Selig's Plan Stinks, Plus GM Jeff Bagwell?

Never Let Your Player Start Making Personnel Decisions. Never

Ed Dykhuizen, Staff Writer

Here I am, in at work on December 26, like a chump. But it's Tuesday, and Tuesdays are made tolerable by writing a baseball column, so that's what I'm going to do, dadgumit.

The only recent baseball news is that Commissioner Bud Selig has a plan for competitive balance that involves the worst six teams being able to draft a few players from the top six teams.

I suppose any attempt at bringing about parity should be a welcome one. And it's nice to see that Selig does have reform on his mind -- whether his concerns are genuine or this is just a cynical, requisite attempt to placate us angry ones is not for me to say. Either way, though, it doesn't make me happy.

I must be missing something major here. Here's what I see: Every other sport does not have baseball's problems with an out-of whack balance of power and lack of parity. Every other sport has solved these problems long ago by having more comprehensive revenue sharing and a salary cap. Therefore baseball needs to put in place more revenue sharing and a salary cap. Which part of this does baseball not understand?

My suspicion is that the owners and players don't want these solutions. Well then, we, as the fans, as the ones who are paying for all this and therefore holding the fate of the game in our hands, should take a seat at the bargaining table. We should unionize and elect our own representative. We should tell that representative to sit down among the millionaires and say, "Shut up, owners. Shut up, players. Either enact increased revenue sharing and a salary cap, or we'll boycott."

Hey, I like this idea. A fan union representative. What do you think, folks? And can it be me? Please?

GM Jeff Bagwell?

Sometimes I wish baseball teams had publicly traded stocks. How fun would that be? You wouldn't just predict who would do well next year; you could put your money where your mouth is.

If there were such a thing, I would have already made plans to stock up on Houston Astros stock. That would constitute "buying low," as the Astros finished 72-91, which, after three straight division championships, looks very poor indeed. But actually, their main problem was that they were extremely unlucky.

Baseball is essentially pretty simple: You want to score lots of runs and allow very few. In 2000, the Astros scored 938 runs and allowed 944, which, using the tried and true Pythagorean winning percentage formula, should translate to an 81-81 record. The fact that their luck was so bad that they lost eight more games than they should have leads me to believe that their karma is out of alignment as punishment for constructing a stadium so silly as to be cosmically offensive.

Luck has a way of evening out, though, so the Astros should do better next year. So I was all ready to pretend stock up on pretend Astros stock, until I heard about the recent trade with the Detroit Tigers.

The Astros surrendered a solid (if fragile) 25-year-old regular in Roger Cedeno. They gave up a top-hitting 25-year-old catcher in Mitch Meluskey. And they gave up a troubled but basically talented 28-year-old fifth starter in Chris Holt. They received a competent 31-year-old catcher, Brad Ausmus, an anonymous middle reliever, Doug Brocail, and an uninteresting 27-year-old nobody named Nelson Cruz.

Don't worry if this trade doesn't seem immediately fascinating -- I have larger points to make here. Apparently, part of the motivation for this trade was that Meluskey was a disagreeable bug in the clubhouse, and Brad Ausmus is apparently a gee-whiz nice guy. All of this information comes courtesy Jeff Bagwell, who urged the Astros brain trust to make the trade.

Problem 1: Listening To The Players

That last sentence should send loud warning bells in the heads of Astros fans. This is a sign of an organization in trouble. Call it an unofficial rule of organization-building: When you let anyone besides the GM influence the GM duties, you fail. It doesn't matter how decent, loyal, and honorable the player is, he's not qualified to make these decisions.

Ever wonder why the Orioles have collapsed recently? Obviously, it's because they're very old and have no young talent. Even this is apparently lost on the Orioles management, who added more oldness to the mix by signing David Segui, Pat Hentgen and Mike Bordick.

But there's a deeper root cause. A few years ago, when the Orioles were merely bad, kinda old and expensive rather than terrible, really old and expensive, the O's management was set to dissolve the core that won a division title in 1998 and a wild card in 1997 and infuse the team with some new talent.

And then the venerable Cal Ripken stepped in. "Please don't get rid of Brady Anderson, Scott Erickson, et al.," he said. "We've had some great success together; we can keep it going." And when Cal Ripken speaks, Baltimore listens.

