It’s sort of like the MVP discussion: do you give it to the guy with the best teammates, or to the guy who actually turned in the best performance? Similarly, I don’t think you can fairly evaluate Zduriencik on L&A’s merits, but only on his own. And on the basis of his accomplishments, while he wasn’t my first choice any more than he was anyone else’s, I think it ought to be clear that he was a good hire.

Folks should stop comparing him to Bavasi, who’d been a GM once already and done badly at it. This is a guy who’s done a significant FO job extremely well and showed real and significant strengths and skills in so doing. Will he be able to translate that to the next level and perform equally well as a GM? We don’t know that. But here’s the kicker: we wouldn’t have known that with LaCava, Ng, or anyone else, either.

Assuming Zduriencik shares major responsibility for that, I have a hard time not being encurraged by this hire.

I’d like to offer one other reason for optimism. Because M’s ownership largely represents Nintendo and Microsoft (solid so far), that may give us an advantage over the investment bankers/real estate magnates/hedge fund managers who own other teams.
Wouldn’t it be nice for everyone else to be Smulyan this time?

Speaking for myself only, it’s not so much that scouting is a black box. I’ve already figured that much out and if there was a reasonable front office in place, I think a lot of us would be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

The problem is that there’s no indication that the thought process that went into Z’s hiring was any different than prior hires and that’s concerning.

I don’t mean this as a knock at all on Z, who by all accounts is light years improved from his predecessors, just that there’s nothing about him that says to me that management is willing to make a clean break with the past.

That sums it up nicely. And I’ll certainly grant John in L.A.’s objection that it’s hard to see the process in scouting — it’s something of a black box; rather as with the guys who grade cotton, who do it by nothing they can quantify. On this one, the only thing you can look at is, when this guy looks at a ballplayer and says, “He’s going to be a good prospect,” do those players turn out to be good prospects significantly more often than the average? And, do the principles he advocates for turning prospects into MLB players do so more reliably than the average? With Zduriencik, the indicators are very, very good.

The difference between Z and the next best scouting focussed GM? Perhaps massive.

The gap between say the best stats-focussed GM candidate (Antonetti?) and the next best? Probably minor.

Probably(Definitely judging by what you guys seem to think of how your organisation is run) by accident the Mariners have made a really good decision based on marginal values…

Another thing that I am throwing out there is that as more and more organisations are run by stat-types being the best scouting-focussed organisation is in itself a comparative advantage. As more organisations are able to make cogent analyses of cheap talent, trades etc the cheap talent becomes less cheap and trades become less lopsided. Relatively speaking the advantage of being adept at scouting becomes more pronounced.

This of course assumes that Z is the best scouting director in the business and as a Brewers fan that’s an assumption that I am really happy to make.

We’re working on it.

These are the best case scenarios. No one is saying Zduriencik is going to turn us into the Indians, A’s, or Rays. What we are saying is that you really can out-scout the rest of baseball on a consistent basis and build a perennial winner in the process. While I think the Twins and Angels are missing the boat by not incorporating more statistical analysis into their organizations, there’s no way their fans look at their current organizations and say “man, we’re screwed”.

Neither should we look at Zduriencik and think that. Now, maybe Z isn’t as good a scout as everyone says, and we turn into the Mets instead of the Braves, or the Dodgers instead of the Angels. We’re still not screwed – those big money scout first franchises are winning a lot of games.

John’s point about this not being a revolution is entirely correct. But I think our reaction is basically along the lines of “okay, so, no 180 degree change in organizational philosophy, but being a great scouting organization with a $100 million payroll isn’t a bad consolation prize.”