I don't get it?

"BobDbobby" <bobdbobby.TakeThisOut@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20040702193224.19227.00001325@mb-m06.aol.com...
> Maybe someone can enlighten me, is it Brenly's fault, players are getting
> injured, players can't get hits, players can't make plays on the field? I
> understand putting the right person in a position makes a difference, but
what
> has he got to work with all the injuries?
> Thanks for the feedback,
> Bob

It just makes it look like Something Is Being Done. Management isn't going
to fire itself for failing to secure legitimate support talent behind the
club's stars, and the time for making the move that =needed= to be made
(swapping Kniffin's and Davis' respective assignments) passed at least a
month and a half ago.

Unfortunately, the effort to save the organization's "face" is ultimately
self-defeating; the organization that had been widely seen as
forward-thinking and run about as honestly and straightforwardly as any
organization has ever been run has instead taken a page out of the Bad Old
Days by blaming failure on those not responsible for that failure, and
crippling the franchise for the forseeable future by removing from field
decisionmaking responsibilities the one man best qualified to be and most
experienced at making those decisions within this particular organization.

That's where this move is so very different from the one that removed
Showalter four years ago. Showalter had lost credibility as a manager and
leader with both the public and his players; Brenly had lost credibility
only with media members trying to create a story where none really existed
(although, in fairness to the local pressboys, "Colangelo's Personal &
Financial Meltdown" is a storyline that no serious local outlet would =ever=
get its management's approval to run).

Don't underestimate the impact of this move on the franchise's ability to
draw talent at or somewhat below market prices. Good people are often
willing to forego some financial gain in order to work in a healthy
organization, particularly given how rare healthy organizations are and how
great (and real) the psychic rewards are therefrom (economists measure this
factor on what they call "indifference curves" but which are better
described as "satisfaction" or "happiness curves"). An organization that
treats its most visible representatives in an obviously unfair manner
rightly and deservedly creates the expectation in the minds of prospective
employees that they too stand to be treated unfairly if they join that
organization.

Put more succinctly, bad organizations have to overpay for bad talent. If
you get lucky developing amateurs, you can buy some time to correct the
organization (or, at the very least, the =impression= of your organization
among prospective employees), but it's an awful lot easier long-term to run
an organization the right way in the first place -- even if it might create
hard feelings among the country-club crowd at the top of the organization.

This last bit also cannot be underestimated as a driving factor within
organizations creating cultures of failure. As an example, the long slide of
CBS into near-irrelevance as a ratings and advertising force in the 1970s
can be traced directly back to the embarassment and ridicule its programming
executives faced in swanky locker rooms and exclusive clubs for its reliance
on rural and suburban audiences and their "hick" programming tastes. In the
early 70s, CBS dumped nearly all of its high-performing programming in favor
of the sort of shows preferred by the elite-educated, wealthy urbanites
with whom CBS' programming chiefs socialized -- at a time when those
preferences and that level of education and sophistication was nowhere near
as widespread as it later came to be. While a handful of these shows did
click [60 Minutes and the Saturday-night sitcom block], those successes were
not sufficient to prevent the proliferation of bad programming that filled
the rest of the schedule from drawing the network into permanent second-tier
status behind audience-sensitive and bottom-line-focused ABC [then, by the
early 1980s, NBC]. The network's response? Panic. Annual or biannual
flailing about, changing direction and focus blindly in the hopes of finding
something more-or-less accidentally that would restore the glory days.

Think this doesn't have a parallel in baseball? Think of the hapless Mets of
the early Doubleday years, the confused post-Martin/pre-Torre Yankess under
the autocratic personal control of overaged prepster George Steinbrenner, or
the mess that is the orioles under social-climbing nouveaux-riche
ambulance-chasing owner Peter Angelos. Bad organizations making bad
decisions and getting bad players (or, at least, bad =play= from their
players), spending years never quite grasping that their own bad leadership
(or, maybe, "leadership overreach" or "misapplication") was directly
responsible for bad product.
--
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"'s been widely reported that the first-weekend box-office receipts of
"Fahrenheit 9/11" set a new record for documentaries. Blogger Frank J. notes
that this isn't true. "Jackass: The Movie," released in 2002, grossed $22.8
in its first weekend, a million dollars more than Michael Moore's gross-out
flick".
-- James Taranto, OpinionJournal.com's Best Of The Web, citing the
following report: http://www.imao.us/archives/001629.html#001629
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