Dorks And Losers

(Photo by John Amis/AP)

As much as every­one might not make it seem so, but it’s a sad day for every­one in the Atlanta Braves orga­ni­za­tion as well as the city of Atlanta, Geor­gia. John Schuer­holz stepped down as gen­eral man­ager and stepped up as new team pres­i­dent. He will replaced by Frank Wren, who to some degree might have the worst GM job in baseball.

In a real­is­tic sense, replac­ing baseball’s best mod­ern GM is tough because of the many lofty expec­ta­tions and numer­ous unfair com­par­isons that Wren will have to endure before he is able to assert him­self out­side of Schuerholz’s legacy. (And yes, being Atlanta’s GM might actu­ally be tougher than the job some poor sap will get when cur­rent New York Yan­kees GM Brian Cash­man is no longer in charge.)

We’ve already seen another great GM step down in for­mer Min­nesota Twins GM Terry Ryan. The upside to Schuerholz’s replace­ment is that only get­ting a new starter and cen­ter fielder will instantly launch the team into National League East favorites. The late sea­son New York Mets col­lapse hap­pened sooner rather than later, but the fact remained that the team itself was flawed and it was only a mat­ter of time before its pitch­ing woes would hurt them.

Didn’t Omar Minaya take a les­son out of the Braves’ 2006 season?

That Mets team was sup­pos­edly built to last for a few years. It only lasted 2006 and 95% of 2007. Given that con­text, it makes Schuerholz’s unbe­liev­able divi­sional title streak all the more impres­sive. I’m not going to reit­er­ate what count­less base­ball ana­lysts and writ­ers will say about the streak. You can read about it here, here, here, and here. Sur­pris­ingly Yahoo! Sports only has one arti­cle on the sub­ject while ESPN has many more.

I will say though that a log­i­cal point to look at Schuerholz’s — as well as long­time man­ager Bobby Cox and for­mer long­time pitch­ing coach Leo Maz­zone — is the luck at hav­ing so many great play­ers on the time at the mirac­u­lously same time. You had and have future Hall of Famers Greg Mad­dux, Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, Chip­per Jones, and Andruw Jones on the ros­ter. Either one has the tal­ent that every GM dreams about hav­ing. And no doubt hav­ing them made Schuerholz’s job a whole lot easier.

From Mark Kreidler’s arti­cle, “Smoltz has been par­tic­u­larly insight­ful on the sub­ject of Maz­zone, gen­tly point­ing out in a recent inter­view with the Atlanta Jour­nal Con­sti­tu­tion that Mazzone’s rep­u­ta­tion as a pitching-staff wiz­ard was built sub­stan­tially on his abil­ity to han­dle pitch­ers who already knew how to com­pete at the major-league level.”

The same can be said for Cox who has equally adept at han­dling estab­lished major league stars like Fred McGriff and Greg Mad­dux, as well as nur­ther­ing the always revolv­ing door for new blood. The same can be said for Schuer­holz who year-in, year-out gath­ered play­ers who would com­ple­ment the other guys on the team. That’s what a GM does. And he was the best at it.

Great quote quote from Jayson Stark’s arti­cle: “Over the last 17 sea­sons, they’ve won more games than any team in base­ball. In fact, they’ve won 170 more games than the next-winningest team in the National League, the Cardinals.

Think about that for a sec­ond. If the Braves lost every game they played next sea­son and the Car­di­nals went unde­feated, the Braves would still have a bet­ter record than the Car­di­nals — or any­one else in the league — since 1991.”

Sim­ply amaz­ing.
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Here’s a funny quote from an ealier Peter Gam­mons Oct. 9 arti­cle on the what-will-A-Rod-do-now theories:

“And Alex Rodriguez. Those who believe the sun sets and rises on baseball’s best player can rant about his .267 Divi­sion Series and point to the fact that he went from Game 3 of the 2004 ALCS until the eighth inning Mon­day with­out a post­sea­son RBI, but if he opts out of his con­tract and Scott Boras gets him $30 some­thing mil­lion a year else­where (plus a third of all Venezue­lan oil reserves), they must fill in a canyon, as well as replace his enter­tain­ment value to YES and those $2,500-a-game seats in the new sta­dium.“
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A quote from Homi­cide: Life On The Street:

Det. Meldrick Lewis: “Bal­ti­more, home of the mis­de­meanor homicide.”

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