Mar
10
What might possibly happen if we ever left our mother’s basement
ByThis isn’t Yankee-related whatsoever, but Richard Durrett of ESPN Dallas wrote an absolute must-read article on Rangers’ general manager Jon Daniels. He touchs on everything from when Daniels was hired as the youngest GM in baseball to when he almost traded for Josh Beckett to when the Mark Teixeira trade put his rebuilding plan into motion. The entire article runs about 3,500 words, but it’s so worth it. Truly fascinating stuff.
When he replaced John Hart as GM in 2005, Daniels was about four months younger than I am right now. Excuse me while I go cry myself to sleep…
53 Comments»
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The Mason Williams Watch
Oh, how wonderful it would be to be a young and smart GM for the Yankees, maybe even smart enough to resign Johnny Damon perhaps?
fail.
Violation of Operation: Shutdown.
wtf is operation shutdown? is this spawned from an open thread? it has to be since i don’t RAB from 6 pm-9am.
It’s our effort to try to minimize the number of memes and inside jokes that go on in the comments. We need to clean these things up, they’re scaring away new readers.
and how was fail in violation?
ps i don’t have any problem with that esp since i don’t think i am typically that bad of an offender
I thought (maybe mistakenly) that responding in general to trolls was a violation (not really any consequences)
Explanation of Operation Shutdown:
http://riveraveblues.com/2010/.....ent-792356
and further discussion of it:
http://riveraveblues.com/2010/...../#comments
yeah, that’s what I thought O:S was too. The only thing is, I’m not sure if that person is trolling or making a joke (the username = hmm).
I’ve read this blog for a while now, but don’t really post much. Have to admit that part of it was because I didn’t really understand all the stuff going on, but also because I’m just too lazy to keep up with all the conversation.
Anyways, Jon Daniels might be a really young real life GM, but as GM/Coach of my football/baseball franchises on Xbox, I’ve won multiple world series/super bowls while coming in under the salary cap… so ha!
by trying to put the kibosh on memes a meme was started.
haha good point
Clarification:
Operation: SHUTDOWN (and itself as a meme) is NOT, as Mike said above, a plan to cut down on the memes around here.
Mike/Ben/Joe’s request to scale back on arcane/unclear inside jokes and memes to make the site more readable to the new reader is a separate request.
Operation: SHUTDOWN was spearheaded by Mondesi, and it’s a movement to stop replying to known habitual crazy fuckers like Jake/Michael and SBGL, loony nutbags who change their names, post nonsensical, emotion-based, intractable positions that are utterly indefensible or even arguable because they’re rooted in irrationality.
Operation: SHUTDOWN is a request by RAB commenters to not engage in fruitless dialogue with other RAB commenters that we all can clearly agree are batshit insane. It has nothing to do with any effort, request, or proposal to use memes or in-jokes any more or less.
fail
wouldnt have taken much brains to resign him.
one day bo..one day.
Love the name, hate the comment
not sure if serious
If you were referring to my comment, I was being serious.
Let me explain: I like the name ‘Johnny Damon AKA Benedict Arnold’ but did not like the shot he took at Cashman (if he was indeed taking a shot at Cash). Cash did just about everything he could to sign Damon, it’s just that he and Boras wanted too much money. Don’t get it twisted, I would have loved for them to bring Johnny back, but not if he were demanding the sun and the moon. I think 2 years at $14 million was more than fair.
The point I was trying to make was: It’s not Cash’s fault that Damon isn’t in pinstripes anymore.
nope, I was talking about what “Johnny Damon AKA Benedict Arnold” said. No worries.
that’s crazy he couldve had beckett and lowell for danks and blaylock. what a completely inferior package to what florida eventually received.
one has to wonder how the landscape of the al east would’ve changed had beckett gone to tex and han-ram stayed in bos….
I know Beckett was an important part of the Sox’s run in 2007 but I do not enjoy thinking about that possibility.
Yeah I’d rather the Sox have Beckett than Hanley.
Hanley plays everyday at a premium position and is a beast among men.
Beckett is a really good starting pitcher, but can only go once every 5 days. He also has pubes on his face and has blisters.
He also has pubes on his face and has blisters.
no better way to end the day hahahaha
They dont have a title in ’07. Thats for sure.
that’s not necessarily true. they oculd’ve gone out and acquired someone else or traded a different part for a diff pitcher. it couldve made them better. beckett isnt THAT good that he isnt replaceable. replacing alex g, lugo, cabrera, renteria, with hanram..now that/…wow.
TYPOS! WOOOOOO im in a rush to go home so ENJOY
He carried that team on his back during the playoff run.
As we have learned this decade and last yr.
Great starting pitching wins titles. Hanley would have been nice for them but Beckett was Bob Gibson in Oct.
It really depends on who they could have replaced Beckett with. Had they not taken on Beckett and Lowell’s contracts, they certainly would have had money to play with, along with the huge upgrade at SS.
In fact, while Beckett was great, he didn’t really need to be. They swept the Angels and the Rockies, and in the two wins he got against Cleveland, the Sox scored 10 and 7 runs. I think whoever the Beckett replacement would have been, likely could have won those games. He might not have pitched as well as Beckett did, but he wouldn’t need to.
