LaCava, Dipoto, or Ng (or Zduriencik)
Woodfork, Bernazard, and the internals have been eliminated from the GM search, according to Baker and Stone. LaCava and Dipoto are apparently in Seattle for a second interview, and Ng will have hers shortly, now that LA is out of the playoffs.
Smart money is on LaCava. He’s the most experienced of the three, is very tight with Bob Fontaine, and has a great reputation with people who Armstrong is taking advice from. I wouldn’t be surprised if the M’s were introducing LaCava as their new GM early next week.
Baker adds that Jack Zduriencik is the fourth candidate, who didn’t come out in the prior reports because he interviewed Monday, after Milwaukee got eliminated. He’s a tremendous scouting director, responsible for most of the talent the Brewers currently have, but is less statistically inclined than the other three. I wouldn’t be unhappy with Zduriencik, but probably prefer LaCava.
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Maybe we’ll hire Ng in a few years when the Mariners are sold and the new owner cleans house.
I don’t have problems with ANY of these candidates. Slightly disappointed that Woodfork didn’t make it; VERY glad that the internals and Bernazard didn’t make it.
Very cheerful news this morning.
the internals have been eliminated from the GM search
This is the most exciting Mariners news in years. My biggest worry is they’d reward an internal guy for years of service; that these guys including the interim GM didn’t get a courtesy pass to the second round shows progress.
While it’s not Antonetti, all three candidates seem like B/B+ options.
BTW, nice job handicapping DMZ. You’ve had LaCava and Ng as favorites all the way.
Wouldn’t an introduction then step on the ‘no announcements right around the World Series’ edict? With the Series due to start next Wednesday, I’d expect the Ms to be waiting a couple of weeks…
MLB has a no-announcements-during-world-series rule (that isn’t really enforceable, as we saw last year with A-Rod opting out), but the M’s could make the announcement on Monday or Tuesday.
While I was hoping for Woodfork, these three are alright too. Thank God no internals are in the running.
Of those three, LaCava sounds best.
Dave, which of the three would you prefer?
Congrats on the wedding btw…
Those of you watching the NLCS game instead of the debate may have caught a quick (and uncaptioned) shot of Colletti sitting in his box, with Ng at his right hand. This was early enough in the game that they didn’t look super worried. Kind of amusingly I recognized her first and then figured out who he was.
The rule can’t be enforced against players, but can be (in some non-public way) against the teams. It is probably more of a you-get-an-angry-phone-call-from the Commissioner’s-office kind of rule anyway. The Yankees may blow off the Commissioner, the Mariners won’t.
I’m on LaCava too – he’s the best of the group by far.
It would be interesting to know what disqualified Woodfork (age? experience? honesty?) but we likely never will.
LaCava has a strong scouting background, mostly with the Angels, but the M’s already have that (including the Angels background) with Fontaine. Of course that was while he was working his way up; the really relevant experience is his past 6 or 7 years with the Jays. And while I sort of follow the Jays closer than most other AL teams (my father gets Rogers cable, so they’re his “home” team by default despite living thousands of miles away) I can’t say I have a good feel for their track record in terms of talent evaluation — making smart trades, picking up freely-available talent to plug holes, drafting and developing high-ceiling guys. What I can recall off the top of my head isn’t super encouraging. Yeah, they developed Rios (Wells was before LaCava’s time), but beyond that… Russ Adams? Aaron Hill? (I guess that at least shows they value defense.) They’ve done better with pitching — Jesse Litsch, Shaun Marcum, Brandon League, and Dustin McGowan are all players they’ve drafted and developed. So that’s a positive, but with pitchers it’s always a crapshoot. As for trades… I guess the Overbay thing worked out, and they managed to get rid of Miguel Batista for Troy Glaus but they had to throw in Orlando Hudson to do it. They’ve been willing to grab guys off the scrap heap but… Kevin Mench? Brad Wilkerson?
And of course we don’t really know how the responsibility for the successes and failures break down between Ricciardi and LaCava.
One thing that Batter’s Box interview emphasizes was that Ricciardi had a coherent multi-year plan to bring the Jays back into contention that emphasized building from within rather than spending on expensive free agents, though that may have reflected Rogers’ stinginess more than anything. That’s something the M’s need (even if it hasn’t worked out for the Jays). Was LaCava in the Indians org when they had their apparently league-leading information systems up and running? Exposure to that would be a bonus (assuming he liked it and saw the benefit and wanted to build something like that here).
