start, equal to the 2008 AL average, and up to 98 pitches, exceeding the AL's 2008 average. BUT the entire AL was moving up at the same time...to 6.1 innings and 98 pitches per start. The Express' expression of change in Tejas brought them to league average in pitches/start and still two-tenths of an inning below-average. They are not a beacon of innovation in using starters deeper into games, but in a league that's headed that way anyway, advancing somewhat more quickly. The assertions that Ryan has done something exceptional in pitch count or innings-per-game with Texas' Major League starters are just not true.

It's worth noting that while the League average of games with under 100 pitches and 100+ pitches has moved to 75-87 respectively, the Rangers have surpassed the League average in that regard by moving to 73-89.

I promised you an other reasons the 2008 Ranger starters' outings were so short relative to the league and why this year's model is going a little deeper.

First, the 2008 Rangers used an above-average number of 22- to 26 year old rookies to start games. Younger starters tend to not have mastery of a large enough variety of pitches to face batters a third time (batters have already seen the full repertoire and can lock down the variables), and young starters are more likely to get blown out of games early.

Age GS ▾ CG GmScA sDR lDR IP/GS Pit/GS <80 80-99 100-119 ≥120

Matt Harrison* 22 15 1 43 0 7 5.6 91 3 8 4 0
Luis Mendoza 24 11 0 31 2 4 4.1 78 5 6 0 0
Eric Hurley 22 5 0 46 0 4 4.9 88 1 2 2 0
Doug Mathis 25 4 0 29 1 2 4.3 93 1 1 2 0
Tommy Hunter 21 3 0 22 0 2 3.7 71 2 1 0 0
A.J. Murray* 26 2 0 45 0 2 3.8 73 1 1 0 0
Warner Madrigal 24 1 0 48 1 0 3.0 46 1 0 0 0

	Age	GS ▾	CG	GmScA	sDR	lDR	IP/GS	Pit/GS	<80	80-99	100-119
Matt Harrison*	22	15	1	43	0	7	5.6	91	3	8	4
Luis Mendoza	24	11	0	31	2	4	4.1	78	5	6	0
Eric Hurley	22	5	0	46	0	4	4.9	88	1	2	2
Doug Mathis	25	4	0	29	1	2	4.3	93	1	1	2
Tommy Hunter	21	3	0	22	0	2	3.7	71	2	1	0
A.J. Murray*	26	2	0	45	0	2	3.8	73	1	1	0
Warner Madrigal	24	1	0	48	1	0	3.0	46	1	0	0

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table Generated 10/24/2010.

None of the seven rookie starters met the team averages for Innings...and as a group they dragged pitches/start down as well. All teams have rookie starters, but the 2008 Rangers' 41 rookie starts was higher than normal

THE FACTS, RANGER PRIDE & WHY THE PROTOCOL IS, BEAUTIFULLY, A MYTH The facts vaporize the announcers' assertions, soon to be an unbearable and, throughout the next few months, inescapable cliche.

The fact is also that the Rangers coaching staff & Ryan never asserted their staff was going deeper into games. BITGODs simply heard what they actually said and translated the words to fit the BITGOD aspirations of A Glorious Time When Men Took The Ball Every Fourth Day And Pitched Until The Gods Alone Ordained They Stop.

ASIDE: The Ryan Protocol, though, may be (and I suspect, is) in play in their minor league system. The Rangers have an unusually astute front office now, and a history of innovative people staffing it (even when they have had exceptionally un-astute ownership). If they are making a big public display of their Protocol, it's likely that's part of getting a minor league system moved away from the status quo and towards accepting a major change (a classic Change Management technique).

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's incomparable Jim Caple, now laboring for ESPN, heard and reported the actual words best:

Ryan twice topped 300 innings in a season and reached 299 in another. Obviously, it was a different game then, but one of Ryan's passions is working to get pitchers at least a little closer to that.

"I don't blame the pitchers for not pitching longer, I blame baseball and management for that because we produced that," Ryan said. "I mean that's the course we set and so that's what we have to deal with. And so we're going to change that course, and we have to start it and it won't be a process that comes overnight.

"What we're trying to do is get our starters to pitch deeper into the games, so we don't have to use as many people in the bullpen and then I would also prefer to not carry as many pitchers to give the manager an option to have another bench player. Will we get there? I don't know, but that's my hope."

Attempting to change a mindset ingrained in baseball over several decades isn't easy, but pitchers are more open to the idea when it's suggested by someone who pitched 332 innings one season without hurting his arm, than say, an owner who made his fortune analyzing stock derivatives.

"He just wants to get the best out of us; he wants us to push ourselves a little bit," Rangers starter Colby Lewis said. "I think that's the biggest thing. He doesn't want us to go out there and be satisfied with 95, 100 pitches, 105 pitches and feel like we've done our job. He wants us to go out there and feel like I can throw another 20 pitches and I can throw 130 pitches. That's his type of background, his motivation for pitchers."

The Ryan Protocol is not yet about the physical act of throwing more pitches per start.

It's about mental toughness that great pitchers have, the relentless focus that deflects self-doubt and mental fatigue when physical fatigue is starting to express itself in the small muscles. It's about engagement and commitment. It's about laboring on while the starter still has stuff and energy, not when the body is no longer able to deliver quality sequences.

Is it going to work? Even Ryan isn't sure...dealing with human emotions is a lot more unknowable than workout/fitness routines and even pitching "mechanics".

The Ryan Protocol is Mythic, in the sense that a myth is a truth presented in a compact clearly fictional story.

The Ryan Protocol is not a Hoax or a Lie or even, at this point, an Exaggeration. It's a Myth. And whether it's Cassandra, The Fates, Hercules Cleaning the Augean Stables & the Royals' Bullpen, or The Express, a myth is a beautiful, if not always happy, way to deliver a point and get it understood and acted on.

Baseball Book of the Decade: Doug Glanville Synthesizes Systems Engineering & Emotional Intelligence

2010-09-24T11:55:00.000-07:00

I was stoked to read Doug Glanville's recent book, but for some reason I let it sit for a while, unread, while I plugged away at novels. I think it was because I appreciate his insight so much that I was concerned I'd be disappointed.

Turns out Glanville's book falls into the category of zero disappointment possible. It's got the inside skinny on how contemporary players live and think and act when they're at work and how they balance their Baseball careers with their Beyond Baseball lives.

The Game From Where I Stand: A Ballplayer's Inside View (Times Books, 2010) is, literally, a unique book. Unique, because never before has a major league player written both about the inside game and explicitly knitted in autobiographical details. Unique, more importantly, because no major league player who has written a book has been a person who combined high brainpower (more players are intelligent than choose to allow it to show) and high emotional intelligence. To objectors who want to use Jim Bouton's Ball Four or Jim Brosnan's Pennant Race as having both "boths", I'll tell you they were both high-brainpower guys, but neither was a mature adult (which, of course, gave them great insights & humor and amplified the joy of reading the books).

Unlike any other volume I know of, The Game From Where I Stand talks in a fascinating and revealing way about how ballplayers live with, and feel about, the issues on and off the field, from the quotidian (living arrangements & sense of home, balancing personal relationships and commitment to the most challenging zero-sum endeavor in Western Civilization, working with media, what it's like to decompress just enough during a rain delay or never decompress if you're on the bench and might need to be called upon to pinch hit) to the headline-scraping (supplements and the challenge to interpreting records in an era where no one can know who didn't use legal or banned supplements and when there's zero valid science that defines their effects on performance).