And maybe whoever they got for their 2007 run wouldn’t have barfed terribly in Game 2 of the 2008 ALCS, meaning the Sox would have got the win and they would have won that Series. You just can’t predict baseball.
/obligatory’d
Beckett’s first four playoff starts for Boston:
30 innings, 4-0, 1.20, 0.700 WHIP, opponent’s OPS .471
Beckett’s last four playoff starts for Boston:
21 innings, 1-1, 7.71 ERA, 1.619 WHIP, opponent’s OPS 1.015
I never get tired of looking at that
me neither.
oooh, that’s nice.
Well said, but you’re in the realm of the theoretical.
Bo can’t handle theoreticals, they’re over his head. Too complex and impossible to calculate. (Except for the theoretical nuclear winter of pain and failure and perpetual 100-loss seasons we’re about to enter for failing to sign Johnny Damon, of course.)
Yeah, not so sure about that. After all the 2004 title was a happy accident as Theo E and the Street Gang were still in the midst of reorganizing the team that year and didn’t expect such a playoff run so soon.
Not acquiring one specific player for 2007 doesn’t necessarily mean the team is so much lesser than the one that took the division and then the WS.
one has to wonder how the landscape of the al east would’ve changed had beckett gone to tex and han-ram stayed in bos….
Well the BoSox shortstop problem would have been fixed long term, that’s for sure.
John Daniels is an awesome guy. I go to the same college he went to and I got a chance to meet him in September this year. Couldn’t have been nicer.
Jon…sorry
It’s not your fault he spells his name wrong. That’s cool that you got to meet him. He certainly seems to be doing a good job, glad he’s not in the East. GM of the Rangers is quite an uphill battle to try to get pitching in that stadium.
and the pitching he’s getting into it is high quality as well: Feliz, Holland, possibly Scheppers. I guess having Nolan Ryan and his old school pitching plan in the organization has its benefits.
To think they could’ve had Purke AND Scheppers. Their system is loaded as it is…
Martin Perez is also getting serious hype.
He’s essentially our version of Man-Ban, except Perez throws harder…and is slightly taller.
MUCH harder, but yeah. Perez and Man-Ban are both slight, projectable lefties, but Man-Ban is more great control/command without elite velocity (which gives him a solid #2 upside) while Perez has excellent velocity and two excellent secondary pitches, giving him a legit #1 starter upside.
Oh, and Perez has already made it to AA. Manny’s still a level behind him (although 18 years old in High-A is no slouch.)
I’m curious as to what Durrett meant by “They didn’t get approval from MLB to sign Purke at a number to his liking, but they got Scheppers done.” Texas doesn’t have an All-Star game coming up so what could the league hold over their head?
MLB loaned Texas something like $15M to help them make payroll last year, so they had to approve any major deals.
That’s a little bit of a sugarcoat in regards to how bad that trade was, IMO because Durrett seems to portray two things too softly:
1) Gonzalez isn’t a “solid power hitter with upside”, he’s a bonafide MLB superstar. And it’s not like he blossomed from out of nowhere after the deal, he was the #1 overall draft pick of 2000 and was skull-f#$%ing the ball in AAA at the time.
2) Durrett makes it seem like the deal was Young and A-Gonz for Aki Otsuka. Otsuka wasn’t the centerpiece of the deal, Adam Eaton was the centerpiece of the deal. He dealt their best young power-hitting, future MVP candidate power slugging big league farmhand AND a solid young SP prospect for… Adam Eaton.
Who’s career ERA+ at the time was 91. Who hadn’t posted a league average ERA in 5 years at the time.
That trade stunk to high heaven from Day 1.
Adrian Gonzalez OPS’d .960 in AAA his last season with the Rangers. Daniels probably forgot to look at Gonzalez’s minor league stat sheet before green-lighting it.
Its hard to make up for that level of gaffe, but Daniels now has the team he’s wanted since the Teixeira trade.
Yeah, I’m not trying to pull a LoHud and say that Daniels is some irredeemable moron for life and should be fired for that one trade, just saying it was an epically, epically bad deal and that should have been stated with more emphasis, IMO.
If you needed a starting pitcher, I could see trading 2005 23-year old Adrian Gonzalez for, say, 2005 Barry Zito (who was, like Eaton, available via trade due to impending free agency)… that gaffe is more understandable, you can talk yourself into Zito as being a frontline ace (the Giants certainly did).
But Adam Eaton? Who the hell thought Adam Eaton was going to amount to shit?
Cornell.. FTW!
Daniels’ ability to do thorough research and present it in an understandable way helped him move up the ladder. After a year in the Colorado system, Daniels caught the eye of Hart, who hired him for his staff in Texas in 2002. Daniels quickly earned Hart’s trust, adding the title of director of baseball operations in October 2003 and assistant general manager less than a year later.
Doesn’t that seem like rapid advancement? Two years in baseball right out of college, one of which with another team, and he’s director of baseball operations? How the hell does that work?
The Teixeira deal still marvels me to this day.
When he replaced John Hart as GM in 2005, Daniels was about four months younger than I am right now. Excuse me while I go cry myself to sleep…
Time for me to work on that Grad School application some more.