So You Wanna Be A GM?Dave PaisleyThe debate erupts occasionally about just what makes a good general manager. The debate is particularly heated in the stathead community, where their sophisticated statistics are used to denigrate the performance of existing GMs and promote the use of a more rational basis for evaluating and acquiring players.

The debate also erupts when current players, particularly superstars, start to wax eloquent about scrubs on their own team, or the fact that their team let someone go that they believed was a great contributor.

And example of the latter is Ken Griffey Jr., who not long ago took a shot at Mariner management for letting 3B Russ Davis go. What does this tell us about Griffey's player evaluation skills? Plenty. Russ Davis has been a marginal player at third for all of his major league career, and the last three years has been particularly atrocious.

The only thing that has kept him around this long have been his some runs. They obscure the fact that he doesn't hit much anyway, and he apparently can't count to four, as he never gets to hear the word "ball" before it.

But I digress. Let's take a look at some of the elements of the argument.

First, there's the question of whether being good at doing something means being good at teaching people to do it or at managing those who do. My experience tells me that the correlation is very weak.

In my own field of airplane design, the argument might run along the lines of whether pilots are the best people to be designing airplanes. It's certainly true that you want pilot input in the design process, but do they know the most about how airplanes work? I can answer categorically that they do not. One of my undergraduate colleagues was a fabulous pilot. He went on to fly Harriers in the Royal Air Force. There is no more demanding piloting task in the known universe, as the Harrier is a tricky airplane to fly. The US Marine Corps found this out the hard way when they refused to assign better than average pilots to AV-8A squadrons and saw accidents skyrocket.

Did this innate piloting talent mean my colleague and good friend was the guy you'd want designing an airplane? Absolutely not. He managed barely a passing grade in our degree program, partly because of a lack of academic talent and partly because of a lack of real interest in the physics behind how airplanes fly. What you really want is a geek like me who can do the math and figure out exactly what is required to give the pilot the tool to do his job. My friend didn't even know how he acquired his knack for piloting, simply that he had it and had been nurtured in an environment that allowed the talent to develop and be evident. He couldn't even tell you how he does what he does or why he's good at it.

Another example from a less high-tech arena comes from Roy Underhill's Woodright's Shop program on PBS. Underhill had a guest who had learned some difficult German wood carving techniques. The guest had spent a significant amount of time with a bunch of elderly German carvers and asked them to teach him their skills. They couldn't, though, because they were so ingrained, they had no idea how they did what they did. The guy had to learn everything simply by watching, copying and repeating until he got it right.

While not perfect parallels with managing a baseball roster, these examples do tell us that being good at the art doesn't mean people are good at teaching or managing those who do the art. You can probably think of hundreds more examples from your own life. So why should we expect Ken Griffey Jr. to be a great GM? Fact is, we shouldn't. Quick -- how many baseball GMs or managers were superstar players? None that I can think of. Any hall of fame players? Nope.

The nearest we can get are the middling stars like Lou Piniella, Dusty Baker, Larry Dierker and Joe Torre, and even they are pretty rare. In fact, the better field managers tend to be ex-players who had to work hard to make a living and didn't get by on natural talent. (This isn't meant to imply that superstars don't work hard, but that they tend to be very well rewarded for their efforts.)While it may seem that I'm saying that ex-superstars generally would make lousy managers and GMs, I merely point out what has been up to now.

If a baseball superstar had the savvy to blend the physical skills he used to play the game with the analytical skills required put together a good team, the combination could be unbeatable (given an adequate team budget, of course.) But why on earth would a retired superstar settle for the grind of baseball management? Why do they need a day job? In the old days ex-superstars could get by on celebrity. These days even a mid-star can end his career with more money than he knows what to do with.

With a hundred million in the bank, why would a Ken Griffey Jr. want to be a general manager? And who would let him if he started signing the likes of Russ Davis to hefty contracts?

about the author

Dave Paisley's voice is provided this week by Gilbert Gottfried. Tell him to stop that consarned yelling at drdjp@strikethree.com.