If the Mariners believe that the Twins are the organization to emulate, Zduriencik appears to me to best fit that model.
Would the Mariners announcing their new GM really take any national buzz away from the World Series? I doubt if this will be a big topic of conversation outside of Seattle.
After reading the two articles DMZ linked on LaCava, I am all about LaCava ‘09.
I hope they don’t screw this up.
Actually, on second thought, it doesn’t seem like they really could screw it up at this point. None of the candidates really rub me as pitfalls.
If you’ve been in the business world at all, or have ever be in charge of hiring or firing, you’re probably familiar with job candidates who look great on paper but represent poorly in person.
I’ve been a hiring manager at three different stops in my journalism career, and have seen this phenomenon up close — their resumes look great, but they crack inappropriate jokes, slag past employers, look or act bored, discuss expectations that sound suspiciously like demands, etc. Sometimes it’s just a feeling that you’re not going to be able to work well with this person.
Not saying this is the case with Woodfork and the others who didn’t make it to the Double Jeopardy round, but I am saying that you can’t overlook the dog-and-pony-show aspect to interviewing for a job. No matter the job or setting, you can’t get past the simply reality that this job interview is one person in a room with two other people (Chuck Armstrong and Howard Lincoln), and all sorts of human variables come into play. There are all sorts of reasons a person connects or doesn’t connect with others. They can be as substantial as “I don’t like this guy because doesn’t seem to appreciate the importance of trying to win every year whether or not we have the personnel or free payroll” to “I don’t like this guy because he wore white socks with his suit.”
FWIW Baseball Prospectus lists LaCava #5 on their “Next Ten Top GM Candidates”…
Sounds like a good fit to me. And I’m guessing, as Jim mentioned above, his personality is probably helping the process.
Personality helps, no question.
And I’ll give Zduriencik this: when your eye for talent is that good, it tends to cover up weaknesses elsewhere.
Yeah, that Baseball Prospectus entry sounds custom-written for the Mariners. (Hmmmm, who wrote that?)
LaCava’s been MY guy all along. All I’m hoping for is that if Chuckie and Lincoln do show enough competence to hire the guy, that they then generally leave him the F alone. For as much of a plus as what his personality is, LaCava’s not a yes-man, fundamentally. I just don’t want him to wind up handcuffed, pissed off and resign from the two nimrods he’ll have to answer to.
I don’t mind Zduriencik in the job, either. But LaCava and Jed Hoyer were my top picks from the start.
I had the same thought. It was Will Carroll.
I should have linked to the entire article.
Zduriencik had a good ranking/writeup on the list as well.
All four look acceptable – but then so did Bill Bavasi when we hired him…
If Zduriencik can do here what Milwaukee has done with their young players (and we should have some good draft picks in the near future for him to work with) then I’ll let the rest of the league have their pick of the spreadsheet wunderkinds and take the talent.
An eye for good young players (like Fielder, Weeks, Braun, Hart and Hardy) would be a welcome improvement around here – especially if they are valued enough to keep around until they flourish.
But if it’s one of the other three, I think the team is still in good hands.
I still think Ng is the best chance to negate The Magoo Effect
Hopefully you have a mod macro on standby in case he gets the job. If we commenters have trouble with Niehaus and Sexson, we have no shot with Zduriencik.
I am rooting for LaCava or Ng. Good candidates, and easy to spell!
I’d like to see Ng, with Kent Hrbek as assistant GM. We’d have the most vowel-deficient front office in history.
Could add a Feierabend macro at the same time.
Hope is in the air today…along with rain!
An eye for good young players (like Fielder, Weeks, Braun, Hart and Hardy) would be a welcome improvement around here – especially if they are valued enough to keep around until they flourish.
So you don’t think Fontaine has been doing a good job? Relatively speaking, the evaluation of young talent hasn’t been the problem. You can quibble with the drafts (Morrow vs Lincecum, say, or the win-at-any-cost choice of Fields which probably came from above) but the unmitigated disasters have been in the evaluation of major league talent taken (and given away) in trades and free agent hires: Silva, HoRam, Vidro, Batista, the Cleveland give-aways, the Bedard fiasco, and every “veteran” on the bench the past few years. The farm system isn’t overflowing with talent, but it’s not the steaming pile of crap that spilled out of the major league roster.
Hopefully you have a mod macro on standby in case he gets the job. If we commenters have trouble with Niehaus and Sexson, we have no shot with Zduriencik.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. But man, watching people flail with his name (pronunciation and spelling both) would be pretty entertaining for a while. What will people call him for short? Z-Man? Zduri? cik-o?
