Terry McGuirk would like you to know that he’s not a potted palm.
He goes to Braves games. He sits in on organizational meetings. He understands the frustrations, realizes it has been 13 years since the team won a playoff series and, as overseer of expenditures, certainly is not oblivious to the ripple effect of the team’s major contractual mistakes in recent years.
“You can make a mistake. You just can’t make a lot of mistakes,” McGuirk, the Braves’ CEO said. “Small-market teams can make very few mistakes. The big guys like the Red Sox, the Dodgers, the Angels, the Yankees, they can afford to make big mistakes. We don’t have that luxury.”
It’s late August, and McGuirk admits he’s concerned. The Braves have been “choppy” this season, to use his description. They recently swept a series from Oakland and started to find their offense, but otherwise have been relatively manic on the field, playing sub-.500 baseball since the first four weeks of the season. They lost eight in a row at a time, post All-Star break, when people are looking for a reason to believe.
Atlanta is a city of fickle sports fans. The other shoe seems to drop every 10 minutes and hope takes a beating. Fans want to see tangible evidence of success before they commit, so they haven’t. Braves’ home attendance has dropped by more than 2,000 per game this season and ranks only 17th in the majors at 29,259, their lowest average since 2004.
McGuirk initially said he believes the Braves are “on a linear trend upwards,” then amended that: “I think we apply a linear pressure upwards, but the results aren’t linear.
“This is a choppy team. It’s hard to understand. I thought I’d understand this team better in spring training than I do today. With six weeks to go, we’re still mildly in the hunt for everything. But I’m not comfortable with how far we’ve fallen behind the Nationals.”
The Braves entered Friday seven games behind Washington in the National League East and one behind San Francisco for the second wild-card spot.
Teams that compete and win championships get the benefit of the doubt. The Braves don’t. Their lone World Series win came in 1995, their last league pennant in 1999, their last divisional series win in 2001. They missed the playoffs four consecutive years (2006-09) following a payroll slash when McGuirk, a former Turner Broadcasting executive, took over for Stan Kasten as Braves president in late 2003. The Braves have been in the playoffs three of the past four seasons, but haven’t won a round (going 2-7 in those games).
Fans generally want to know two things: 1) Can my team win? 2) What happens if it doesn’t? The only thing that bothers people more than a lack of success is a lack of accountability.
McGuirk gets that. But he rejects perceptions that the Braves have a detached ownership group that carries only about the numbers on a spreadsheet and that he and the organization haven’t set the bar high enough.
“I don’t agree. We hold ourselves to a high standard. We’re our own worst critics,” he said.
So what should the expectation be? Would there be ramifications if it’s another failed October?
“Those are fair things to ask,” he said. “It’s fair to question accountability if we don’t perform.
“I don’t want to put absolutes on anything. With six weeks to go in the middle of the hunt, I wouldn’t say anything that would upset the direction and the performance of the team. Teams have a psyche and organizations have a direction, and we’re totally focused right now on trying to make the playoffs. I don’t even want to say what we’ll do if we don’t make it. We’re evaluating in either case, and we deserve to be judged on our evaluations. That’s not just my view. I turn to people like John Schuerholz and Bobby Cox to make decisions on some of these things.”
Make no mistake: Whatever happens is McGuirk’s call. He’s the name at the top of the organizational chart. He meets with the team’s owner, Liberty Media, once a year and that’s about the extent of the corporation’s contact with the team. McGuirk is the one who would decide, after input from team president John Schuerholz, whether general manager Frank Wren and/or manager Fredi Gonzalez should lose their job.
“Everybody is accountable. You just mentioned two guys who are accountable, I’m holding myself accountable,” McGuirk said. “I don’t want to make any predictions. I don’t want to say even how or when meetings will occur. But if we don’t have success, know that we won’t be satisfied and we’ll be looking at things very hard.”
This shouldn’t be taken as a prediction of change: But I considered it significant that during the one hour we spoke, McGuirk didn’t go out of his way to publicly praise Wren or Gonzalez, which executives often will do. He noted Wren responded well after spring injuries to pitchers Kris Medlen and Brandon Beachy by signing Aaron Harang and Ervin Santana. But he also acknowledged the contract mistakes that have hurt the team (a reflection of Wren), and the up-and-down play on the field (a reflection of Gonzalez).
McGuirk suggested he might’ve underestimated the effect of having such a young team. The Braves were determined to secure the nucleus of their future in the spring, signing Freddie Freeman, Julio Teheran, Craig Kimbrel and Andrelton Simmons to long-term deals.
“I think sometimes we forget that we’re one of the youngest teams in baseball,” he said. “They don’t really know everything they need to know to be stars. We’ve lost some stars over the last couple of years. Those guys provided a lot of stability in the clubhouse.”
He alluded to the major deals given Dan Uggla and B.J. Upton, as well as Derek Lowe and Kenshin Kawakami, which mostly have backfired. McGuirk: “You’ve written extensively on it. I’ve read every word and it rings true because the empirical evidence is in the performance. All I can tell you is there is no lack of accountability and evaluation. I just have to ask you to trust us. I’ve been successful in everything I’ve done in life and I’m not going to go down without a hell of a fight.”
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