General Managing

Being industrious, and not enormously original, I thought one could apply the same kind of thinking to general managers. They don't get hired off the street - they have all had jobs in baseball, often for other teams, often in other front offices, and always for other general managers. They would have bloodlines too. I carried out this exercise back in May 2008 - Craig and fellow Bauxite Gwyn were so delighted that each translated my research into a graphic. This was Craig's

and this was Gwyn's

Naturally, I basked in their praise, and I'm just shameless enough to seek it out again.

The very term "general manager" is something that developed some time later than the actual job. The earliest general managers, of course, were generally either the team's owner (think Connie Mack) or the team's manager (think John McGraw.) They were also their own scouting directors, performance coordinators, and whatever else you can think of. They managed the games, taught the players how to hit a curveball, negotiated the contracts, and beat the backwoods looking for talent in the off-season. Both these wondrous species have long since vanished from the earth. I'm pretty sure that Jack McKeon in San Diego and Whitey Herzog in St. Louis are the last managers who truly served as their own GM. Billy Martin acted as his own GM for his first two years in Oakland.  Owner Bob Short had briefly attempted to run his Texas team in the 1970s.  But even Bill Veeck, who always described himself as an old-fashioned owner/operator and did have an extensive baseball background, hired a GM for his last lap around the park. The last owners who doubled as a GM were Calvin Griffith in Minnesota and Charlie Finley in Oakland. Griffith was groomed all his life to run a baseball team while Finley was an insurance man with no baseball background at all. Still, while this breed  has gone the way of the buffalo - or, more accurately, the passenger pigeon - I'm pretty sure it wasn't Rick Hahn who decided to hire Tony LaRussa to manage the White Sox. And then there was Steinbrenner...

It is not entirely surprising, then, that the longest serving GMs also happened to own the team. Connie Mack ran the A's from 1901 through 1949, before his sons finally persuaded him to give up the reins in 1950. Clark Griffith did likewise in Washington from 1920 through 1955. Mack and Griffith had both been major league players; Mack was the A's field manager as well during all these years. Griffith had managed the Senators before his ownership stake grew large enough that he could assume full control of the team's operations; once it did, he left the dugout and worked in the office. He was succeeded by his nephew Calvin Griffith, who had been adopted by his uncle and groomed for the post. Calvin Griffith operated as his own GM until selling the team in 1984. Barney Dreyfuss was a businessman, and a shrewd one, who parlayed his ownership of the last place Louisville Colonels into a half-share of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and was then able to buy out his partners. Even John McGraw, who will always be best remembered as a field manager, had a small ownership stake in the Giants. Those five men - Connie Mack, Clark Griffith, Barney Dreyfuss, John McGraw, and Calvin Griffith - carried out what we now regard as the general manager's job for the same team longer than anyone else in the game's history.

The first great GMs who neither owned nor managed their teams were Ed Barrow and Branch Rickey, both of whom had been field managers. Rickey had played in the majors, albeit not particularly well, before returning to the game as an executive with the Browns and then as field manager. He moved across town to manage the Cardinals until he was fired by owner Sam Breadon in 1925. Breadon put Rickey in charge of running the franchise instead. This turned out to be a much better use of his talents. Ed Barrow had actually started out selling concessions. He had moved from there into ownership of several minor league teams, then into field management with Detroit (where he might have set up one of the game's very first platoon arrangements!) and, a decade later with Boston. He managed the 1918 Red Sox to a title. It would be their last one for quite some time.  Barrow spent part of the years in between baseball jobs right here in Toronto, managing the Windsor Arms hotel. When Red Sox owner started selling all his stars to the Yankees, Barrow decided to go there as well. He  took over as business manager of the Yankees in 1920, in which position it was he - not the field manager - who oversaw the team's roster. He did a pretty decent job there over the next twenty-six years. No GM can match the ten titles the Yankees won during Barrow's tenure; no one even comes very close. Barrow's tenure with the Yankees is still the longest of anyone with the same team (save the five special cases discussed above.) Branch Rickey was a GM for 31 years, but for three different teams; a GM of more recent vintage, Pat Gillick was a GM for 28 years (for four teams.)  Rickey's St. Louis teams only won four titles, though they added two more in the first three years after Rickey had moved on to Brooklyn after the 1942 season. (He didn't win with the Dodgers. Came pretty close.)  The only man who even approaches Barrow's total is his own apprentice in New York, George Weiss, who Barrow hired to run the farm system and who had succeeded to the post when Barrow retired in 1946. Weiss' teams won seven championships before he was forced out, along with Casey Stengel, when Bill Mazeroski hit that home run.

