I’ve been on record several times now saying that John Schuerholz was secretly one of the worst GM’s in baseball for the past decade or so. I admit that this was probably somewhat of a hyperbole (after all, there were always guys like Dave Littlefield around). We can probably say now, looking back on his entire record, that he was adequate. And if people were just saying he was adequate right now, I wouldn’t be writing this post. But we are hearing things like “one of the greatest general managers ever,” and “best GM of the modern era,” so once again I have to step forward and be one of the only lone dissenting voices in the chorus of praise for Schuerholz.

I don’t deny that Schuerholz made some nice trades and signings, particularly early in his tenure with the Braves, but he also made some real clunkers, so I think we can say that on the whole, his record in those departments was pretty average. The Braves did manage to homegrow quite a bit of talent from the farm system during his watch, so he definitely deserves some credit for hiring good minor league personnel and leading some fruitful drafts, but a lot of other people had a hand in those players’ development, and he also did some really questionable things like promote his son beyond all reason.

What we have to realize is that Schuerholz benefitted from three amazing blessings early in his career that had nothing to do with his abilities as a GM - Ted Turner’s money, the once in a century coincidence of three Hall-of-Fame pitchers all falling into his lap at the same time, and the miracle work of pitching coach Leo Mazzone. As the money dried up in the late 90s, Maddux and Glavine moved on in the early 2000s, and especially after Mazzone’s departure in 2005, Schuerholz’s weaknesses as a GM were increasingly exposed.

It’s interesting to see Mazzone get fired by Baltimore a day after Schuerholz quits as GM, for the two men will always be linked in my mind. The Braves won 14 consecutive division crowns, and Schuerholz and Bobby Cox received most of the credit, but I will go to my grave thinking that Mazzone deserves more credit than the other two combined.

Under Leo Mazzone’s tutiledge, scrap-heap nobodies became decent, replacement-level mediocrities became good, good pitchers became great, and great pitchers became gods. I’ve now read three different studies that sliced the numbers different ways, and all came to the conclusion that on average, pitchers who came to the Braves reduced their ERAs by about half a run compared to how they fared before and after.

This is a huge, huge advantage, and one that I don’t see how we can give John Schuerholz much credit for. Every year for 16 years, he would let all his good free agent relievers go, and sign a bunch of nobodies off the scrap heap, and yet the Braves led the league in bullpen ERA year after year.

If Leo Mazzone helped all pitchers by an average of 0.50 off their ERAs, I think it’s safe to say that he probably helped starters a little less than that, and relievers significantly more. I mean, seriously - Kevin Grybowski? Kerry Ligtenberg? Darren Holmes? Chris Hammond? Tim Spooneybarger? Kevin McGlinchy? Mike Bielecki? These are just few examples of the no-name relievers who came to the Braves and had Mariano-Rivera-like seasons, only to suck again as soon as they went to another team. And there were a number of starters who had similar miracle seasons only to suck as soon as they left - Denny Neagle, John Burkett, and Russ Ortiz come to mind most immediately.

Somebody please tell me, how does John Schuerholz deserve credit for miraculous pitching performance after miraculous pitching performance that happened during his tenure, no matter who he signed and threw out there?

Schuerholz employed a similar strategy with position players as he did with relievers. Each year he would let all of his good free agents walk, and pretty much not replace them in any meaningful way, but the Braves would still win the division anyway. Oh sure, he would occasionally pull a trade to fill a hole, if one fell into his lap, but by and large he would just sign some scrap heap guys and sit back and wait for a Braves prospect to fill the hole eventually. This meant that hundreds and hundreds of at-bats got wasted on these fill-in guys - terrible players like Dave Gallagher, Michael Tucker, Tony Graffanino, Keith Lockhart, Gerald Williams, Brian Hunter, Bobby Bonilla, B.J. Surhoff, Rico Brogna, Robert Fick, and Vinny Castilla in his dotage.

Yes, its true, all of those terrible, terrible players I just mentioned were everyday starters for a whole season or more during the Braves’ 14 straight division championship years. Now I know that most championship teams have a player or two who is less than awesome, but these guys were truly, honestly god-awful. Go look them up - their collective average with the Braves must be something like .225. And several of them played first base! Division titles were won in spite of players like these rather than because of them.