I haven’t heard it, but my minds has been translating it as Ze Durian Chick.
and I see Baker tells me I’m all wrong.
“Zur-en-sik”
When did Bavasi look acceptable? He underachieved with the big market and high payroll Angels.
If LaCava makes it more probable Fontaine hangs around, that’s definitely a plus….
What I see are 3 baseball guys that came up through the ranks and then Ng. I didn’t see a college degree listed in any of resumes from the guys. Did any of them graduate from college?
The trend in the league seems to be to grab the smartest people you can find and let them apply their massive brains toward the problem of building an organization, a philosophy and success. The3 smart people bring in additional smart people, propose new ideas and cultivate new ways of thinking.
The M’s seem to be running contrary to that trend and have 3/4ths of their candidates coming from the scouting background and while they aren’t old school, they certainly aren’t new school.
I don’t see any of these people leading the next generation of thinking or being on the cutting edge in new baseball developments. Other than Ng, I’m seeing clones of Pat Gillick. I don’t know if that’s good enough.
Right. Certainly my feeling at the time of Bavasi’s hire, and I think the consensus on thie site, was that he was a classic retread: an old-school old-fashioned GM hired probably in large part because he’d been a GM before and had a recognizable name. I remember a lot of disappointment being expressed here, that the Ms hadn’t hired a more forward-looking GM.
I’d call it a torrent of disappointment, not a torrent of criticism because there was also the notion of “wait and see”, to give him (and the Ms) the benefit of the doubt. But he proceeded to fulfill many of our worst fears, as far as major league acquisitions went, and then the criticism grew and grew. Not just of him, but of the Ms, who should’ve realized far earlier what a mistake they had made.
Anyway, that’s my recollection of the mood on this site at the time. Although there weren’t that many calling the hire downright unacceptable, there was plenty of skepticism and disappointment about Bavasi’s hire from the beginning.
Um, what does having a college degree have to do with being smart?
And if you just see three baseball guys, then I suspect you’re not looking very carefully….(for example, Ng is a baseball gal who worked her way up through the ranks….)
Um, what does having a college degree have to do with being smart?
Education is a pretty reasonable proxy for intelligence.
read more closely…3 baseball guys and Ng is what I wrote.
guys = men. Ng has a degree from the University of Chicago. I have no doubts that she is a smart cookie. I’m concerned that the other 3 candidates may not be her intellectual equals.
I’d be a little uneasy about hiring a guy who people say everyone loves. I know this may sound a bit like the silly fans who want the manager to throw bats out of the dugout at the first strike call made against his hitters. Are great GM’s loved by everyone? Ed Barrow? Stuck up skinflint jerk. Branch Rickey? Conniving jerk. George Weiss? Wishes he’d only been called a jerk. Etc . . etc.
You have to make some (if they work) temporarily unpopular decisions as a GM. It may be an unfair stereotype but I’d be worried that the nicest guy in MLB would try and avoid such decisions and put an organization in a worse long term position.
A guy who can find a bright side in anything? Is that really what you want? Why is that a recommendation for a position where tough decisions have to be made? Is that the temperment of a great GM? I remember years back, Bill James lampooning Chuck Tanner in his absolutely hopeless years as the manager of the Braves for having this same sort of always finding the bright side attitude.
Is the Toronto player development system really that strong of a recommendation? I mean, it’s not bad but is is that good? They’ve seemed to have an odd play it safe, don’t go for the high ceiling hit or miss players philosophy. But maybe I’m just not seeing the bright side of this.
Intelligence is not a unidimensional attribute. (for example, there is book smart and there is street smart). There are several attributes relevant to being a GM that has nothing to do with academic achievement.
And as a graduate of a fairly prestigious university (which has also sent more than their share of attendees to the bigs), I know for damn sure that education is NOT a great proxy for intelligence. I knew dozens of MBAs who could manage their way out of a paper bag…. (not to mention that if start out as a player, you’re more than likely not going to start or finish a degree until later in life—a degree isn’t as strong an indicator as it is for other populations).
Paper credentials don’t mean as much as behavior in the field for our purposes; if they assembled a smart, competent operation for the clubs they worked for, then it’s more relevant than if they got a degree from Chicago, UC Irvine, Moorehead State or Northern Arizona.
I’m pretty sure you mean “couldn’t” there, and I agree. And some people can be very smart in one field, but be unable to transfer that thinking to another field.
