General Is Key Word in GM Job

If you’re in a major league ballpark this summer and see a middle-aged man in a conservative business suit wandering aimlessly among the corridors and ramps of the maze, bumping into people, mumbling to himself and perhaps pulling out what remains of his hair, be especially kind to him.

Ignore him when he babbles, “Damn all agents and their multi-year contracts with trade-veto clauses and attendance bonuses. . . . Oh, no, forgot to call the cocaine rehab center. . . . Wonder if anybody’s got a left-handed reliever they’ll trade me. . . . Did I forget to protect somebody on our 40-man roster? . . . What time is my plane to Tallahassee for that AA game? . . . What we really need is a new multi-media marketing strategy. . . . Let’s see, I got to be in court tomorrow to testify in our cleanup hitter’s trial. . . . Maybe I can schedule the meeting with the salary arbitrator for lunch, right after I listen to all the scouts and decide who we should draft. . . . Anything else? Hmmmmm, almost forgot. Guess I better fire the manager.”

Take this poor, sad creature by the arm and lead him gently to the team’s front office. Knock on the door and tell the secretary, “Here’s the boss.”

These days, your reward for 20 or 30 years of perfect service in baseball, for being the brightest and best in your industry, is that they make you general manager of a big-league team.

Then watch you slowly go crazy.

Two years ago at the World Series, Hank Peters of the Baltimore Orioles--at that moment the reigning executive of the year in baseball--collapsed at a party and was rushed to the hospital. Diagnosis: total exhaustion. Peters took some time off, lost a few pounds, then jumped right back into a job that, if you tried to do it all correctly, would be too complex for a man with the brain of Einstein, the body of Schwarzenegger and the enthusiasm of Rose.

Being a baseball general manager in 1976 was difficult.

In 1986, it’s completely impossible.

Every day, you just pick out what you’ll neglect first.

In the last 10 years, the responsibilities that fall to a baseball boss have exploded. The modern player has changed significantly, the modern manager rather radically, but the contemporary general manager has changed utterly.

Free agency, with the hundred complexities it brought along, was the huge earthquake. But salary arbitration, drug addiction and rehabilitation, big-time marketing and the burgeoning possibilities for millions of dollars in cable and local television money are also recent arrivals.

That doesn’t touch all the traditional roles. Make trades. Hire and fire managers and all the other personnel at every level of the organization. Supervise scouts. Oversee the whole minor-league operation, from whom you draft to whom you cut to whom you protect from raids by other teams. Consult with the manager and owner on how the team on the field should be constructed and play the game.

“You have a lot of plates spinning on the tops of a lot of sticks and some of them are going to fall and crack,” said John Schuerholz, general manager of the Kansas City Royals.

That is, if you don’t fall and crack first.

Pat Gillick of the Toronto Blue Jays, as smart a young general manager as you’ll find, said that to run a team these days, you’d “need a three-headed monster. Many times I’ve wished I could clone myself.”

“One (person) would do player contracts, salary arbitration, negotiations (for TV contracts, etc.) and marketing. Another one would deal with drugs and alcoholism, psychological and financial problems all the way down through the system, as well as rehabilitation programs. And another one would work with player development in the minors, personnel moves at the major league level and making trades.”

Actually, even that probably wouldn’t be enough. What you would need would be three people with contrasting personalities, training and experience.

Do you need a man with the legal and business training, plus patient, pragmatic charm to be a contract negotiator, marketer and chief executive officer of a business with a $15-million payroll? As General Manager Tom Grieve of the Texas Rangers pointed out, “The days of offering a player a contract and saying ‘Take it or leave it’ are gone forever. One of my assistants made 17 phone calls, two of them over an hour each, to a player’s agent, and that player--Steve Buechele--had only two months in the majors and wasn’t even eligible for salary arbitration. Can you imagine the groundwork that goes into a star’s contract with incentive clauses, deferred payments, bonuses, insurance policies, annuities and trade-veto clauses?”

What sort of wise philosopher will counsel 19-year-old minor-leaguers on saving money or help a 29-year-old superstar kick drugs? “That rising tide of abuse seems to be ebbing considerably,” Milwaukee’s Harry Dalton said. “That’s great, if true, but it’s still out there.”

“We have spent a lot of time on drug programs for the last four years, and we aren’t going to stop,” Toronto’s Gillick said.

Would either the legal eagle or the parish-priest type feel comfortable in the role of wheeler-dealer trader? As Trader Jack McKeon, San Diego Padres’ general manager, said, spitting out the tip of his big cigar, “A lot of these new guys forget that your whole marketing strategy is the damn team you put out on the field. If somebody doesn’t get you some good players, who’s gonna come see ‘em?”