Cal Ripken is a wonderful player, a wonderful human being, but he should be barred from the GM's office unless he's signing a contract extension. As anyone with half a brain could have predicted, the Orioles' atrophying talent base has put forth feebler and feebler efforts ever since. Cal now has the honor of losing alongside his buddies, who are rapidly being shed anyway, for lower premiums than they would've fetched if the O's struck when the iron was hot.

The same thing happened in Philadelphia. Curt Schilling, another wonderful player and all-around stand-up guy, was the de facto GM. He and the other players were up in arms when it looked as though their mediocre first baseman, Rico Brogna, was to be let go. So they signed him for another few years, wasting money on mediocrity and holding back phenom Pat Burrell for another year.

The bottom line is that when it comes to personnel decisions, players don't know what they're talking about. Players are too close to things to have a good perspective.

And it's understandable, really, that players stink as GMs. Baseball is a ruthless game -- you either produce or you're worthless. Meanwhile, these are human beings we're talking about -- human beings that these players live with and work with. When Cal Ripken puts his weight behind Brady Anderson, he does it because he has developed an attachment to him, because he has seen Brady do countless wonderful things for the club.

But there's no room for that kind of sentimentality in baseball. A good GM is a ruthless one, one who eats the heart out of a player's career and then chucks him away when his usefulness is gone. That, sadly, is how you win. That's baseball.

Problem 2: Believing That A Happy Clubhouse Matters

It sure seems like having a happy clubhouse matters, doesn't it? Look at almost any successful team and you'll see a whole bunch of happy guys getting along.

But of course they're getting along -- they're winning. Professional baseball players aren't like normal people; they're unhealthily obsessed with competition. That's how they got to their lofty position in the first place. By attaching an unreasonable amount of value to winning what is, in essence, a trivial game, they devoted their life to learning how best to make their teams win.

So more than normal people, baseball players are happy when they win, and discover all sorts of great things about their teammates. When they lose, the world seems dark and stupid, and their teammates seem incompetent and irritating. That's the nature of the odd baseball-playing beast.

But even putting that aside, it still stands to reason that a happy clubhouse is necessary. Any corporate manager will tell you that when everyone is loose and having fun, productivity happens.

But again, baseball is different. When baseball players get testy, they can't surf the 'Net or go for excessive coffee breaks. In extreme cases (Juan Gonzalez and Dick Allen come to mind) they can pout their way to failure. But for the most part, major league players give their all every time they reach the field, no matter what that jerky catcher said to them. Again, that intensity is what brought them to the majors in the first place.

And whether there are a lot of smiles in the clubhouse really doesn't affect that competitive drive, honed to fine point by years of experience. Smiles may make the manager feel better about his team, or make the players more excited about coming to the park, which feels like success -- but it isn't.

Success is determined on the field, by wins and losses, which comes from ability and talent. Players should never be traded, as Meluskey and Fernando Tatis have apparently been this winter, because they're a "cancer in the clubhouse." There's no such thing. Meluskey and Tatis may well be testy people, and put everyone in a bad mood. But who cares about any of that if they play well and help the team win?

Even despite the fact that winning makes teams happy, I could still list countless world-beating teams throughout history that did little besides bicker. The Yankees of the late '70s are the famous example: When Reggie Jackson, Billy Martin, and George Steinbrenner weren't butting heads, they were winning World Series titles.

This has always been true. The team with perhaps the most impressive record in history, the 1906 Cubs (116-36), featured the famous Tinker to Evers to Chance. Johnny Evers was one of the most unpleasant people in baseball history, and didn't exchange a word with his double-play partner Joe Tinker all year.

Throughout history, there have been more superstars who were jerks than those who were nice. Ernie Banks, Lou Gehrig and Kirby Puckett were the exceptions. Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth were the kind of people who would've been in insane asylums if they weren't in baseball. Bob Feller and Ted Williams were insufferably full of themselves as kids, in a similar way, I'm sure, to Tatis and Meluskey.

I'm sure that if Hughie Jennings, the Detroit manager in the early 1900s, was worried about "clubhouse harmony," he would've traded the certifiably insane Ty Cobb by age 25. But he didn't, and Cobb's demonic ways led them to three straight AL pennants.

That's plenty for this week. Any responses?

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