Like many baseball books, Glanville's has dish on individual players he competed with or worked alongside and while all reveal a little about individuals we know better as images on a television screen or the front and back of baseball cards, the finest examples are this insightful observer's impressions of known eccentrics, such as Carl Everett and Ugueth Urbina are treated well (I won't share them with you; it'd undermine your enjoyment of them). And he shares some inside language I'd never heard before (some of it spectacularly useable, such as "French Toast").

It's not perfect; a lot of the material in the final third is ordinary material that feels like it was requested by the publisher or an agent, and what makes Doug Glanville such a special person and observer is somewhat wasted on some topics.

But no matter how much you already know about the game, it is exhilarating to get so much extra background you never knew about. And if you don't care much about the game, The Game From Where I Stand is lovely and rich anthropology reported by a native observer.

I have to state this is one of the three most important books about baseball written in the last 50 years, in part because it covers so much about the game, in part because the author shares his sincerity, authenticity, intelligence and love for the game with the reader. It's a gem.

PART IV - Advanced Experimentation 410: Not Letting Falling Off A Cliff Cost You Cliff Lee Money

2010-09-03T09:13:00.000-07:00

In Parts I, II and III, I laid out how the Mariners, if they intended to advance their record over their 2009 campaign, had to do something very different from the blend that had gotten them (to everyone's surprise) over .500 last year.

And I explained that the front office had taken the exhilarating but risky course of a Bold Experiment, and attempted to do what no team in the last 90 seasons -- maybe longer -- had tried: Build a team around team defense so far above the norm that it would allow them to transcend the gravitational field that is the Pythagorean winning projection. I described the Bold Experiment and how it failed, quite miserably because the offense, already well below adequate, was undermined by business side of the team, a part of the organization that was priapic for the promotional opportunities of re-signing an already-below average DH instead of acquiring any of the relatively-available talent of left-handed batters who can pull the ball but can't field. I described just how it failed by falling below the event horizon, a universal function that happens in all endeavors mechanical and human and in the making of movie sequels (see Mission Impossible XXVIII: Highjinks in the Retirement Home Complex)

But I asserted the architect of the baseball side of the equation, G.M. Jack Zdurienck, had shown genius in spite of the total failure of the Bold Experiment, and I said I was going to explain why he was, in this respect, a manager to emulate in your own endeavor. That genius was not just the willingness to implement a Bold Experiment (mandatory but usually avoided) but building in a contingency plan to buffer the consequences of that unprecedented experiment's failure. So here we go.

CONTINGENCY PLANNING In the off-season, as part of rolling out the Bold Experiment, Zdurienck traded for the guy who has been the best starting pitcher in the majors, Cliff "The Benton Bandido" Lee to compliment his existing top guy, Félix Hernández, one of the top 10 starters in the majors. It's tough to acquire talent like that, but Lee's contract is to expire at the end of the 2010 campaign, so while his immediate value is high, the long-term dollar value of the guy is less certain because of the uncertainty both of how much he would cost to re-sign and his actual value in the final years of his -- inevitably long because part of the cost of buying Six Sigma brilliance is not just high per year salary but paying for years when the player has matured to an age that it's unlikely the performance will still be dominating -- contract. And as a premier starting pitcher, his cost would be either very high, or higher than that, something the on-field investment sensitive Mariners' ownership strongly prefers avoiding.

For many front offices, the normal thing to do would be to sign Lee (eliminating part of the uncertainty -- the uncertainty of price-tag) and make him part of the team. And then if the signing didn't work out for any reason (didn't like the city, team faltered making the value of a two-ace strategy less valuable) one could trade him and more likely than not recover the full investment (sometimes called "sign and trade").

But the Z-Man understood that since the experiment was far from normal, the normal context of sign and trade wasn't an optimal process to insert into it...too risky, since failure was more likely. So he didn't pursue the (normal) courtship of the new, one-year-left-on-contract star, and in fact, politely but bluntly declined to talk contract between the trade & the beginning of the season. Lee and his agent were a little surprised, maybe even disappointed.

For the Ms front office, though, it made some sense. Publicly admitting the lack of courtship signaled potential trading partners Lee might be available, and that was almost certain to stimulate acquisition lust among contenders and wanna-bes and mediocre-but-ambitious teams (offer not good in Pittsburgh, Kansas City and other cities where teams make as much $$ losing as winning). And more interested parties lead to more possible bidders lead to better returns on a trade.

Keeping Lee through a melt-down of a season was, of course, an option...not a good one. Beyond Baseball, companies, militaries and non-profits routinely stick to their decisions even when it's become crystal-clear the decision was a fatal stinker. In Baseball, it happens occasionally, but Baseball is not as forgiving of incompetence as the Fortune 500 is of failed CEOs or the Pentagon or Kremlin are of failed commanders.

Because the Bold Experiment was so unprecedented, Zdurienck didn't plan just on winning; he understood and shaped the processes to account for stumble or failure as well.

¿What chances did he take that might have backfired on the benefit/cost ratio he hoped for? Not an injury to Lee that would erase his trade value if the experiment failed -- because if they inked an about-to-be-injured Lee to a long-term deal, they might be stuck with damaged goods. That the experiment would succeed beyond their wildest dreams and earn them a trip to the World Series? Not really a bad risk, since the good feeling from that would be a counterweight (in part or entirely) to the possibly-perceived personal tort of not courting Lee early.

So when the Bold Experiment imploded in the dark matter-infested regions below the Mariners' offensive Event Horizon, Z-Man traded Lee to one of several contending teams seeking his services. And since the Ms had so many holes in their everyday line-up, Z-Man could choose from amongst the contenders the several that had a prospect or young developing potential star that filled, specifically, one of his several on-field black holes. And the curse of the total meltdown of the Bold Experiment had within it the relative blessing of giving Z-Man more latitude, because this was a team that wasn't on the verge of contending, so the talent he acquired didn't have to be shovel-ready to appear in the 2011 line-up as star-quality already; he could trade for a player or players who were more than a year away.

So looked at from a good management perspective, the magnitude of the meltdown actually afforded Z-Man more possibilities to improve, more ways to succeed. Cognitively, it's a hard place to go Beyond Baseball, but on July 9, the Ms traded Lee and a longer-term but lower ceiling guy, Mark Lowe with a dab of cash to the Texas Rangers for Blake Beavan, Josh Lueke, Matthew Lawson and Justin Smoak. Smoak is a 1b prospect, Lueke is a reliever whose pitching is lights-out at AAA and whose personal behavior has been mirror-image dark matter, the kind of employee that, if he wasn't producing brilliantly, you'd have no qualms about jettisoning.

While fans tended to cry loudly that Lee had been lost, there was close to zero margin in keeping him. His value was certainly high...the Ms had gone 9-4 in the games he had started (and should have been 11-2, by Game Score Won-Lost, a stat that more accurately reflects a starting pitcher's contribution to team wins than the actual W-L record that appear on stat sheets), they were 25-48 in the games Lee hadn't started. That means even cloning Lee and replacing their worst starter with his clone wouldn't have made the team a .500 one. There was no point in paying him big money to excel for a team doomed to last place with or without him.

