Who shall honor the baseball general manager?
When every fantasy team owner believes his or her own eye for talent is 20/10. And every caller to sports talk radio figures it possible to trade sand for Waterford crystal, if only you were astute enough.
When sportswriters gather, like buzzards in a tree, presuming a fatal mistake is just one move away.
Upon joining the Braves as GM in October 1990 by way of the Kansas City Royals, John Schuerholz’s first maneuver was to hire away groundskeeper Ed Mangan to repair the bombing range/infield at old Fulton County Stadium. Agronomists in the press box being rare, that one went unchallenged.
But with his next transaction Schuerholz imported a squat 30-year-old third baseman, who the season before hit .230 with little verifiable power and put up the lowest fielding percentage of his professional life. All at the (then) outlandish price of $10 million for four years.
Wrote iconic Atlanta Journal columnist Furman Bisher at the time: “John Schuerholz comes here with the reputation of a serious spendthrift. His damn-the-price-buy-buy strategy apparently led to bye, bye Kansas City. ... He has been in town only a few weeks, but long enough to ravage the treasury.”
Terry Pendleton was the player in question, the National League MVP his first year with the Braves (and runner-up the year after that). The spirit guide of that team’s remarkable worst-to-first journey of 1991.
Yes, who shall honor the GM when every player instinctively knows it best to keep an arm’s length from the man in the suit? Because he is the boss, the man who sets value and may at his pleasure dangle you on the market like a garage-sale love seat.
“I think if you’re a good GM,” Braves Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Glavine said, “half the guys are going to be happy with you and half of the guys are going to be mad at you.”
Well, as a matter of fact, Baseball’s Hall of Fame shall honor the GM on July 30 when Schuerholz, 76, currently the Braves’ Vice Chairman (read that adviser), is inducted into Cooperstown’s eternal storage unit. He will be, by the Hall’s reckoning, one of only six in the Hall whose “primary function was team-building among non-owners.”
A man of impeccable syntax and a pretty good baseball mind, a builder of World Series champions with two teams in two leagues, the guardian of 14 consecutive Braves division titles starting in the 1990s will soon share space with the hired help. Not all the legends of the game enter Cooperstown with grass stains and a positively sparkling Wins Above Replacement number.
Schuerholz’s induction speech, like his career, is sure to be well-crafted. He has gone through rough drafts by the dozen. He even has pulled transcripts from other induction speeches just to get a sense for the tone and the moment. It always has been about scouting and preparation.
In 17 years as the Braves GM, and nine more as team president, Schuerholz went about his business with a Fortune 500 kind of buttoned-down look and deportment.
“John could have been president/CEO of IBM,” current Braves GM John Coppolella said.
It was, in fact, Schuerholz’s air of corporate confidence that was his initial gift to the Braves when in Atlanta in 1990. The Braves lost 300 games in the preceding three seasons and had been a punch line for much longer than that.
“He added class to the organization, a background of winning,” said Bobby Cox, who stocked the cupboards with some promising talent as GM for Schuerholz before returning to the grit of the dugout to manage.
Cox’s whimsical wish for his always composed friend: “I want to see John sweat one time.
“And he won’t, believe me.”
Granted, he’s a man of style. But it will be the substance of Schuerholz’s work that will be celebrated in upstate New York. The constant work of shepherding franchises to high ground, of preaching the doctrine of “The Braves Way” until it became a franchise catechism – that’s the general manager’s mark.
(Here is Schuerholz’s definition of that term, his philosophical North Star: “Having good people around you who you respected, honored and trusted. Giving them clear goals. Having the commitment and dedication and work ethic.”)
There are artifacts from his life that would be priceless relics to show off during his induction. Like the photo of him as a young Baltimore middle-school teacher dressed up in a pith helmet and safari jacket, instructing his eighth graders on Equatorial Africa. Or the letter that teacher wrote to the Baltimore Orioles owner that eventually filtered down the chain and landed him an entry-level assistant’s job at the age of 26. But, alas, their whereabouts are unknown.
When his mentor in Baltimore, the late Lou Gorman, announced he was going to the expansion Kansas City Royals, and was taking his assistant with him, Schuerholz’s initial reaction was unenthusiastic.
