Our National Pastime became more corporate in this millennium as franchise after franchise assembled management teams loaded with business school types.
Fewer baseball men are ascending to the top positions. It’s all about analytics and process now, with data supplanting human judgment and scientific labs replacing old fashioned skills coaching.
Old school field managers who directed games with their instincts and real-time reads have given way to new school managers executing game scripts prepared by the number crunchers.
The men on the front lines of player evaluation, the scouts, have become increasingly devalued. And old schoolers will note that baseball may have more great athletes today, but fewer great ballplayers.
Much has changed since the good old days when Whitey Herzog would sit down with Gussie Busch over headcheese sandwiches to propose bold changes for his team.
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Bill DeWitt Jr. grew up in baseball and he loves it, but he has brought new school ownership to the Cardinals. His regime is in its third decade of valuing continuity and stability.
His admirable (maddening?) patience has become the norm in baseball, which tends not to see much change at the top from year to year.
We’ve seen a few swashbuckling owners, like the late Peter Seidler with the San Diego Padres and John Middleton with the Philadelphia Phillies. Mistake-prone Arte Moreno has been an old school owner with the Los Angeles Angels, to the delight of agents and the lament of the team's fans.
Steve Cohen was a fanboy owner with the New York Mets for a bit, but then he settled down and hired David Stearns to build a more corporate operation. The Ricketts family seemed to have the capital go crazy with the Chicago Cubs . . . but that franchise opted for a more deliberate rebuild instead.
Writing for The Athletic, Ken Rosenthal argued that baseball features too much front office stability and not enough ownership urgency to initiative change.
He wrote:
Many fans of the Blue Jays are exasperated, if not downright angry. Ditto for fans of theÌýºüÀêÊÓƵ Cardinals, Seattle Mariners, San Francisco Giants, Cincinnati Reds and Pittsburgh Pirates.
Those teams intended to contend and didn’t. And yet, more trust-the-process blather likely is coming their fans’ way . . .
For underachieving clubs, managers are always easy scapegoats. The Mariners already fired theirs. The Reds, Pirates and others might, too. But modern managers are glorified middle men, extensions of their front offices. A managerial change often is an act of deflection by the head of baseball operations, a bid to buy more time . . .
Stability and continuity indeed should be valued. If teams, particularly in this age of social media, reacted to every fan eruption, they would be firing people every three days, if not every three minutes.
Still, the passivity in the sport is disturbing.
Part of it might stem from the expansion of the postseason in 2022, and the illusion of contention provided by the addition of a third wild card in each league. Consider theÌýChicago Cubs. A good month of August thrust them into the fringes of the wild-card race, and now things don’t look so bad, if you’re willing to overlook how for four months they underachieved.
Another factor is the analytically based groupthink that pervades front offices. Fire your head of baseball operations, and who will you hire? Probably another executive whose decision-making is not all that dissimilar from the one you let go.
So fans dreaming of a dramatic change in direction for their franchise better not be holding their breath.
TALKIN’ BASEBALL
Here is what folks have been writing about Our National Pastime:
Bob Nightengale, USA Today: “The Los Angeles Dodgers are baseball’s marquee franchise. No one scouts better than the Dodgers. No one develops their players better than the Dodgers. No one wins more regular-season games than the Dodgers. But here we are in the final stages of the most anticipated season in Dodger history, and the team is moving ever so close to the most heartbreaking word in its vocabulary: October. Let’s face it, you don’t drop $1.3 billion in the offseason, spend the year watching Shohei Ohtani put on one of the greatest shows in baseball history, pack Dodger Stadium night after night and rake in tens of millions of dollars in Japanese advertising, only to have the same chances of winning the World Series as the Minnesota Twins. The Dodgers, even with the best record in baseball, are once again set up for playoff disappointment – but this time the warning signs have been there all year. Just when the Dodgers thought that future Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw, 36, would be coming to the rescue, they now openly wonder if he’ll throw another pitch. Kershaw lasted just seven batters in his start Friday night against the Arizona Diamondbacks, leaving the game with a bone spur in his toe after giving up a home run to Corbin Carroll on a 67-mph curveball – the fourth-slowest pitch of his career – and headed straight to the injured list and a world of uncertainty about his future . . . The loss of Kershaw was just the Dodgers' latest pitching malady. If the postseason started tomorrow, their rotation would be Jack Flaherty (10-6, 3.07 ERA), Gavin Stone (11-5, 3.33), Walker Buehler (1-4, 5.88 ERA) and Bobby Miller (2-3, 7.25 ERA).â€
Alden Gonzalez. : “A close observer called this year's Padres ‘a well-oiled machine,’ which seems appropriate. They might not have quite as much star power as last year's group, but the pieces seem to fit so much better. They're dominating in extra-inning games and coming through in clutch situations, two things they famously didn't do last year. And though a lot of that might be a simple return to the mean, those who have watched the Padres closely this season see an offense whose players seem to complement one another perfectly and has the type of depth that would rival anyone's. Case in point: (Jackson) Merrill, suddenly running away with the NL Rookie of the Year award, has hit no higher than sixth since the All-Star break -- while slashing .320/.350/.620 in that stretch. Now the kicker: The Padres had been doing all this without (Fernando) Tatis (Jr.), arguably their best player, who returned on Labor Day after a 59-game absence. The Padres are the best contact team in baseball, a trait that will suit them well in tight postseason games. Now they've added a power-and-speed dynamo to that mix.”