There's another essay or two in the Ms acquisition of Lueke and Z-Man's

apparent willingness to acquire for a team that prides itself more on its off-field warm-fuzzies than its on-field accomplishments an apparently awesome relief talent who's got a massive character failure. Will the genius of Z-Man's contingency planning be cancelled out by the potentially Lueke-warm or catastrophic social revulsion of the secondary prospect's violations? Still to early to tell. But since this is not a Mariner blog, I'm not, at this point, going to jump on that news hook to rush something to print about it.

Jack Zdurienck is a management beacon to follow for both understanding the absolute need to execute a Bold Experiment even when the organizations feels like its in a comfort zone, when anything less than bold is close to assured failure. And he's equally a beacon to follow for contingency planning.

Are you comfortable? Are you planning for what's changing? Are you planning for how to deal gracefully with what the most likely turns might be that would foil your plans for what's changing? Zdurienck is. You should, too.

For Turnaround Management, Buck (Showalter) the Status Quo

2010-08-14T13:12:00.001-07:00

Beyond Baseball, when you inherit a struggling or failing department, you usually have a short time to initiate actions that will turn it around. Shorter, certainly than the mythical First 100 Days a U.S. President gets. It's critical to DO SOMETHING, but frankly, flailing around aimlessly but vigorously like a Rock'em Sock'em Robot usually doesn't work out. That's leaving it to chance.

Because of Angus' Law of Problem Evolution, you have an advantage if you are quite different from the previous manager(s). If the predecessor was an a$$hole, it helps to be humane, if she was passive, it helps to be decisive, if he was an hysteric, it helps to be samurai-calm. But in the end, your best chance of success is having a plan adapted to the situation, and immediately but deliberately executing against it...incrementally, relentlessly. And use the techniques of Change Management: set expectations, communicate the changes and the reasons for them, and most critically, enforce accountability.

There is no better stage to examine business or military or non-profits' turnaround than Baseball. The National Pastime is the most transparent billion-dollar institution that exists, and moves that management makes are examined and broadcast. The subtleties hidden in the social structures of corporations publicly-owned and private, officially guarded in the military, unofficially aliased in non-profits, are all hung out to see in plain view in Baseball -- and the highly measurable results, from wins and losses to to the contributions of individual team-members, is exposed to the world. And between the 30 major league Baseball organizations, there are a number of styles and cultures and patterns that cover most legitimate organizations' equivalents.

For the last decade, a classic, transparent example of what I call a Droopy-Dog organisation is the Baltimore Orioles. A team that through several eras maximized management practices to make a relatively "small market" franchise highly competitive has fallen on hard times, and it's been so long since they won anything...


Year               Tm    G   W   L W-L%    Finish                                     Managers
2009 BaltimoreOrioles  162  64  98 .395  5th of 5                        David Trembley(64-98)
2008 BaltimoreOrioles  161  68  93 .422  5th of 5                        David Trembley(68-93)
2007 BaltimoreOrioles  162  69  93 .426  4th of 5    Perlozzo(29-40) and David Trembley(40-53)
2006 BaltimoreOrioles  162  70  92 .432  4th of 5                          Sam Perlozzo(70-92)
2005 BaltimoreOrioles  162  74  88 .457  4th of 5      Mazzilli(51-56) and Sam Perlozzo(23-32)
2004 BaltimoreOrioles  162  78  84 .481  3rd of 5                          Lee Mazzilli(78-84)
2003 BaltimoreOrioles  163  71  91 .438  4th of 5                         Mike Hargrove(71-91)
2002 BaltimoreOrioles  162  67  95 .414  4th of 5                         Mike Hargrove(67-95)
2001 BaltimoreOrioles  162  63  98 .391  4th of 5                         Mike Hargrove(63-98)
2000 BaltimoreOrioles  162  74  88 .457  4th of 5                         Mike Hargrove(74-88)
1999 BaltimoreOrioles  162  78  84 .481  4th of 5                            Ray Miller(78-84)
1998 BaltimoreOrioles  162  79  83 .488  4th of 5                            Ray Miller(79-83)
1997 BaltimoreOrioles  162  98  64 .605  1st of 5 LostALCS(4-2)           Davey Johnson(98-64)
1996 BaltimoreOrioles  163  88  74 .543  2nd of 5 LostALCS(4-1)           Davey Johnson(88-74)

Source: Baseball Reference

...that the organization gets riddled with Droopy-Dog-ism, the belief (you've all heard it in some workplaces before) "that no matter what we do, it won't work out" or "failure? it's just the way we are".

So two weeks ago, the Orioles fired their second manager of 2010 and hired Buck Showalter, who last managed a promising Texas team to a bunch of unremarkably medium finishes. His history and the immediate results of his turnaround attempt?

Year	Age	Tm	Lg	W	L	W-L%	Finish
1992	36	New York Yankees	AL	76	86	.469	4
1993	37	New York Yankees	AL	88	74	.543	2
1994	38	New York Yankees	AL	70	43	.619	1
1995	39	New York Yankees	AL	79	65	.549	2

1998	42	Arizona Diamondbacks	NL	65	97	.401	5
1999	43	Arizona Diamondbacks	NL	100	62	.617	1
2000	44	Arizona Diamondbacks	NL	85	77	.525	3

2003	47	Texas Rangers	AL	71	91	.438	4
2004	48	Texas Rangers	AL	89	73	.549	3
2005	49	Texas Rangers	AL	79	83	.488	3
2006	50	Texas Rangers	AL	80	82	.494	3

2010	54	Baltimore Orioles	AL	9	2	.818	5

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 8/14/2010.

As you can see from the table, in his first 11 games as an Oriole manager, the squad has gone 9-2. While such an extreme turnaround requires a bit of luck, in the Orioles, as well as in Beyond Baseball organizations that are endowed with decent talent but are struggling, there's a bottled-up reservoir of will-to-win.

¿So how do you tap into that to turn around a Droopy-Dog organization? Not the Rigglemania Approach...if you want a stunning counter-example to plumb, here's one from last year. But Showalter represents one very viable positive path.

BUCK'S ONE HIDDEN PRACTICE AND FIVE YOU CAN SEE
There are several ways to do this (all require the correct context), but in the Baltimore Orioles' specific case, the beginning of the turnaround is measurably good. One is hidden, something not generally shared with the public. And you can see from reportage and by merely visually observing Showalter during games and in interviews four visible practices that generally work.

The Hidden: Relentless acquisition of data and relentless erasable whiteboard charting out of the season's plans adjusted and tweaked before series and games.

As my buddy Talmage Boston, who knows Showalter, said, Buck charts out a plan, gets it committed to "paper" (a whiteboard) and adjusts it perhaps daily when opposing pitcher assignments change or increased data gives him impetus to experiment. But if he was abducted by space aliens, his successor would inherit documentation of the plan complete enough to show the logic of it, and the successor could carry it on.

If you have a turnaround to perform, starting with a structured plan that's defined and documented enough to pass on to a helper or successor or your own supervisor, but one that's got the design that can evolve as the season wears on, is a critical, not always possible, approach. Buck is pretty relentless, even for Baseball, which is significantly more relentless and goal focused and accountable than corporate or military structures are.

Data --> Plan --> Data --> Adjustments

VISIBLE CHANGE PRACTICE #1 - Intentional, Inevitable, Immediate
It's a classic Change Management strategy...from the first day, Showalter made it clear the new regime was different, expectations were different, and he would be unyielding in striving for success. The first messages were about avoiding mental mistakes and execution (the things that you should almost always succeed at if you pay attention, concentrate and commit. So many things in worklife are tough and likely to go wrong that it's important to get the easy stuff correct and if you can, you might turn a truly .445 team that's playing .305 ball into a .445 team (or even a little better, if their attitude makes them self-confident).

