TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

"Finding the Right Employees"

There was a strange piece on NPR this morning, on their "Business Decision Makers" segment, featuring Braves' GM John Schuerholz. I say strange, because it's difficult to really try to generalize about good business practices from such a rarified enterprise as a major league team. I can't dispute Schuerholz' prowess running the Braves, either, since he has 13 more division championships to show as a GM than I do.

What was deucedly odd about the conversation were the examples Schuerholz cited as emblematic of the Braves' successful business approach. In picking an example of a succcessful "brains over bucks" decision, he came up with the Braves' acquisition of Jaret Wright. It sounded like an attempt to discount the moneyball stats-counting mentalit: he said that when the Braves scouted Wright with the San Diego Padres, he had an ERA in the eights, but the Braves really saw something special there with good old-fashioned scouting. It sounded like the Braves had cherry-picked a throw-away from the Padres, but Wright had been a highly thought-of prospect with the Cleveland team well before his short stint in San Diego, and had had some problems with injuries and ineffectiveness. He had a fine year last year with the Braves, throwing a 3.28 ERA, but league-adjusted that wasn't that significant an improvement on his earliest years with Cleveland. And of course, the Braves didn't have the foresight to sign him to a long-term contract when his ERA was 8.37, and now the Yankees own him.

Another strange example of a decision cited by Schuerholz as having to be made for economic reasons that he later regretted was trading David Cone. The example here, though, of course isn't from his Braves' days, but almost 20 years ago, when Cone was traded from the Royals to the Mets. Schuerholz said that Cone "went on to win...three Cy Young awards". But... Cone won only one Cy Young award...with the KC Royals, in 1994,after he'd come back to them as a free agent.

Schuerholz went on to talk about the "bottom of the circle", the importance of scouting intangibles like work ethic, leadership, and so forth, in evaluating the total ballplayer. The interviewer then brought up John Rocker...whom Schuerholz dismissed as being now gone, and he, JS, was still there -- that was the complete discussion of John Rocker in the organization.

There's no disputing the Braves have a great organization, and I'm sure that traditional scouting and character evaluation and so forth have a big role in that. But the examples cited by Schuerholz in this interview weren't factually correct or particularly insightful from an inside-baseball perspective, much less illustrative of larger business principles.

Which leads me to conclude, once again, that the Big Secret to Business Success is: Keep Your Secret to Business Success a Secret.

posted by The Crank 9:04 AM