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August 11, 2004

Lies, Damned Lies

Deconstructing General Managers

by Nate Silver

I was watching the Red Sox game on Monday night when Orlando Cabrera came to the plate. Cabrera was the starting shortstop. I did a quick double-take, then browsed through half a UTK column for news of Nomar Garciaparra's latest injury before realizing...

The Garciaparra deal is old news now, and both Joe Sheehan and Chris Kahrl have done their usual tip-top job of breaking the trade down. But perhaps because the Cubs were the lucky beneficiaries of Theo Epstein's misstep, or perhaps because it's just so fricking strange to see Garciaparra in another uniform, like something from an EA Sports bizarro world, I've found myself thinking about the trade a lot since it was consummated.

It's fair to say that I agree with Joe's conclusion: the trade was made for non-baseball reasons. Contrary to the obvious comparison, this deal was not Jeremy Giambi/John Mabry, Part Deux, in which a marginal player was replaced by a sub-marginal one. Garciaparra, though no longer a star, is still a tremendously valuable commodity, probably worth five or six wins above a replacement-level shortstop over the course of a full season with his bat. Losing him will have a material negative impact on the Red Sox' chances of reaching the post-season.

The more compelling question is not, "Why make the trade?", but rather, "Why would Theo Epstein make a trade for non-baseball reasons?" I don't mean that facetiously. The deal with the Cubs reveals, in some shape and form, certain of the limitations inherent in the analytical movement and its applicability in baseball front offices:

1. GMs are people, too. General managers are not immune from making decisions based on "soft" factors like interpersonal considerations. On the contrary, as anyone who has ever met one can attest, baseball executives are selected out in substantial part for their people skills. The better GMs--a group in which Epstein belongs, as does Jim Hendry--thrive because they combine those people skills with strong analytical abilities.

   It is unrealistic to expect to find a general manager who is able to completely divorce himself from the sort of "irrational," right-brained, human-based factors that influence decisions in all walks of life. Somebody with that personality type would probably never have been deemed fit for the GM role in the first place. It is natural to expect a GM to be sensitive to the opinions of people within his organization, contemporaries outside of his organization, fans and media members. (The difficult experience of Dan Duquette, who was lambasted in Boston for appearing to be such a person, is instructive here.)

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