As for La Cava being optimistic and a nice guy and everything – that can be a great thing. Nice guys with a backbone can tell someone they’re fired and make them feel good about it…
This hire is going to be a crapshoot, I’m afraid. The interview process doesn’t really reveal much about how someone is going to work day-to-day. And you have to wonder how much recommendations from other clubs will reveal. After all, the other clubs have a vested interest in the M’s continuing failure (”They hired Carlos Silva so we didn’t have to”).
I’m not sure how much of a recommendation Toronto is for LaCava either; but the fact that he spent time working in Cleveland would be rather more so, I’d think. And if LaCava coming in keeps Fontaine (and hopefully Engle as well) in place, I agree with gwangung, that’s definitely a mark in his favor. We won’t know until it actually happens and we see whom he hires (I’d hope to see him pull some of the brighter young folks in Cleveland, for instance), whether he builds the kind of team he’ll need to succeed, but at this point, LaCava looks very promising.
Also, I agree with davepaisley: so long as you’re not a doormat, so long as you have the ego strength to say what needs to be said and make the hard decisions, better to do it in a way that leaves people thinking well of you than not.
And as a graduate of a fairly prestigious university (which has also sent more than their share of attendees to the bigs), I know for damn sure that education is NOT a great proxy for intelligence.
And as a graduate of one of the world’s elite universities, I know for damn sure that our graduates are, on average, a hell of a lot smarter than people without degrees. Hence ‘reasonable proxy’.
Do you really believe La Cava is the best choice?, is it true he has ties to the Angels with Bavasi and Fontaine and the not so successful years.
I don’t see La Cava resume as a positive for the future development of this organization and I certainly do not see Fontanie as a positive for Mariner’s organization, we could have a very good list of guys he passed on that are great players.
Wouldn’t a GM prospect with a better background in a winning organization be more appropriate in establishing the Mariner’s as a championship organization.
and for what it is worth:
Ng has a BA in Public Policy from the University of Chicago, and played softball there for 4 years.
La Cava rec’d an Associates degree from Gulf Coast Community College, transferred to Pitt where after 2 years he signed with the Pirates; never made it out of the minors, and turned to scouting.
DiPoto signed with the Indians out of Virginia Commonwealth University, pitched for 8 years, turned to scouting.
Zduriencik has a BA in ed from California University of Pennsylvania, and an MA in PhysEd from Austin Peay; was a teacher & coach before scouting.
Did anybody else catch the dweeb in the booth at the Phillies clincher, extolling the virtues of Gillick, saying basically that all his teams were winners when he was there, and steaming craters thereafter. Which means he’s awesome. I played it back three times on my DVR. Amazing.
Thanks msb. That confirms my thoughts that the M’s aren’t going after the sort of candidate I’d like to see them go after.
As a hiring manager in the software industry I’ve always believed in hiring people smarter than I am (that’s not hard to do
). I firmly believe that weak managers hire people just like them or less intelligent than they are to establish a position of superiority. I get the feeling that Lincoln and Armstrong fall into the latter camp and it’s yet another reason why this team won’t get better until they are gone.
Urk. There was a time in the software industry when a degree WASN’T considered important–it was the code you produced, or how you expressed your intelligence.
I think the relevant points here are not the degrees, but if the candidates made effective use of both scouting and statistical methods, and were open to innovations in player evaluations. That’s a LOT more important than where they got their degrees.
which college grads do you want them to emulate (Epstein? Daniels?) and who did you want them to interview that they didn’t try to?
this morning Stark said he thinks the reason some people don’t like Gillick is that he doesn’t make “the big move”– just little ones that work out… oh, ok.
and according to him, the Ms are extremely intrigued by Kim Ng, and have a lot a questions of a lot of people in baseball, and liked what they have heard. He thinks it will be interesting to see how ‘old school’ they are– that it is a non-traditional choice, and comes with a lot of potential complications. Of the other three, he’d go DiPoto, because of his people skills & breadth of experience, “a very very likable person”.
Baker enters the “higher education for GMs” discussion
Graham: true. On the other hand, there’s no reason to assume that LaCava’s average. Indeed, given his track record, I’m not sure there’s justification for that assumption.
metz123: the key is whether LaCava is weak, and how good a judge he is of people. We don’t need to hire someone brilliant; we need to hire someone who knows how to identify the brilliant people and get them to work together to produce brilliant results. Sometimes, brilliant people can do that; in my experience, more often, they can’t. If LaCava can, if he has the sort of judgment and people skills necessary to do that, then he’ll do well; and you can’t tell that from looking at the “Education” line on his CV.