Anyway here's the current crop. The incumbent is bolded, and I've added his age and the year he took up the post in parentheses.

San Francisco (7) - Spec Richardson, Tom Haller, Al Rosen, Bob Quinn, Brian Sabean, Bobby Evans, Scott Harris (since 2018.) He is probably the youngest of the current GMs - the Giants Media Guide doesn't give his age, but he got his BA from UCLA in 2009, so he's probably about 35. He started as an intern, for Washington and Cincinnati - his first real job was in baseball operations for the Cubs. He became their assistant GM in 2018, and got the Giants' GM job a year later.

** Ryan did two separate tours as the Twins GM (1994-2007 and 2011-2016)

I've been trying not to count the many, many interim GMs - Rob Antony in Minnesota, Mike Port in Boston, Tony LaCava in Toronto, John Rocco in New York, Tom Lasorda and Dave Wallace in Los Angeles, Joe Brown, Roy Smith, and Brian Graham in Pittsburgh, Bill Stoneman's second term in Anaheim - who filled the job of a departed predecessor while the team looked for a permanent replacement.

Anyway, the question originally on my mind can now be answered. The Blue Jays have indeed had remarkably little front office turnover. Only the Colorado Rockies, who didn't even get started until 1993, have had fewer people sit in the GM's chair. The only team that's been around for the entire period that has also had just five GMs is Oakland, thanks mostly to the long tenures of Sandy Alderson and Billy Beane.

Alderson, of course, is a very significant figure in the evolution of the GM's position. He was a lawyer with no baseball background at all - he worked for Roy Eisenhardt's law firm, and when Eisenhardt bought the A's, Alderson came along as general counsel. He eventually got to hire another lawyer, a guy named LaRussa, to manage the team on the field. Alderson demonstrated quite clearly that a GM didn't need to have played the game in order to run a team. One would think that had already been proved fairly conclusively by Ed Barrow himself, but never mind. Alderson's long and successful tenure (1983-98) in Oakland pretty much settled the matter. You find the same types of people holding GM positions today that you did in 2008.

Just seven of today's GMs actually played pro ball. Only four of them actually played in the majors - DiPoto, Young, Fuld, Gomes. The other three are Atkins, Forst, and Rizzo.This was already much the case in 2008, when just eight of the GMs in place had played pro ball. They were Beane and Williams, who had played in the majors, as well as Ricciardi, Wren, Minaya, Towers, Gillick, and Melvin.

Just five of the current GMs are doing the job for their second team, and four of them - DiPoto, Anthopoulos, Cherington, Hazen - chose to leave their first team, generally as part of a struggle over control. That's an old story indeed - it's why Branch Rickey left the Dodgers. As mentioned, Eppier is the only current GM who was fired by one team (Angels) and hired by another (Mets.) Back in 2008, it was likewise just five men who had been GMs elsewhere: MacPhail, Dombrowski, Gillick, Wren, and Bowden. The latter two were the only ones who had been fired from a previous GM posting.

Nine of today's GMs are doing this job for the only ML team they have ever worked for: This group consists of Cashman, Bendix, Chernoff, Hahn, Forst, Young, Fuld, Girsch, and Gomes. The same was pretty much true in 2008, when seven GMs had only ever worked for one team: Beane, Williams, Smith, Cashman, Friedman, Shapiro, and Reagins.

By my count, eleven current GMs (Elias, Picollo, Minasian, Forst, DiPoto, Eppier, Rizzo, Hawkins, Cherington, Hazen, Schmidt) began their careers in the scouting departments and another eleven (Cashman, Bendix, O'Holloran, Chernoff, Click, Anthopoulos, Ng, Krall, Arnold, Preller, Harris) started out as interns. Three (Atkins, Fuld, Gomes - all former pro players) started out in player development, and two (Levine, Hahn) seemed to come from the business side of the operation. The cases of Chris Young and Mike Girsch seem unique.

And this is Brian Cashman's twenty-fifth season as the Yankees' GM. You will recall that the longest term of any team's GM was that of Ed Barrow, the first Yankees GM. Barrow did the job for twenty-six years; Cashman is now just one more year from matching that. He's become a figure of considerable historical significance.