The Big Chair by Ned Colletti & Joseph A. Reaves

Author:Ned Colletti & Joseph A. Reaves
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

A DAY IN THE LIFE

Some days are spent chasing big-time free agents and dealing in the $100 million to $200 million dollar stratosphere. Some days are spent maneuvering through the day-to-day that finds the GM juggling and looking through many different windows simply trying to figure out people.

In the sports world, there are young people who dream about being a professional athlete. At some point, those dreams dissolve into the reality that being paid to play sports isn’t going to happen except for a very tiny percentage of people.

That is not the case with the Big Chair. There is no age limit, no physical appearance or conditioning that will stop people from aspiring to or playing general manager.

Fantasy sports leagues have exploded across the United States for decades since Dan Okrent, then a publishing consultant for Texas Monthly magazine and later public editor of The New York Times, invented Rotisserie League Baseball with friends at La Rôtisserie Française restaurant in New York City in 1979. Among one of the many reasons fantasy games are so popular is because they give fans the illusion they are running their own team. Anyone and everyone can be a general manager. Just pull the right players off the basement card table or on the Draft Day computer and build a championship team.

But, in twenty-first-century professional sports, evaluating talent and assembling a team are just a tiny fraction of a real-life general manager’s job. Besides balancing budgets, placating owners, dealing with the media, reaching out to the community, negotiating with agents, and constant travel, a general manager has to be part-time psychologist, big brother, confidant, disciplinarian, punching bag, and voodoo doll.

There is no such thing as an off day or a typical day. Every day is frenetic and every day is different. But a look at just part of my day—thirteen and a half hours of it—on Friday, June 3, 2011, offers a glimpse at some of the craziness beyond merely assembling a team that real-life general managers have to juggle.

The Dodgers were in Cincinnati for a weekend series with the Reds. We were 26-31 and six and a half games behind the Giants.

I flew to Phoenix to see our extended spring staff and to meet with two of our top relief pitchers, who were going through difficult adjustments.

Hong-Chi Kuo, a gifted left-hander from Taiwan, had had two Tommy John surgeries and two other elbow surgeries. He’d come back so often that our trainer Stan Conte affectionately called Kuo the “cockroach,” because “you can’t kill him.”

Besides the physical injuries, Kuo had battled anxiety issues for several years. He twice fell victim to the so-called Steve Blass disease, named after the Pirates pitcher of the 1970s who suddenly and inexplicably lost the ability to control his pitches. The same psychological problem derailed the careers of Mark Wohlers, Rick Ankiel, and Dontrelle Willis.

In 2009, one year after he went 5-3 with a 2.14 earned run average, struck out ninety-six batters in eighty innings, and won Game 2 of the National League Championship Series for us, Kuo suddenly developed Steve Blass disease.

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