Part of that practice is to show everything is changing, that almost no s.o.p. is assumed to be operating. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays got this down in their turnaround...I've written in terrifying depth about that one aspect, here, in three parts.

In Showalter's case it's been many things, but Aaron Gleeman can point to a real break from standard practice that any Oriole can see and feel the ripples from, suggesting changing to a six-man pitching rotation. When you make public a suggestion like that, it deflects some heat from players, giving the Commentocracy some meat to tear into and at the same time making it clear to the world that just about everything from the past may be altered.

Given the Birds' chronic struggles, this is a "good" thing, because it's easier to get Droopy Dogs to perk up on seeing things actually changed (not just talked about). and it immediately engages them in changes to their personal roles, which leads directly to...

VISIBLE CHANGE PRACTICE #2 - Consequences & Accountability
You declare and enforce the idea that everyone has to be accountable for success. It's natural to give a relatively weak team in a killer division, like the O's are, some slack. If you take every loss too seriously, and so many are inevitable, people can burn out quickly. So it's critical with a young team to simultaneously show you care a ton about winning, but not take every loss as though it was a World Series Game 7.

An earlier Gleeman article echoed a theme (several different players, all told first face-to-face) that has been going on for over a week...that everyone is going to have to justify his playing time by playing hard. From Gleeman:

Alfredo Simon took over closer duties in Baltimore when he was called up from Triple-A in late April, converting 15 of 17 save chances with a 3.40 ERA and .248 opponents' batting average through his first 30 appearances.

However, he's struggled lately, blowing two saves and allowing seven runs in his last six games, and not surprisingly new manager Buck Showalter is already talking about making some changes in the ninth inning:

"I'm sure Simon will get some more opportunities along the way, but I feel like we have some other people capable of doing it other than him. We'll see what each night dictates. Some guys down there have shown that they are capable of getting big outs for us. He has above-average pitches but he's still got to locate them, too. Guys can turn around a bullet up here."

Instead of the classic Droopy Dog behavior of letting it go because it doesn't really make any difference anyway, he's telling the whole team that execution is critical and will affect playing time, even in a role such as closer, where stability is most critical. But broadcasting this message leads to...

VISIBLE CHANGE PRACTICE #3 - Discipline
Discipline, like any other good thing has a yield curve. You can ramp it up to a point beyond which you degrade performance. In Buck's past manager jobs, I believe, he's turned up the military aspect beyond the optimal point ... we'll see how much he's learned in the last few years, see if he can find a more moderate plateau on which to make his stand.

But if everyone knows they need to please the boss to keep their job, and if the boss is pushing accountability & concentration on small controllable factors that are easy to adhere to with a little effort, they are very likely to do it. And they are especially likely to do it if it extends to "stars" like the closer. And even more likely to do it if the hammer falls on one or two underperformers in the next few weeks. It's critical that when you use this practice Beyond Baseball, you don't just lop off a few heads a few days in. That's just capricious. You need to give everyone a chance to succeed, or you're not being accountable yourself and that decimates the power of change management. But acting on stated factors and enforcing discipline leads to...

VISIBLE CHANGE PRACTICE #4 - Being 'In Charge'
If the manager is accountable and enforces discipline fairly and consistently she can radiate the aura of being 'in charge', and this is a vital piece of turnaround. Because when the manager tells people something is to happen and will happen, if she's shown she's in charge, she trims much of the doubt (about whether it's a good idea, about whether it's actually going to be executed, about success when it's executed) and doubt, especially in a Droopy Dog organization is overhead, that is, energy and attention invested in activities that cannot add to success.

VISIBLE CHANGE PRACTICE #5 - Neither Respecting the Inherited Situation or Disrespecting It
It's really difficult to do this last one. It takes more willpower than most managers have.

You pretty much have to turn your back on the past. Avoid the temptation of doing the opposite of everything your predecessor did...that Binary Thinking will lead to great hope from the troops, but pointless avoidable failures in practice.

Avoid Respecting The Past...the Rigglemania Failure linked to previously. It's tempting to want to show your predeessor respect, especially if you worked for him or her, especially if you know that the failure was beyond that person's control. If you want Visible Practice #1 to succeed (everything is different now), the last thing you want to do is make people comfortable with the idea that the old system was okay.

Avoid Disrespecting the Past...bad-mouthing the prior manager. It's classless, unnecessarily alienates any remaining friends or people who liked her personally, and brings back memories of processes you want to move past because they evoke low morale cognates.

Pay attention to the past in your planning and data. Ignore the past in your communications.

BEYOND BASEBALL
If you inherit a Droopy Dog workgroup that needs turning around, it's a good idea to start with the Showalter outline and system. Every context is different, and if you don't make some tweaks to the basic design in response to who is on your roster and their personalities, you'll underperform.

But Baseball in general, and the 2010 revision of Buck Showalter, specifically, is a beacon of management wisdom for turnaround.

PART III - Advanced Experimentation 410: When Asceticism & Failing the Alderson Wisdom Pushes You Below the Event Horizon

2010-08-10T07:26:00.000-07:00

Every decision a team's off-field management makes
has to balance
the baseball considerations and the non-baseball considerations
--Sandy Alderson

As I explained in Part II, the pre-2010 Mariners tried an exciting but risky standards-busting experiment: Try to prevent so many runs through a combination of an outlier pitching-friendly home stadium a mix of great to acceptable pitching and a close-to unprecedented quality of team defense that the amount of offense required to win a trip to October would be unprecedentedly low. And that buying that low level of offense to fulfill the effort would save a lot of money that could go to the team's bottom line or the top line.

As Vince Gennaro can tell you, the amount of money you need to move a team from 85 to 90 wins is significantly more than to move it from 80 to 85 wins. But some offense is required...but how little would be too little and how little would be just enough?

Success at determining that demilitarized zone between "too little" and "just enough" was going to determine the experiment's success or failure. The 2009 team's offensive performance was a data point to consider; dead last in the league in OPS+.

2009 Mariners Offense                           
Starters                        Age   BA  OBP  SLG  OPS OPS+
C            Rob  Johnson         25 .213 .289 .326 .615   65
1B      Russell  Branyan*         33 .251 .347 .520 .867  128
2B            Jose  Lopez         25 .272 .303 .463 .766  102
SS   Yuniesky  Betancourt         27 .250 .278 .330 .609   63
3B         Adrian  Beltre         30 .265 .304 .379 .683   82
LF    Wladimir  Balentien         24 .213 .271 .355 .625   66
CF    Franklin  Gutierrez         26 .283 .339 .425 .764  103
RF        Ichiro  Suzuki*         35 .352 .386 .465 .851  127
DH          Ken  Griffey*         39 .214 .324 .411 .735   95

Bench                           Age   BA  OBP  SLG  OPS OPS+
DH          Mike  Sweeney         35 .281 .335 .442 .777  106
SS           Josh  Wilson         28 .250 .294 .398 .693   83
LF     Michael  Saunders*         22 .221 .258 .279 .537   44
LF      Ryan  Langerhans*         29 .218 .311 .386 .697   86
SS           Jack  Wilson         31 .224 .263 .299 .562   51
============================================================
             Team Totals       29.9 .258 .314 .402 .716   90
           Rank among 14 AL teams     13   14   13        14

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table Generated 8/7/2010.