“I’m not going to Kansas City. They’re still hitching their horses up to the hitching post when they go grocery shopping there,” he remembered thinking. But in a life of good decisions, he made another one and headed west.
By 1981, just 41, Schuerholz became the youngest GM in history at the time. Retooling a team in transition, he built the Royals’ first World Series champion within four years.
And come the dawning of the 1990s, with the Royals ownership in flux and the normally solid midwestern ground beneath Schuerholz’s feet shifting, others called him more than a little daft when he uprooted and took the GM job in Atlanta. This, after all, was the same franchise that had trademarked futility.
But the man had done his research. He recognized the work done to rebuild the farm system. There was gold there for the GM who knew how to pan for it, he sensed.
After getting the groundskeeper in place in Atlanta, Schuerholz went to work filling in the defense behind the young pitching staff. In came Pendleton, first baseman Sid Bream, shortstop Rafael Belliard and center fielder Otis Nixon. And not coincidentally, the 1991 Braves soared from worst to first and set off the greatest age of baseball known to the South.
There is the ever-present qualifier to Schuerholz’s reign, the black mark of unmet expectation to go with the unprecedented 14 consecutive division titles.
“It is sad,” he said, referring to the single World Series title of 1995 punctuating the long run of lesser titles, “because our teams were so much better than that. We could have been world champions at least three or four times with the quality of teams we had.
“So, when talking about the great 14 consecutive division titles, I also talk about having to end that sentence with the word, ‘but.’ I’d rather not have ‘but’ at the end of that sentence.”
One secret to the prolonged success was the partnership that Schuerholz formed with the man in the dugout, Cox. It can be a ticklish relationship between he who watches from on high and he who sees it all from field level. Emotions and agendas get in the way. But this GM and this manager were unbreakably bound by winning.
“We had mutual respect for each other’s background and knowledge for the game,” Cox said. “We’re not always going to agree on everybody. But it bet you it was 99.9 percent (agreement).”
Of course the other element to his Hall of Fame career, no secret, were such benchmark maneuvers as the initial big rebuild, the acquisition of first-baseman Fred McGriff in 1993, the signing of Maddux even as the Yankees dangled larger dollars in 1992.
There were missteps in Atlanta, too. On Schuerholz’s watch, for instance, the Braves traded Adam Wainwright (three-time All-Star pitcher with St. Louis).
At least, the worst of his work was saved for somewhere else.
Referring to Jonathon, now the Braves’ assistant director of player development, Schuerholz said, “My son was a young lad when he came up to me without prompting and said, ‘Dad look at it this way: When anybody ever asks you about the worst deal you ever made, you don’t have to think about it at all. You know what it is. It’s David Cone.’
“Yeah, thanks, son.”
Believing that Cy Young winner Cone would self-destruct, Schuerholz traded him out of his hometown in Kansas City. He went on to lead baseball in strikeouts a couple of times and win five World Series rings with two different teams.
Schuerholz today owns a fine office just beyond right field in the new SunTrust Park, with the banners representing all those division titles hanging almost near enough to touch. The day-to-day chore of team building is no longer his, though. “I’m sort of like Obi-Wan Kenobi,” he laughed.
In an advisory role, he recommended to this regime that the Braves needed to tear down to bare steel, as he puts it. But the building back is someone else’s responsibility.
“I think they’ve done a remarkable job (rebuilding) in the shortest period of time that I’ve seen. It may take them a few more years longer, but not much,” Schuerholz said.
There is a model the current Braves brass may wish to follow.
Just listen.
Who shall honor the baseball GM? How about some of these other Braves who preceded Schuerholz into the Hall of Fame.
Maddux: “He always seemed to get the right kind of players. Not only good players, but players who got along with the guys who were already there.”
Cox: “He used the advice of managers, coaches and scouts. He was never the Lone Ranger going out there. He’d sit down and talk to everyone about (a potential move). And if it wasn’t proper, he wouldn’t do it.”
Glavine: “He was a really good evaluator, especially in terms of when to sell or get rid of somebody on the high side, knowing when it was time to cut ties with somebody.”
The methods are proven.
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