Braves president John Schuerholz was the team’s general manager throughout its unprecedented run of 14 consecutive division titles from 1991-2005, doing it with team payrolls that ranged from the bottom quarter of the majors at the beginning, to the top quarter for the bulk of the run, to middle-of-the-pack near the end. Given his experiences, few are as familiar with the luxuries of a huge payroll and the challenges of competing at an elite level on a middle-class budget.
I’ve always said if you have really good baseball operation/organizational intelligence and more money than the people you’re competing against, that’s the best combination. If you have baseball operational intelligence and not as much money as the guys you’re competing against, you’re still not daunted by that. You feel like you can still compete. You can put a team together. Your farm system, your scouting guys, your developmental process, your pipeline, no matter how much money you’re paying in major league salary, you’ve got guys coming through the system you can rely on to be part of your major league club and compete, and that’s the attitude I always had.
Budgets are affected by income streams and revenue generation, and when that alters, you alter how you operate. But that doesn’t mean you give up. It doesn’t mean you give in. It doesn’t mean you cash in your cards. You’ve just got to be more creative and more diligent and rely more on your homegrown players, which is always the secret sauce for me, for any organizational to succeed, is how well you’ve scouted and develop your own players.
If you have more money and you’ve made draft mistakes, you go out and buy someone else’s developed players. Which is what the big-market clubs did for years. And then finally they awakened and said, “Wow, this scouting and player development thing is a good way to go. Let’s invest in that as much as we do buying everybody else’s players.”
Anyway, it’s challenging, sure. It’s more difficult, sure. But it’s not impossible.
I don’t think there’s anybody who gets into a job like the general manager of a major league baseball team and worries at the end of the day if they feel more rewarded (by having to field a team on a smaller budget). No, you want to win. You want to build a winning team. Rewarding is if you win. Not how hard you worked or how creative you’ve been in the process.
It (smaller budget) doesn’t doom you to the basement. It doesn’t doom you to no playoff appearances. It just challenges you and makes it more … you’ve got to dig down a little harder, people have got to work a little harder and go after it. And our guys have done that over the years.
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