And yet … that’s what the Royals (and other small market teams) do. They play the game conventionally. They fall back on old ideas. They hire old school managers and preach old school baseball values and scout players on the same 20-80 scale that players have been scouted for 50 years. Bill pulls out his spiral notebook — he always brings a spiral notebook to games — and on a page he draws two ladders, one on top of the other. The higher ladder is the “professional” ladder. The lower ladder he calls the “amateur” ladder. He then draws a picture of someone dangling from the bottom rung of the professional ladder. That, he says, is the Kansas City Royals.

“It’s so important for them to be considered professional,” he says, “that they are unwilling to try anything that might make people think they’re amateurish.”

What bothers me about my first evaluation of GMDM is that I thought, I hoped, that the team HAD hired someone who did think unconventionally. Since he had come out of the KC org, I thought he understood that you had to do things different with a small-market, small-budget team. There’s still time for him to adjust—-at the MLB level at least—-and I don’t want him to change at the minor league level. But I had hoped that Rowdy Hardy, Disco Hayes, etc. had given us signs of management that would think differently. Anyway, I think GMDM will adjust, but it hasn’t been 100 percent obvious on the surface. Perhaps he’ll read the JoPo article and do a midterm GM self-evaluation. – TL

sort of a good point, but in a weird way, way off. The problem with the Royals is not that they are too conventional. Maybe in 1980 or something. But right now they are unconventional, in the same way using a telegraph would be unconventional.

The Royals aren’t in trouble so much because they are doing everythign the same way everyone else is and thus not getting ahead, it’s that they are being unconventional and need to catch up.