No GM can reject a player’s proposal without approval of the owner or clear parameter instructions beforehand. A GM is the agent of the owner and has a continuing duty to comply with the owner’s directives. First year law student stuff.
Not if they do not obey instructions.
Totally makes sense to me
Jim, I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that he was completely insubordinate
Damn, MM. you have reading comprehension issues. I said IF as a hypothetical response to your hypothetical kudo.
And I hear the owner likes to bounce ideas off of Reggie Jackson and Jeff Bagwell, and he values their input. I figure they think more like Dusty than they think like Click.
That’s the rumor, but I still don’t think Crane is going to replace Click with someone more like an “old school baseball man” if that’s the inference folks are making from his relationship with those guys. Crane loved Luhnow, and if not for the trash cans Luhnow would almost certainly still be here doing his ultra-new-school thing. Maybe things have changed but I think he will try to find someone in the Luhnow/Click school of thought (albeit someone he finds personally palatable in whatever way Click wasn’t).
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If it weren’t for piffle The Void would be even voidier
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Long Live Piffle?
Are Luhnow and Click necessarily from the same school of thought? My understanding is that Click was very fluent in analytics while rebuilding at least some of the scouting apparatus that Luhnow had methodically dismantled.
Broadly speaking. Certainly not identical in philosophy, but when Crane hired Click I don’t think he intended a real departure from Luhnow’s approach. And Click seems to have been well respected among the folks I read who focus on technology-based player evaluation (which Luhnow obviously valued and promoted). I think Click saw real live scouts as a complement to those systems while Luhnow saw them as inefficient. Whatever their differences may be, I was really just lumping them together in a general contrast with “older-school” guys.
I think that immediately also. However, inflation is a bitch. One never knows how this may end up, but still I like it.
If reports are to be believed, Baker and Click recently disagreed over deadline moves and Baker lobbied for “intangibles” (esp. at Catcher) while Click focused on analytics which are heavily biased towards hitting and for power. If this is a reasonable facsimile of the truth, then for Crane to have two “older-school” confidants to help him referee and decide would be a natural outcome. All successful CEOs keep at least one heretic close.
My recollection is Luhnow’s dismantling the scouts was early in his tenure. My friend hated him for that. By the end of his run, though, he had been blending scouts and analytics and using both. That is how I remember it anyway.
I remember it that way too. Blending the observational data with numerical data is analytical…
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Sorry that was longer than I expected.
I’ll shorten and repost
Here’s a bit of what he said.
Click for a short period of time before being fired for questioning Click and not being as rigid as Click wanted. I also spoke to someone that was lower on the totem pole but worked THIS season with Click and to a little degree with Dusty and Crane.
Basically I was told the MLB highly recommended Click. When he got the job it was with the understanding he would rely on the people already in the organization and add to the talent in the front office. What happened was a lot of people in the front office felt Click was arrogant and tried to marginalize the people already in the organization. That made him unpopular.
Second, Click let go of a few very popular and successful people in the front office and attempted to keep Crane out of the loop on baseball decisions. I’ve posted on it before but Crane has become engrossed in baseball scouting and analytics. Especially after the cheating scandal, Crane has been more involved. Click did not want him sitting in on discussions, etc. He didn’t obviously keep Crane out, but it was awkward from what I was told. There was obvious tension. Crane also didn’t like how Click would treat some staff.
Lower level employees would go to Crane and involve him in disagreements with Click. This happened with Baker and others including my friend who was fired.
Click and Crane would have shouting matches eventually. Click didn’t discuss this with anyone as far as I know.
Crane supposedly lost confidence and patience in Click as a decision maker. For example Crane wanted Click to spend more in free agency. Click was adamant to wait to the deadline and then that blew up. The deals Click said would be available were not except for the Contreras deal which Crane viewed as an over pay. Crane was upset Click would not move on deals earlier and would miss out on players sometimes.
I’m sure its ok to put it here since he posted it on a message board that any of us could join.
If this story is accurate then it is best that Click is no longer around. My only thing, and it doesn’t matter now, is that if this is all true, then why did Crane even offer him the 1 year deal? He should have just let the contract expire and announce he was going in another direction with the GM position. He was under no obligation to offer Click any kind of contract. Offering him the 1 year deal to turn down wasn’t necessary IMHO.
I have no way of knowing if its true.
I will search his other posts and see if I can find an answer to that question.
Same reason you make an offer for a FA that you have no intention of keeping, so you can say “hey I offered him the chance to come back”