In 20-20 hindsight, his line-up featured one very legitimate lead-off hitter (Suzuki) and one legitimate batter to bat fourth or fifth (Branyan) and one batter (Sweeney) who would not insult your lineup if he batted seventh or on his best days, sixth. No one else's performance justified them batting third or clean-up or fifth, or even really, sixth.

So what would they do?

THE FOUR & A HALF KEYS TO THE Ms' 2010 RUN PRODUCTION
The offense protocol Seattle had to work with was not standards-busting; it was the norm. Teams with a shortstop who can hit 25 homers or a catcher who can slug .580 can play around with letting guys they're not sure about play key offensive positions. The Mariners didn't have such benefits. They would have to work the protocol of the four and half keys; they would need to produce their significant offense from DH, First Base, the two corner outfielders, and to an optional degree, Third Base.

At Right Field, they logically decided to stand pat. Ichiro Suzuki, signed for the next season, perhaps the team's most recognizable figure and only all-time record holder, slots in as a legit lead-off batter, and while he doesn't get you power (unless someone throws at his head), you can buy that elsewhere.

At First Base, the front office let their best OPS+ hitter, the health question-mark Russell Branyan, go and, given the market and their budget (left over after so much allocated to Cliff Lee, as mentioned in Part II), plugged in reasonably-priced glove man Casey Kotchman, whose 2009 line looked like this:

      1b  Casey  Kotchman*             26 .282 .354 .409 .764  103

The most optimistically you can look at this switch is:

He's only 26, so he might have some improvement potential.
He's a left-handed hitter who has a swing that can pull the ball, and the only affordance the Mariners' stadium provides is for left-handed flyball hitters who pull the ball.
He's a big defensive upgrade (at a position that doesn't have a strong individual defense contribution but does contribute to team defense since it interacts with roughly 10 chances a game)

I think the Ms focused on the last bullet, considered the first two and crossed their fingers. Of the four usual primary offense contributing positions (DH, 1B, LF and RF), they knew they had a likely offensive downgrade at 1B they hoped would be cushioned by better defense.

But Kotchman would not under any circumstances, be a batter other teams would fear or even think extensively about (in his best offensive production season, he was intentionally walked once ...and that was to set up the double-play, not to get to a weaker hitter behind him).

Essentially, without a breakout season, Kotchman was not going to provide an offensive upgrade at first base.

At Third Base, the Mariners had another switch, allowing a player they thought should be a legitimate #5 or even optimistically a #4 batter, but who hadn't performed up to those offensive expectations, to move on. But Adrian Beltre was one of the keys to their great team defense...while Third Base is not the most critical positions defensively, he was arguable the best or second-best in the league at the position. So this change could imperil the experiment if they didn't pay attention to defense. They felt they could not replace Beltre with a lumbering, concrete-handed slugger and they felt there was no-one promising in the Ms spotty minor leagues to take a chance on. They signed Chone Figgins, a lead-off hitter of some quality and who, at Age 31 in 2009, was indicating some "old guy skills" acquisition; not power, but taking walks (101 for the season compared to the 69/season he'd averaged previously as a starter), which had gotten Figgins' on-base average close to .400, roughly 40 points better than his previous average as a starter. A second legitimate lead-off hitter, perhaps, but on a team that already had one.

On the side of caution, of the seven seasons Figgins had gotten 20 or more plate appearances in the Mariners' home field, he had only performed better than his seasonal numbers twice and over those seven years had produced about 21% less offense than he had in the rest of his games (pretty sharp decline). And while Beltre's homers happened at about one every 25 at-bats during the years he was a starter, Figgins was getting a homer about once every 122 at bats.

So while Figgins was not likely to erode Beltre's defensive contributions much if at all, he was unlikely to keep up in power, even the disappointing (to the Mariners) power numbers Beltre had put up. Equation at this point: Kotchman (lower homer power) aligned with Figgins (lower homer power), and the magical Suzuki (one could hope equaling his prior power output).

If the next-to-last in the American League power numbers were going to be exceeded...or even equaled...it would require significant positive impact from Left Field and D.H.

In Left Field, the team replaced young Wladimir "The Willemstad Weed-Whacker" Balentien (OPS+ of 66) with Milton Bradley, an excellent athlete who has a difficult history with some press guys, many management guys but few teammates. Bradley had come in a toxic waste swap with the Chicago Cubs, when the Ms sent the second-worst starter in franchise history to the Windy City for the clearly-very-skilled but sometimes disruptive outfielder. The hope for his ability to add to the offense was pretty-well founded (20-20 hindsight aside). In the six years from 2003-2008 inclusive, he'd been out of action a fair amount, but in the 100 games a year he averaged, had been on base at a .390 clip, blasted out an OPS+ of 132 -- better than any 2009 Mariner, and collected 15 homers per shortened season. His 2008 year had been his best, his 2009 an emotionally turbulent campaign which had been tied for his worst (still this worst was an OPS+ of 99), but it was not as though at age 31, his agility and fine motor skills had fallen off the table.

While it was not a given that Bradley could revert completely to the 2003-2008 model, it was not delusional to think he might not bounce half-way back to his good-looking history from his sub-par 2009. And that half-way PRO+, 116, is 50 points higher than Balentien's 66, more than enough to cover the shear-off from Branyan to Kotchman. But if Bradley couldn't make up that difference, no one else on the roster could (without an extraordinary season), and given the significant dollar investment the team poured into Bradley & Cliff Lee, and the owners' execs' commitment to showing a profit every season, the front office wasn't going to get a stimulus package if the lien-up went into a depression.

But this move and the money involved put ownership, which values family-friendly warm fuzzies very highly (since the contemporary family-friendly marketing concept in Pacific Northwest sports generally outweighs on-the-field performance as a profit optimizer), really put them at the mercy of Bradley maintaining an even keel. More than about any men's professional sports franchise I can think of, the Mariners value their image of good citizenship and family-friendly fuzzies.

The contingency plan in case Bradley imploded: the even-younger than Balentien Michael Saunders (OPS+ unknown...true, his was 44 in 2009 but in the slimmest of appearances. Unlike the move at 1B, where one could be fairly confident there'd be at least some drop-off, LF was a shot in the dark, a big bag of uncertainty). But on the power front, it couldn't look like a shift for the better. While Balentien notched 20 or more homers at every level in the minors, about one every 17 at bats in AAA, Saunders had notched more like one home run per 30 AB. Saunders was more athletic and younger, so one could imagine that one day in a few years Saunders could sport more pop than Wladimir, but not as soon as 2010.

Which put every last bit of hope the Mariners had of at least equaling their previous year's offense (dead last remember...you really can't carry a drop-off from that if you have hopes of a wild card, and there was no fact-based reason to think it could be better) in getting absolutely mega-studly DH performance.

This is where the plan came off the wobbling rails, and that was because the Seattle ownership has persistently not gotten the Alderson Wisdom down: the need to balance field decisions against business decisions.

