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Originally Posted by Erick Estrada
This news on the heels of John Ferguson Jr being promoted to AGM in Phoenix. Is there another professional league that recycles bad executives and coaches like the NHL?
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As Beatle17 says, they all do. Here's what Michael Lewis had to say about it in
Moneyball:
Quote:
The game itself is a ruthless competition. Unless you're very good, you don't survive in it. But in the space just off the field of play there really is no level of incompetence that won't be tolerated. There are many reasons for this, but the big one is that baseball has structured itself less as a business than as a social club.…
That's not to say that there are not good baseball executives and bad baseball executives, or good baseball scouts and bad baseball scouts. It's just that they aren't very well sorted out. Baseball doesn't subject its executives to anything like the pressures of playing baseball, or even of running a business. When a big league baseball team spends huge sums of money and loses, heads may roll, but they don't roll very far. Club insiders have a remarkable talent for hanging around, scouting young players, opining on the game, until some other high-level job opens up.… There are no real standards, because no one wants to put too fine a point on the question: what qualifies these people for this job?
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Sound familiar?
It's true that some of the dumbest baseball execs got weeded out because they couldn't or would't cope with sabermetrics, so Lewis's remarks about MLB are somewhat out of date now. The equivalent change is happening much more slowly in hockey, and membership in the Club is still enough to get you a senior job somewhere around the league.