R.J. Anderson, : “We can all agree that something would have to go terribly wrong for the Brewers to lose the NL Central. If they're going to make a real run at the pennant, they're going to need other things to go right. Among them: (Rhys) Hoskins to refind his stroke. He started the season well, but he's mustered OPS around .600 in two of the last three months. With Christian Yelich sidelined for the year, the Brewers are going to require some other hitters to step up to atone for his absence. Hoskins is a prime candidate to do just that.”
Chris Thompson, The Defector: “Strictly speaking, many of baseball's starting pitchers have more pitches in their arsenals than they need. I'm not complaining! Take Shota Imanaga, the delightful 31-year-old rookie southpaw for the Chicago Cubs: StatcastÌýsaysÌýImanaga has used eight distinct pitch types this season, including a four-seam fastball that he's thrown a whopping 53 percent of the time, and a slow curve that he's thrown exactly once. His pitch profile is a hoot: Overwhelmingly Imanaga relies on a combination of the four-seamer and a deadly splitter, effective against righties and lefties, but then there are six whole other damn pitches—two more than Luis Castillo has in his entire repertoire—that Imanaga throws just here and there, evidently whenever he is feeling zany. This is how you know starting pitchers are artists, or mad scientists, or both.â€
Mark Feinsand, : “The Blue Jays were one of the most fascinating clubs to watch at this year’s Trade Deadline, with a number of directions they could have taken. As we look toward the offseason, the Jays still have a variety of approaches they can take into the winter, so which way will they go? Vladimir Guerrero Jr, Bo Bichette, Chis Bassitt, Jordan Romano and Chad Green are all slated to become free agents after the 2025 season, and given the Blue Jays’ disappointing 2024 campaign, nobody would have blamed general manager Ross Atkins for trading all five to jumpstart a rebuild. Yet when the Deadline passed, they all remained in Toronto, as did Kevin Gausman, who has two-plus years remaining on his five-year, $110 million contract. Toronto did make a number of moves, trading away impending free agents Yusei Kikuchi, Danny Jansen, Yimi García, Justin Turner, Trevor Richards and Kevin Kiermaier, as well as Isiah Kiner-Falefa (under control through 2025) and Nate Pearson (under control through 2026). The deals helped restock an ailing farm system, adding eight players into the club’s Top 30 Prospect list . . . The idea behind holding on to Guerrero, Bichette, Bassitt and Gausman was to retool the roster this winter and try to make a postseason push in 2025, presumably the final year this core will be together. Toronto has tried unsuccessfully to extend both Guerrero and Bichette, and while keeping one of them – Guerrero seems to be the more likely to stay – is certainly a possibility, this group that seemed to have so much promise after reaching the playoffs three times from 2020-23 appears to be reaching its expiration date.”
MEGAPHONE
“I honestly didn’t know we had a no-hitter going. And I ran out there and started getting booed and I realized, ‘Oh, we probably have something on the line here.’ I kind of just locked it in and did my part.â€
Cubs reliever Nate Pearson on relieving Shota Imanaga during the Cubs’ no-hitter.