To kick off the 2009 season, they'd come up with the master stroke of signing the original Mariner star (okay, there were other Mariners who qualified as stars, but one who was really a star in the rest of the baseball world, too) Ken Griffey Junior. This wasn't an on-the-field master stroke. Griffey Junior, as you have seen from the chart of 2009 performances, wasn't even average for a D.H. But while he wasn't producing remarkable on the field, he was kicking axe at the box office, selling incremental tickets and making the city feel good about the Mariners through the application of nostalgia and the belief, probably founded, that Griffey Junior was headed to Cooperstown after he retired, and this reprise would pretty much assure his Hall of Fame plaque would end up featuring his head under a Mariners cap. So, with the owners and executives above the front office valuing the business considerations of the team way way way way more than the on-field ones,

At D.H., they re-signed Griffey Junior. Who of adult age would have predicted that at age 40, Griffey Jr would be able to exceed the .411 slugging percentage w/19 homers he'd hit as a 39 year old? Clearly someone on the business side at the Mariners' offices. But with the Griffey re-signing, the Mariners had no slack to make the Zdurienck Supremacy function; there was no position on the field where they could get enough additional power to lift the team from last place in that category. Yes, they still had old Mike Sweeney who had been an adequate contributor in a minor role, but one he would not be able to expand much given incurable injuries that prevent him from playing the field except under dire circumstances.

The Designated Hitter spot, as Earl Weaver figured out before he ever had to actually ink one onto a line-up card, is a magnificent and high-return affordance for a team with a run-prevention orientation. That's because DH gives you the chance to use an incomplete (less-expensive, easier to find) player who can hit a lot but not play the field. True, great DHes don't fall off trees in bushels, but an abundance of quite good ones are easy to find.

AND ANYONE WHO EXECUTES PROJECTS OR EXPERIMENTS KNOWS, NO SLACK...
...means the only way to succeed is massive bouts of good luck unsullied by any significant bad luck. That was not to be.

The biggest single disruption was not on the defensive side, but on the run-production side (because no matter how successful your run prevention engine is, you still have to outscore your opponent to win a game) when (again failing to sufficiently weight the on-field factors relative to the business factors) management pressured Ms manager Don Wakamatsu to not just give Griffey the main weight of the DH role, but to bat him 5th in 15 of the first 23 games. This promotional feel-good nostalgia almost assured that whoever was batting clean-up would get nibbled to death, since the consequences of walking the clean-up hitter and facing Old Junior were close to non-existent. Bradley started the season batting 4th, and then it was the In-No-Way A Heart Of The Line-up batter Jose Lopez. With Old Junior anchoring the 5th spot, Bradley at clean-up managed .059/.238/.235 and Lopez hammered a better but not adequate.253/.282/.333.

From an on-the-field factors view Griffey pulled the team below the event horizon, and close-to-guaranteed the failure of the defensive experiment. With Griffey in the line-up as DH, the Mariners yielded their easiest-to-fill offensive boost. It was as though ownership had taken the nimble little Smart Car Z-Man had designed and planted on it a glorious 3,000 pound hood ornament. The Mariners elected to fritter their on-field design slack away in exchange for a series of feel-good promotional bobble-head opportunities.

Whitey Herzog, who went to Cooperstown this year for constructing successful run-prevention teams would never have considered the possibility the 2010 Mariners experiment could succeed minus a Balrog of a DH. Nor would Earl or any of the Baltimore front office guys he worked with. The bold experiment never got a fair shake.

In Part IV I get to give you a positive example from this failed season. I'll tell you the brilliant part of Z-Man's execution, his deft contingency planning that any manager Beyond Baseball would be wise to mimic as part of planning a bold experiment.

PART II - Advanced Experimentation 410: The Null Hypothesis Is Not A Dull Hypothesis

2010-08-02T06:12:00.000-07:00

In Part I, I explained why the 2010 Seattle Mariners' front office found themselves best served by a bold innovation.

In this part, I'll describe the innovation they chose to adopt as a working hypothesis, that run prevention could be amassed in such concentration that it could deliver escape velocity from the gravitational field of the Pythagorean Principle (that a team's runs-produced and runs-allowed strongly shape their win-loss record).

If that Mariners hypothesis worked, it would...

Free them from the expense of assembling a fully-featured offensive team, substituting lesser-valued players whose lead attribute, defense, is cheaper to buy in the 2009-2010 market than those players with noteworthy offense.
Ambush the scouting of other teams who would not at first know the workings of the hypothesis and once they knew it, would be challenging, energy-consuming and time consuming to respond to.

To put a rational bold experiment together (Beyond Baseball, too), it requires OMA...observation of past trends, measurement of past effects, and analysis of relationships between factors. Here's the OMA chain that led the Ms' front office to the experiment.

What to Implement to Maximize Run Prevention?
The 2009 and 2010 Seattle Mariners have a modern statistically-oriented analytical function in the front office. And the protocol among modern sabermetricians is that run-production (and by the perfect double-entry math of Baseball therefore, run-prevention too) is made up of three factors, one of which is heavily-affected by defense (the opponents' batting average of balls put into play), one heavily affected by pitching (the rate of issuing walks), and one moderately affected by pitching (home runs yielded).

Putting it Together #1 - Team Defense
The M's 2009 campaign featured the most hit-preventing team defense (as measured by relative Defensive Efficiency Rating) since 2001. The 2009 Ms allowed Batting Average of Balls in Play at 91.3% of the 2009 American League's composite average (.274 for the Ms, .300 for the AL), and the only team in the 21st Century to apply such asphyxiating team defense was the record-shattering 2001 Mariners that won 116 games while allowing Batting Average of Balls in Play at a rate of 88.2% of the 2001 American League's composite average.

As I stated in Part I, the 2009 Mariners exceed the number of wins the Pythagorean thumbnail estimation suggested they "should" have by eight, a very high and fairly unusual difference. The 2001 Mariners (a legend everyone in the Mariners' administration views with reverence) with their even-better relative team defense, won seven more games than the Pythagorean thumbnail suggested they "should". That is a lesson they couldn't overlook.

So, using a factor they could control, they were able to play around with team defense, at least at the edges, to try to exceed the rather exxxtreme accomplishment they'd notched in 2009. They moved a mixed bag of fielding talent, 2009 2bman Jose López, to 3rd base where his strong arm would have more positive value and his so-so range be less of a deficit. They gave the left field spot, for most teams, a place to locate one's weakest fielding big bat, to youngster Michael Saunders who'd looked a little promising in the field in 2009, even though his bat wasn't yet producing fully a major leaguer's output. They acquired the athletically-gifted Chone Figgins to play second base, and even though it hadn't been Figgins' primary position, he'd played at that spot occasionally over the first eight years of his career, and as a better athlete with an apparently-better baseball brain than his second-base predecessor, perhaps would add team defense (or perhaps wouldn't neutralize the hoped-for benefit of moving López to third). Finally, the team let the only possibly-legitimate middle-of-the-lineup slugger they had on the roster, the injured first-baseman Russell Branyan, leave, replacing him with a questionable bat with an acknowledged glove, Casey Kotchman. So the team had put into the two positions most usual in roster protocol to produce offense, LF and 1b, respectively, a very young, not-fully developed player and a guy who could hit some, sometimes. This was a risky pairing - if one or both produced offense near the top of their potential, this team's offense was going to be anemic, but if one or both didn't produce near the top of their potential, its was going to be sub-anemic.

But the Mariners front office put on the field a defense that should have been even better than the 2009 squad at hit prevention. What about homers and walks, the other two components that are part of the contemporary sabermetrics protocol for run prevention?

Putting it Together #2 - Homer Prevention
While the team can't control this factor day to day like Bill Veeck, the team's home park is the most extreme anti-hitting (ergo, pro-defense) park in the league over the last 9-1/2 seasons. Further, though, it is an intensely homer-negative park overall -- crushing right-handed pull power into dust while gently boosting left handers who loft the ball while pulling it.

