Front Office Frenzy

Baseball America has placed information on their website that I’ve dreamed of having access to for years. This information that I am currently salivating over is housed in a section of their website named the ‘Baseball Executive Database’. In this database resides the name of nearly every General Manager and Scouting Director for every major league ball club going back to 1950. I have never seen such a comprehensive listing of front office personnel anywhere.

I went first to the hometown Orioles and found that the first general manager ever to be officially fired in Oriole history was Hank Peters on October 5th, 1987. Peters had GM’ed the Orioles starting in 1976 and had overseen two pennants and one World Series winner. The last five years of Peters’ reign saw Oriole wins plummet downward from ninety-eight in 1983 to 85 – 83 – 73 and finally to 67 in his final year. The seventy-three win 1986 season had been the Orioles’ first losing season since the 1967 campaign.

Flipping to the San Francisco Giant page I was struck by the long tenures of a number of Giant GM’s. Chub Feeney, Horace Stoneham and Spec Richardson were the only GM’s from 1950 through the halfway point of 1981. Most recently Brian Sabean’s been at the helm for eight full seasons. Then I saw that Sabean’s name was highlighted – a hyperlink, which must mean more information! So I clicked on Sabean’s name and a listing of all of the jobs he’s had in his career appeared before me. How many people out there knew that Sabean was the Yankee Director of Scouting in the late 80’s and early 90’s?

Then there’s the page of the oft-maligned first and just recently former GM of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, Chuck LaMar. Unknown to me LaMar served under John Schuerholz from 1992 through 1995 as the Director of Player Development. No wonder LaMar got a shot at a GM job.

So be a nerd like me and enjoy this treasure trove of information. I think I’ll start compiling general manager win-loss records…