Opinion: More on management-by-baseball
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In my Opinion Daily from last night about the Dodgers’ bullying P.R. and the organizational incoherence underlying it, I made passing comparative reference to the on-the-same-page success of the Los Angeles Angels of not-Los Angeles.
As if by magic, The Times’ Hall of Fame baseball writer Ross Newhan, an original-Angels beat writer and author of the only quality book-length history of the team, penned a fine feature that describes an Angels organization meeting in the fall of 1999 introducing then-newbie General Manager Bill Stoneman and Manager Mike Scioscia to, among other people, the team’s P.R. staff:
Stoneman and Scioscia heatedly and pointedly declar[ed] the need for an overhaul of focus and direction in an organization that had known mostly failure, frustration and frequent fluctuations in personnel and philosophy during the 45 years Gene Autry owned the team and the four that Disney had. ‘What happened,’ said a person who was in the meeting, ‘is that Bill and Mike kept getting peppered by questions from the marketing staff as to which of the players they would build an advertising campaign around since, as one of the marketers said, they were not going to win a World Series and it would be foolish to build a campaign around the team. ‘Bill and Mike looked at each other incredulously. I thought they were going to come out of their chairs. They’d been on the job for only two weeks and they were being told that the organization’s expectations didn’t include a World Series. Well, both of them laid it out right there, saying that every day they came to work the goal from top to bottom should be and would be to reach the postseason and to win the Series.’
Like a lot of good management stories, this sounds both trite and right (and is pure crack to us management-by-baseball fanatics).
Some reaction to my column at an Angels site, and at a non-Angels site.