So to put together this work of art and craft, the Mariners already had a great canvas for laying on the homer-prevention component of run prevention, the park they played 50% of their games in. In the other 50% of their games, on the road, their 2009 pitching staff was precisely league average in homer prevention.

Staff       Road HR
LAA           76
TEX           78
CHW           80
NYY           80
OAK           87
TOR           91
SEA           92
AL mean       92
MIN           92
BOS           95
DET           95
KCR           97
TBR          101
BAL          109
CLE          111

And keep in mind, three of the teams that allowed fewer home runs were in the same division as the Mariners, meaning not only did they get to face a marginally-powered Mariner offense quite often, but also got to face it in the Mariners' home park in a bunch of their road games (an affordance the Mariners never got to have, since the Ms played none of their away games in their homer-snuffing home park).

Putting it Together #3 - Walk Prevention/Overall Pitching Quality
Tweaking the 2009 team as a base would require care. The 2009 team had great-looking pitching overall (ignoring the home-away splits). At 4.27 runs per game surrendered, the team was #1 in the American League

  R/G    Tm     W    L W-L%  ERA   HR ERA+  WHIP H/9 BB/9 SO/9
 4.27    SEA   85   77 .525 3.87  172  112 1.30  8.4  3.3  6.5
 4.52    CHW   79   83 .488 4.14  169  112 1.35  9.0  3.2  7.0
 4.54    BOS   95   67 .586 4.35  167  108 1.41  9.4  3.3  7.7
 4.57    DET   86   77 .528 4.29  182  106 1.41  9.0  3.7  6.9
 4.57    TEX   87   75 .537 4.38  171  106 1.37  9.0  3.3  6.4
 4.65    NYY  103   59 .636 4.26  181  101 1.35  8.6  3.6  7.8
 4.65    TBR   84   78 .519 4.33  183  104 1.36  9.0  3.2  7.1
 4.69    MIN   87   76 .534 4.50  185   98 1.38  9.6  2.9  6.5
 4.70    LAA   97   65 .599 4.45  180  102 1.41  9.4  3.3  6.6
 4.70    OAK   75   87 .463 4.26  156  103 1.39  9.2  3.3  7.0
 4.75    LgAv  82   80 .505 4.45  178  100 1.40  9.2  3.4  6.9
 4.76    TOR   75   87 .463 4.47  181   98 1.42  9.4  3.4  7.3
 5.20    KCR   65   97 .401 4.83  166   92 1.46  9.4  3.8  7.3
 5.34    CLE   65   97 .401 5.06  183   83 1.51  9.9  3.8  6.2
 5.41    BAL   64   98 .395 5.15  218   88 1.53 10.3  3.4  5.9
Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 7/23/2010.

That 4.27 Runs/Game (the first column) is not only the best in the league, but by a stunning margin of .25 R/G over the second best team. Why is a quarter of a run stunning? Well, the difference between the 2nd best team and the 5th is a mere .05 R/G, and to get to the team that's 0.25 R/G less effective than the 2nd best team you have to get past the 12th best. It's such a significant difference, the difference between #1 and #2 just about spans the rest of the entire league.

The 2009 M's pitching is, by this measure, an extreme outlier. And it was, as I pointed out in Part I, also an extreme outlier in its W-L record compared to its Pythagorean projection. An inquisitive and observant manager in any field would wonder if there might be a cause (incredible out-of-scope run-prevention) and effect (outperforming pre-season expectations or outperforming Pythagorean projection). What IF way-above normal defense bent the space-time continuum and changed the gravitational field the Pythagorean affects. She might not presume it existed, but she would at least be interested in if it was true.

Because if it was linked by some cause-and-effect, this not-broadly-known insight would be actionable knowledge, that is, a competitive edge. In the open market, pitching is seen as a very valuable commodity, so it's generally expensive, but defense has been both difficult to measure and not thought of as a critical factor in the high run-production era since the owners juiced the ball after the 1993 season. I'm fairly sure no team has tried to make defense its lead positive attribute since the end of practice of Deadball strategies in the early 1920s. And just as the insights described in Moneyball six years earlier had seemed a way to create more wins/dollar and something that others would then have to chase, and many couldn't chase even if they wanted to and knew how to (The Texas Rangers, for example, which have an offense-stimulating stadium), competitors could be slow to adapt to this possible Mariner revolution yielding a benefit that could last a while.

The coup de grâce for the 2010 rotation was Zdurienck's acquisition of a starter who may have been potentially the best starter in the American League, but certainly the best for this team. Because the acquisition, Cliff Lee, rarely walks anyone (in 2009, 1.7 walks per 9 innings pitched compared to the league average of 3.4), and his homers-allowed per 9 innings pitched was 0.7 compared to the league's 1.1). Roll in the Ms defense's ability to snuff hits as a complement, and it looked to Zdurienck as though Lee might notch his best season ever.

And compared to 2009, the season against which Zdurienck was looking to improve, Lee (potentially the best) would be replacing Carlos Silva (who in 2008 and 2009 had been 5-18 with an ERA of 6.81).

ASIDE: Z-Man had the opportunity to try to sign Cliff Lee, due to become a free agent at the end of 2010, to a long-term deal before the perfect Lee-glorifying scheme they'd put together had borne fruit, and many managers in all fields would have thought it best to get in front of that, getting Lee to commit before the probably-superb season played out. Z-Man didn't, and that was brilliant, a lesson I'll talk about in Part III and one you should follow.

So make a perfect alignment for run-prevention

Asphyxiating ballpark, unchanged;

Exxxxtreme defensive ability on the field, made more extreme;

Good pitching, improved

Thus, the hypothesis to be tested, perhaps offensive ability would become less material.

Because the Mariners weren't using any of the standard operating procedures for building a winning team, there was a big chance the hypothesis would be null, that the experiment would not pan out.

And while the bold experiment didn't work for reasons I'll describe in Part III, Z-Man's brilliance made it possible to come away with positives even if all the Ms could prove was the null hypothesis, as I'll tell you about in Part III.

PART I - Advanced Experimentation 410: The Zdurienck Supremacy, or Containing an Implosion

2010-07-25T14:23:00.000-07:00

Change is inevitable. Change for the better is a full-time job. --Adlai E. Stevenson

There's a powerful example of Baseball's superior management abilities in the horrendous cherry-pie time of the 2010 Seattle Mariners. In spite of the obvious fact that Ms General Manager Jack Zdurienck's plan was an awful, unmitigated black hole from which no light escaped, it equally shows his innate genius and why he's a noble exemplar to follow.

¿How can a total black hole represent genius management? For two reasons, the first of which I'll discuss in this Part I.

AN ORGANIZATION WITHOUT STRONG PROSPECTS TO ADVANCE IN A COMPETITIVE MARKET MUST EXPERIMENT & TAKE CHANCES
In 2009 the Mariners surprised everyone who knew something about baseball by finishing the season at 85-77. The underlying facts were a little gristlier...the Ms were outscored by their opponents 640-692, which the Pythagorean thumbnail indicates should generally create a win-loss record closer to 75-87, 10 wins below their actual result. This projection was farther below an actual result than that for any other team in the 2009 majors. A large deviation like this in either direction is generally accepted by analysts to presage a following-year performance that will conform more closely to the Pythagorean projection than the win-loss record itself.

