Consistency

I was talking to a friend about a week ago regarding Willie Randolph's situation with the Mets. His position was that the Mets should have fired Randolph a few weeks ago, since in any organization, once it becomes clear that a manager doesn't have the support of upper management, his time as an effective worker is basically over -- the rank-and-file can ignore him with a certain amount of impunity, knowing that upper management will likely take it out on the manager in the doghouse rather than taking it out on them.

When I heard that the Mets basically fired Randolph in the middle of the night, it got me thinking about a pet theory of mine.

The pet theory is this: consistency and continuity on the part of upper management is an underrated and in some cases unheralded component of what baseball fans would consider a 'quality organization'. On one hand, this theory has an obvious problem -- just because someone has been an owner or a general manager of a major league ballclub for 20 years doesn't mean that they're any good at it. An owner could name himself as the GM and sit in the role for decades and never have a clue what's going on.

On the other hand, actual big-league organizations don't tend to follow this counter-example. Case in point, the Athletics organization. Charlie O. Finley was the owner of the franchise both In Kansas City in the 1950s and early 1960s, when the franchise was woeful, and in Oakland in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the franchise became a dynasty. While in KC, however, the A's had seven different general managers in 17 seasons, including two who barely lasted a single season. When Ed Lopat resigned following the 1967 season, Finley himself decided to take over the GM role and held it until he sold the club in 1980. In KC, the franchise never won as many as 80 ballgames and had three seasons where they lost 100 or more games, while in Oakland, the A's won five consecutive division titles and three consecutive World Series titles.

The idea is that if you have a consistent group of men in charge of the organization, you'll be able to instill a certain ethic in that organization, one that can be reinforced at the major league level as well as throughout the minor leagues when players are being developed. I think it's a good theory (and it's not really very original, either), but it's not one I get a lot of support for when I discuss it with other fans.

The converse of that theory, however, gets a lot more support: while consistency in and of itself may not create quality in an organization, a quality organization almost always shows a great deal of consistency. Likewise, a poorly-run organization shows little sign of consistency: GMs and other executives move in and out of the organization like cheap light bulbs and thus, even if the guy you hired is actually good at his job, he's not around long enough to really make an impact.

It can be demonstrated, using this method, that the Mets should not be considered a quality organization, despite their occasional successes in winning pennants and World Series titles. The Mets longest sustained period of success as a franchise is likely the mid-to-late 1980s -- they won 90, 98, 108, 92, 100, 87, and 91 games in each season from 1984 through 1990, won two divisions and finished second in every other season, and won a World Series in 1986. Unsurprisingly, they had the same GM during this entire period (Frank Cashen), two scouting directors (Joe McIlvane and Roland Johnson), and for most of the period, one farm director (Steve Schreyver, who was replaced in 1989 by Garry Hunsicker). Since 1991, however, the Mets have had seven different GMs (including an interim stretch by Cashen that lasted less than a season), six different scouting directors, and five different farm system directors.

The problem with having that much turnover at the executive level is that it becomes hard to really establish an organizational philosophy -- the new guys want to do things a bit differently than the guys who just left, so they make some changes, but because of the way baseball operates, they can't make sweeping changes (they can't fire all the minor league managers and replace them, for instance). So the organization becomes a huge frayed knot of different organizational philosophies, twisted all together by a common desire to 'be a winner'.

Meanwhile, one of the unnoticed side-effects of the 'Moneyball' revolution in Oakland is exactly this same kind of organizational consistency. Michael Lewis noted, though it wasn't repeated much at the time his book was published, that Billy Beane inherited his interest in Bill James's theories of baseball from his predecessor Sandy Alderson, who had been trying without much success to instill the organization with some of that philosophy since the 1980s. Alderson, however, was a lawyer who'd never played pro ball, trying to push the theories of a writer who'd never played pro ball on a bunch of guys who've spent their lives in pro ball -- Alderson's successes in this venture would have to be considered small. Beane's advantage is that not only was Beane a former player, he was a guy the scouts loved, so when the scouts would complain about a Jamesian concept being 'horseshit', Beane could rightly retort, 'No more horseshit than you guys thinking I'd become a big-league superstar.'

Oh, yeah, and the A's have had exactly two GMs since 1983 (Alderson and Beane), four scouting directors since 1981, and two farm directors since 1981 (at least according to the Baseball America Executive database). That's some pretty good consistency.

To bring this long-winded post finally back around to the subject of the Minnesota Twins: since Calvin Griffith sold the Twins to Carl Pohlad back in the 1980s, the Twins hired Andy MacPhail as GM, then replaced him by promoting their former scouting director Terry Ryan, who just stepped down last year. Mike Radcliff has been the Twins' scouting director since 1994. While it may not be strictly correct to argue that this level of organizational consistency and continuity is in some sense responsible for the Twins positive performance in the 21st century -- after all, the same crew oversaw some very lean years during the mid-to-late 1990s -- the fact that the Twins have had that degree of organizational consistency is certainly evidence that they're a solid baseball organization.

Certainly more solid than some out there...