But that’s the kind of player Braves fans could expect to see Schuerholz sign the following season after one of their All-Stars left as a free agent. That’s the kind of GM he was. And this tendency only got more pronounced as the money ran out toward the end. Schuerholz just wasn’t that creative a GM.

In fact not creative at all. It got so that in the past few years Schuerholz was so predictable in his behavior that I could call what he was going to do before he did it. Honest-to-god, I predicted he would sign Raul Mondesi to be his starting right-fielder in 2005 before he even did it. And I predicted that he would sign no relievers in 2006 and that the bullpen would fall apart without Mazzone, and it did just that. But most importantly of all, I predicted as soon as Mazzone left that the Braves run as AL East champions was over, and sure enough, it absolutely was.

The bottom line is, Schuerholz was like most other GMs. He did some things right, but he did a lot of other things wrong. He just happened to have the greatest pitching coach of our lifetime on his side, as well Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, and John Smoltz, together on one team for a decade in the prime of their Hall-of-Fame careers.

To paraphrase Danny O in one of his past rebutals to my view, “at least you have to give Schuerholz credit for being a part of a winning formula all those years.”

Well okay, yes, but “the greatest GM of the modern era”? Not even close.

The announcement that John Schuerholz was resigning as GM of the Braves to become the new team president came as a surprise to fans. More than a few are worried that his replacement, former assistant GM Frank Wren, will not be able to pull off some of the same magical moves that have made the Braves so successful.

But before we speculate about the future, let’s take a moment to reflect on the past.

Schuerholz came on just after Bobby Cox stepped down from the front office to get back in the dugout. When Ted Turner and the Braves brought Schuerholz to Atlanta in the fall of 1990 to announce that he would be the new GM, they tried to book him in one of the swankier downtown hotels. But they were disappointed to find out that the presidential suite was not available due to the presence of one George H.W. Bush, who happened to be in town that week. The lesson, as always: you’ve got to lodge for the job you want, not the job you have.
But I digress.

Schuerholz won a number of different ways. He memorably built teams around pitching, but he also put together winning lineups that overcame bad pitching (see 2004). Even though he had a reputation as a wheeler and dealer, there were also plenty of home-grown stars that matured during his tenure. And while he had a fairly large checkbook to pursue big money names, he never was able to spend at the level of the Yankees or Red Sox. That became even more true after AOL-Time Warner bought the team and froze his budget.

And still he was able to produce division winners until the 2006 season.

Here’s a few highlights and lowlights from the Schuerholz era:

December 1990 – Signed free agent 3B Terry Pendleton

Pendleton had just hit .230 for the Cardinals the year before becoming a free agent. The Braves had been so bad for most of the eighties that they had to look up “first place” in the dictionary to understand what it meant. Schuerholz brought him in along with a collection of seasoned veterans (Sid Bream, Rafael Belliard, Otis Nixon, Juan Berenguer, etc.) for $1.7 million, which was less money than he made the previous season. The team was transformed by the new faces as well as the culmination of some talented young arms that the Braves had been grooming since the late eighties. TP hit quickly became the emotional leader. He hit .319 and was the MVP in the worst-to-first season.

December 1992 – Signed Free Agent P Greg Maddux

This certainly won’t be filed under “genius moves that no one expected to pay off” because Maddux was a hot commodity in a fairly rich free agent market. But by bringing him to Atlanta to team up with Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, and Steve Avery, Schuerholz gave the Braves a devastating rotation. Maddux won the Cy Young Award in each of his first three seasons as a Brave and Atlanta fans were treated to great pitching for the next decade or so.

July, 1993 – Traded OF Melvin Nieves, Donnie Elliott, and Vince Moore to the San Diego Padres for 1B Fred McGriff

Can you say fire sale? The Braves had too many prospects, the Padres had too much payroll. A match was made. San Fran was sitting atop a 9-game lead in the NL West when McGriff gave the Braves the spark they needed. (Literally: The press box caught fire his first night, delaying the start of the game for an hour. The Atlanta Fire Department was named the Player of The Game on TBS, even though McGriff hit a game-tying homer that rallied the Braves to the win.) The Crime Dog had a new moniker (Fire Dog) and a new home. All he did was hit .310 with 19 dingers and 55 RBI in 68 games for the Braves. The Braves won the NL West in one of the best pennant races of all time.