I think you mean “some other writer”.
Did anybody else catch the dweeb in the booth at the Phillies clincher, extolling the virtues of Gillick, saying basically that all his teams were winners when he was there, and steaming craters thereafter. Which means he’s awesome. I played it back three times on my DVR. Amazing.
Yeah, that was McCarver, though Buck was chiming in to agree. I know, I was yelling at the TV too, about guys who trade away young talent and throw away draft picks (ie the opposite to how the Rays got built) and guys who know how to scorch-earth their farm system and then get out before the house catches fire.
I firmly believe that weak managers hire people just like them or less intelligent than they are to establish a position of superiority.
Weak managers fail in a variety of ways, and fail to hire the right people for a variety of reasons. The biggest problem I’ve seen is people who don’t have a accurate evaluation of themselves, making them unable to hire assistants who complement their abilities and shore up their weaknesses. This can be the result of insecurity, ego, or just a failure of introspection. These people tend to hire people just like them, or people who always defer to them (”yes men”) and so never get a real diversity of opinion or have their assumptions challenged. Which is fine if everything happens to be going their way, but results in the same mistakes being made over and over again when it isn’t. (Sound familiar?) Note that a middling-intelligence guy who realizes he’s of middling intelligence and isn’t afraid to hire smarter people who might not agree with him is often a better choice than a really smart guy who has never taken accurate stock of his limitations (or doesn’t think he has any).
So, I put Lincoln and Armstrong in the hiring role. I hope they can hire someone smarter than themselves to build an organization. I guess I can also hope that they hire a GM that hires smarter people than himself to build a great organization. That’s a valid point.
However, in reading the articles and interviews about our 3 guy GM candidates I get the impression that they aren’t organization building guys. Instead they are being hired for their personal abilities to evaluate talent (their scouting backgrounds) and their interpersonal skills (get along with media).
I look at a baseball team like a corporation. I see the Lincoln and Armstrong as the CEO and Chairman of the board. Their job is to set the overall direction. I see the GM as the guy who builds the management team that manages down and drives the corporate objectives. Now, baseball is funny in that it’s a big revenue operation but you don’t have a lot of employees (relative to revenue).
I prefer my GM to spend his time driving his direct reports to meet their objectives (scouting director, contracts, minor leagues, technology, etc). I don’t think I want him playing the role of individual contributor. Sure, I want the GM to make the final decisions on personnel because he knows more about baseball than Armstrong or Lincoln but I don’t think I want him to be making the decision on drafting Strasburg because he watched him personally throw a wicked slider in March of 2008.
This is probably pretty muddled thinking and poorly communicated but it’s just my thoughts on the slate of candidates they’ve put together (outside Ng, who I think is an organization builder).
As far as my thoughts on candidates they should be looking at? The Rays sure look good for hiring Andrew Friedman who was an analyst at Bear Sterns and another firm before joining the Rays. If a team like Tampa can pluck what appears to be a talent like Friedman from outside of baseball, why do the M’s have 3 “baseball” guys in their final 4?
According to Baker the potential Mariner GMs have the following educational backgrounds:
Zduriencik: Bachelor’s degree in education from California University of Pennsylvania; Masters degree in Physical Education from Austin Peay University
LaCava: Associates degree from Gulf Coast Community College; transferred to University of Pittsburgh, but left after two years to pursue a pro baseball career
DiPoto: Attended Virginia Commonwealth University before being drafted by the Cleveland Indians
Ng: Bachelor’s degree in public policy from the University of Chicago
I also heard the McCarver remark and immediately turned to my wife and said, “That’s hardly a recommendation for Gillick.” So he left nothing behind in Toronto, Baltimore or Seattle. The Phillies better at least win this World Series.
FWIW, it was Stuart Sternberg, Rays principal owner (and former Wall Street trader) who hired Friedman, who’d attended Tulane University on a baseball scholarship.
Ng just jumped to the top of my list. An econ degree from Chicago would be better, but I’ll take public policy.
oh, and Sternberg put Friedman into the FO with Gerry Hunsicker (BA in Education) — former coach, scout, baseball lifer …
haven’t heard this anywhere,so i thought i’d pass it on.
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/128297
seems woodfork removed himself from consideration.
not liking what he heard at his interview…?
it was discussed above and in “Power structures and the GM hunt” …