Trades were always tough to make. Now, they’re like figuring out a checkmate in three-dimensional chess. Agreeing on whom to deal for whom isn’t the problem. It’s wading through the morass of agents, lawyers and contract provisos. “Tough, but not impossible,” said Schuerholz of the modern trade.

Beyond this, somebody in an organization has to make countless crucial personnel decisions that require a lifetime of eyeballing ballplayers. Dalton of the Brewers wonders where that next generation of ballpark Gypsies will come from.

“Your working day is pulled away from making the nine innings that night as good as they can be,” he said. “You have agents calling to discuss their players’ future and you’re not spending that time on the phone with your top scouts, talking about who should be moved up through the system or who needs to learn another pitch or who you might be able to steal in a trade. You’re not out seeing your AAA club with your own eyes. Dealing with the people in uniform is the great fun of the sport--what attracted us to it.”

Frank Cashen of the Mets: “There are only a couple left, the last of a breed, who do everything from the CEO role to negotiating TV contracts to negotiating with players’ agents to making trades and drafting players. That’s almost a lost art now.

Dalton: “Most teams have specialists to help out in whatever area their top man is not an expert.”

Relaxed, charming, somewhat roguish personalities such as Dalton, Cashen and Dallas Green of the Cubs may be a dying breed. A more orderly, make-every-minute-count type of personality could replace them.

“Not long ago, a person was considered good if he’d been in the game 30 years. That was enough,” Grieve said. “Now, you might want someone, like me, to grow into the job. Sandy Alderson (A’s), Mike Port (Angels), Hawk Harrelson (White Sox), Andy MacPhail (Twins), Bobby Cox (Braves), John Schuerholz, Pat Gillick, Murray Cook (Expos), Joe Klein (Indians), Dick Balderson (Mariners) and Dal Maxvill (Cardinals) are more or less in that category.”

Schuerholz: “Baseball is an industry of increasing specialization. You have to analyze what a GM is. Only a handful of clubs have one person who does basically everything, or at least oversees it--Cashen, Dalton, Green, Peters and myself. Most clubs make a clear delineation between baseball and business. . . . Baseball had some GMs who got spun around in their chairs when the players started bringing in pros to do their negotiating.”

On the business-versus-baseball breakdown, Alderson of Oakland thought he was “the front-runner of a new trend” toward legal negotiation expertise. “But now, a few years later, I don’t see any other guys like myself. The trend is the other way. More with baseball backgrounds--like Harrelson, Grieve, Maxvill and Cox.”

What baseball has discovered, to its surprise, is that the most difficult and important sort of expertise to find is deep lifelong knowledge of the game itself. Sophisticated as a $10-million player contract or a $20-million TV deal or an integrated marketing strategy may be, it’s not as mysterious a subject as which Rookie League pitcher will someday be Tom Seaver.

And coming up with a Roger Clemens or Cal Ripken is more important than the rest put together.

“Now, you don’t just have to find stars, you have to keep them,” Gillick said. “You have to make sure you have a backup in your system for the player who may become a free agent. We have a flow chart here. You may have to make a personnel decision in the minors, or a trade, a couple of years ahead of time because you know that you’ve already decided not to bid top dollar to keep a certain player.”

With all the responsibilities, it’s easy for a general manager to lose a grasp on the chemistry or personality of his own team.

“If you don’t make the effort, a GM can be totally out of touch with his players,” Peters said. “(Former Reds and Indians executive) Gabe Paul said he never went in a clubhouse. That won’t work now. Sometimes I go in there just to be seen, just to exchange a pleasant word. With agents doing the talking now, if you wanted to, you could go an entire career as a GM and never speak to a player.”

So, on top of everything else, don’t forget to stay at the park until 10 or 11 o’clock at night so you can chat up those players after a tough loss. No wonder Peters’ wife, Dottie, comes to every home game and sits next to her husband. When else is she going to see him?

When Peter Ueberroth became baseball commissioner two years ago, his first practical task was to locate “the competence in the game.” Find out who made it tick, understood the mechanisms. That didn’t take long. The general managers impressed him more than the owners, players, managers and union leaders all put together. When he wanted advice or a critique, he listened to them. “The GMs tend to have the long-term interests of the game at heart more than any other one group,” he said.

“Ueberroth consults GMs on problems. He wants to take advantage of their expertise and create more visibility,” said Oakland’s Alderson. “A lot of GMs have felt rather alienated, like they (ran) the teams, but weren’t consulted on basic issues. We represent the game.”

Now, more than ever.