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Earlier this morning, it was reported that the Atlanta Braves will make a major announcement today at 3:30pm. Naturally, I wondered what it could be. Did Teixeria get an extention beyond 2008? Did they quietly change course and resign Andruw Jones? Was it discovered that Julio Franco was actually a childhood friend of Jesus of Nazareth?

According to Ken Rosenthal, it’s none of the above. It appears that John Schuerholz is stepping down as General Manager of the Braves.

The architect of the Atlanta teams that won 14 straight division titles as well as the Kansas City Royals teams of the 1980s seems to be calling it quits at the age of 67.

It has been rumored that Schuerholz is a prime candidate to replace Bud Selig as Commissioner of MLB in 2009.

This could, of course, also create further speculation regarding free agent Tom Glavine, who reportedly became upset with Schuerholz last year for revealing in his memoir Built to Win a private conversation that the two men had exchanged after Glavine signed his contract with the Mets in 2002 during which the 300-game winner expressed immediate regret for leaving Atlanta*.

*Although I think he was going back either way  

Braves team officials sat down with members of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow-PUSH Coalition on Monday to talk about the team’s lack of African-American players.

Rainbow-PUSH representative Joe Beasley said the Braves, and specifically GM John Schuerholz, could do more to recruit black players.

From the AJC:

“As I expected, [Schuerholz's] idea is the bottom line: I’ll put the best 40 men I can get wherever I can get them from on the field, and that’s fair,” said Beasley. “But the fact of the matter is if they put resources into recruiting here in the United States, and more specifically here in Atlanta, there are talented players here.”

Maybe Beasley is right, although no team works harder at recruiting local players than the Braves (see Francouer, McCann, Davies).

But is it really a big deal that there aren’t many African American players in the MLB? There are plenty of dark skinned players. There are players from South America, Japan, Korea, Cuba, the Dominican Republic — the list goes on and on.

And there’s the rub: this isn’t about race, it’s about nationality. Rainbow-PUSH’s problem isn’t that there aren’t enough dark skinned players, it’s that there aren’t enough African-American players.

But so what? There aren’t nearly as many white players in the NBA these days, and of the handful that are left, many are foreign. But you don’t hear much complaining about that.

The truth is, Jackie Robinson’s legacy lives. He opened the door to players of color and, thanks to him, today baseball has a ton of players of color. It is one of the most diverse sports out there. That diversity just doesn’t happen to include many African-Americans. Which is a bummer. But it’s certainly not racism.

It must be a slow month at the Rainbow-PUSH offices.

Braves GM John Schuerholz is telling Atlanta fans to be patient. The team is still going to make improvements. They’re just not going to rush.

“We’re going to operate in the same way we’ve operated and feel comfortable doing it,” Schuerholz said by phone from his vacation home in Naples, Fla. “We feel like we can continue to make good choices and good moves.”

He wouldn’t discuss specifics or refute rumors, as usual. Schuerholz doesn’t operate like that. But he did indicate the Braves would not be involved in the posting process for Japanese left-hander Kei Igewa, whose Hanshin Tigers team will review blind bids posted by major league teams this week.

Translation: The market is blowing up. Free agents are signing for way more than they’re worth. And, at the going rate, the Braves (an organization that has been up for sale for over a year) can’t afford to sign anybody who’s any good. So they’re going to try to trade for what they need. Or, they’re going to just cross their fingers and hope that some of their young guys step up big next season. That’s right, we’re looking at you, Jeff Francoeur, you turkey.

Oh, one last thing. If you’re a Braves fan and you died a little inside watching your team miss the playoffs for the first time in 14 years last season, and you’re frustrated that the team doesn’t seem to be making any improvements this offseason, and you’re terrified of the prospect of a 2007 starting rotation that is dependent on aging John Smoltz and recovering Mike Hampton, then you probably won’t be thrilled to hear that the Braves are raising ticket prices.