NOTE: This Pythagorean projection suggestion for the following year is not meant to be universal, nor is it universal in practice. For example, the 2009 San Diego Padres had a record of 75-87, but that lacklustre record reflected 8 more wins than their 67-95 projection based on their runs scored and allowed. This suggested that the Padres' overperformance probably would go away in 2010 and all things being roughly equal, 67-95 ball would be more indicative of their prospects than 75-87. But au contraire, while all things are roughly equal for them, but they have had a significant performance UPtick: as of today, if you project out their current W-L ratio to a whole season, they have been playing 94-68 ball, way far better than either their actuals or projected.

Pythagorean projection is a general rule. The exception is never the rule and all rules involving human behavior have exceptions.

The Mariners, to build on their 2009 success (which would be staying on the good side of .500, with a dream of making the playoffs) needed to do something to change the equation, to overcome the status quo. Dabbling at the edges might work but probably not. Opponents, especially within the division, get a lot of time to analyse and adapt to what a competitor is doing. But a truly needy (for success after a loooong hiatus) organization probably requires a bold initiative, probably innovative. The need for innovation wasn't mandatory, but in a tight division such as the American League West, with no apparent punching bags nor apparent Balrogs, bold could work well enough to gain a flag or blow away the competition. And if you can do that for a single season, it pays business dividends for years (not to mention the side-effect of career dividends).

It's risky though, because if it fails, you might look like a dope, and in Baseball, the most transparent endeavour in North America, everything that could make you look like a dope will wriggle to the surface and be beaten to death and well beyond on talk radio and in the blogosphere. And remember your Deming: the bolder the initiative...the farther it is from standard operating procedure...the higher the potential gains are but also the uglier the potential crater if your thesis doesn't work out.

THE BOLD INITIATIVE: NOT THE TRADITIONAL "PITCHING & DEFENSE", BUT AN UNPRECEDENTED "DEFENSE THUS PITCHING"
The bold initiative was to try out what I believe is an unprecedented approach to team-on-the-field construction. Recent interest in the statistical analyst world has drifted, probably more from the need for new guys to find and exploit a niche than from actual passion, away from hitting and pitching (both well-stocked with successful analysts), and towards the under-explored & intrinsically fascinating region of defense (notable exception: Chris Dial at Baseball Think Factory who slud over to defense to be able to refine his pitching projections). Defense had been outed as "overvalued" in the book Moneyball, and the cognates from that point of view took root even though the Moneyball A's had moved back to a more moderate position on defense by the time the book came out in paperback. But one of the significant factors that appeared to be a foundation of the M's success was outstanding defense overall and in many places on the field.

Before I detail how what happened to the 2009 Mariners and how the team's front office decided to experiment, I need to lay out three systems concepts managers need to internalise.

THREE SYSTEMS CONCEPTS MANAGERS NEED TO UNDERSTAND
There are three numeric concepts managers need to know about in general, but specifically to understand why the attempt to build on the Mariners' 2009 success for 2010 has tanked so horribly. Interestingly enough, many professional statisticians, even in baseball, behave as though they don't understand them when it comes to turning concept into action.

Concept One is The Additive (All-Wet) Assumption.
This is the Management By Wishful Thinking seduction of assuming that if you double some input quality or quantity, you are likely to get double the quality or quantity of the output. It's seductive because we are all taught and virtually all master the sterling example thereof, 2+2 = 4. Its allure is reinforced by the many obvious examples where it holds just fine. Team home run output plays out remarkably closely to the home run abilities of the individual players on the roster. If you replace a batter who consistently hits about five homers a year with another who consistently hits about 20 homers all other factors being stable, it's a reasonable thumbnail presumption to think the team has the potential for 15 more homers for the season. Total Team Homers are the additive result of the homers hit by each individual batter playing for the team (well, duh...only Walt Davis would take me to task for suggesting such a thing, but I'm going to contrast that common sense assumption in the next paragraph). Other tallied events that are almost completely based on individual accomplishment fit this Additive Assumption quite decently.

But many events don't fit The Additive Assumption well at all, especially out towards the extremes. One is team defense. This is one of hardest concepts for people who haven't dug into defensive stats to understand. Team defense adequacy of turning batted balls into outs is not the additive result of each fielder's ability to turn batted balls into outs.

Here's an example. Say I have the best, rangiest SS in history ... his incremental value in preventing hits is greatly affected by who is playing 2nd base and who's on 3rd base. When you see the best SS playing with 50th percentile third-basemen and second-basemen, his range enables him to take some grounders or pop-ups "away" from adjacent infielders who could had them -- if you have ever seen the SS cut in front of the 2B on a grounder up the middle and take a ball either could have had, you already know this. When one or both of the adjacent basemen truly stinks, "all" of the SS' potential for range is more fully actualized. He's going to go to the limits of his lateral range and get balls the stiff next to him wouldn't get to if SS Deity didn't. When the neighboring basemen are 50th percentile defenders, SS Deity is not going to prevent as many hits because those neighbors are going to get to some chances that SS Deity could have gotten to, so that SS isn't free to exercise all his range, ergo his full potential isn't added into the sum of team defense. When the neighboring basemen are Deity-like as well, SS Deity's ability to add incremental defensive hit-removal value is further diminished, because he and his neighbor-Deities are to a greater degree are getting to balls a neighbor would have had anyway. There are many outfield examples of this interplay, too.

At some point on the scale, certainly at the 1974 Baltimore Orioles' point, the very presence of three neighboring glove deities changes what individual batters and team managers try to do against them. In that sense, there may be non-measurable run-prevention advantages, but it's not directly the addition of additional effective fielding range.

The All-Wet instances of the Additive Assumption are traps for managers, both in Baseball and Beyond Baseball. The Mythical Man-Month is one of the best-known non-baseball examples...the all-wet assumption that if two programmers can develop solid working code in six months, then why not hire six programmers because you'd get it done in two months? It's a classic failure of the Additive Assumption, and one that's played out absolutely as regularly now as it was 35 years ago when the All-Wetness of the Assumption was outed publicly through the non-Baseball managerial corps by a rabid Mets fan.

Concept Two is a corollary to Concept One...Critical Mass
What I call Critical Mass is when you collect so much of a single attribute, the result takes off in a way that's very far from the amount you add. An example is the 1978 Milwaukee Brewers where the team's offensive potency was higher than sum of the individual players' offensive potential. The team's line-up was a Lumber Company, and the good and even middling Major League batters on the team tended to outperform what could have been expected for them. I have a suspicion as to why this happened which may or may not be correct, but happen it did. The team had such a Critical Mass of hitting that it disrupted what could have been assumed by the Additive Assumption.

Concept Three is another corollary...Event Horizon
The Event Horizon is quite like Critical Mass, but on the low-end of the scale. Like an auto engine you're tuning so it idles at lower and lower rpm, at some point, there won't be enough fuel to keep the engine turning over...cutting fuel rate by 25% won't cut the idle rpm by 25%...the engine will just stall and not run.

The Turn of the Century Oakland A's hit the Event Horizon with their defense...sometimes they had so many DH/1b/3b types on the field at once, their defensive engine stalled out enough that it undermined the superior-ness of the offense they had assembled. The 2010 Mariners, I believe, hit the Event Horizon with their offense, but I'll cover that in a subsequent post.

These three concepts are critical to understanding both why the Mariners chose their experiment and why it apparently failed. In the next entry, I'll show you how these applied, why the Ms tried a bold experiment, why it was this particular experiment, why it went so wrong and what managers Beyond Baseball can take away from this to prevent their own Cherry-Pie Times.