JP Riccardi interviewed in Worcester Telegram
by Tom Dakers on Mar 15, 2010 6:50 PM EDT
in Toronto Blue Jays Analysis
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PrintEveryone's favorite former GM has a little profile in his local paper and he says a couple of things I thought were interesting:
"As soon as a trade is made," Ricciardi said, "there are 50,000 people blogging about how the general manager did a bad job, and they don't understand what he was up against from a standpoint of what the ownership wanted to do, what kind of money he had to work with, how he was putting his team together based on a four- or five-year deal, what the player wanted."
So first I think "hey, JP reads me". I mean I must be one of the 50,000 idiot bloggers he's speaking of, right? But second, what he is really telling us here is 'any bad deals I made really weren't my fault'. Just because a person is GM of a team, it doesn't mean he should be judged by what he does as GM. Fair enough. I'd also like to say any stupid posts I put up really aren't my fault, I was forced to do them by the ownership team of SB Nation. Because, of course, no one is at fault for anything they do.
Later he says:
"I'm not saying you have to have money to be successful," Ricciardi said, "but if you don't have money you'd better be willing to go seven or eight years of bad baseball before you start seeing the fruits of those No. 1 picks getting up to the majors. I'd go into another job with my eyes a lot more open and probably do a little more homework on who the ownership group is and what their expectations were because that's what ultimately controls everything."
Now this is the guy that got the job by telling ownership he could win while reducing payroll. Then when he didn't win after letting Carlos Delgado go, he told management that they had to spend money and he signed a few high priced free agents. That didn't work and he's surprised that management wanted to bring salaries down again?
He says we could have won if we went 7 or 8 years of bad baseball first. Or maybe he is telling us we are in for that many years of bad baseball. I know ownership didn't do great for him, that last year but they had allowed him to ramp up payroll in the years before and it didn't workout.
All in all I'll feel sorry for the guy another time.
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what I find really interesting
about his statements is that the blogs were actually some of the people giving Ricciardi the fairest shake he got. Including us, but others too. We did call J.P. out when he made what we thought was a bad move, but we were the ones giving him credit when he did something well. I think it’s interesting that he makes blogs the whipping boy when we were the fairest to him and Richard Griffin was making every single piece he wrote a hatchet job on J.P.
"Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our closed rooms... The game of ball is glorious." - Walt Whitman
Go away JP
We have a real GM now.
"I've only been in love with a beer bottle and a mirror" - Sid Vicious.
by craig in calgary on Mar 15, 2010 9:52 PM EDT reply actions
how many of the following are JPRicciardi prodigees? (just curious)
Rzepczynski
Cecil
Snider
Lind
Romero
Arencibia (if he works out?)
maybe Dopirak
am I missing any? much as I think AA may be a better fit for the team at this point, if this is JP’s legacy, perhaps not so bad? thoughts?
shortcomings (1) SS pipe (2) 3B pipe (3) OF pipe
well, most of them
maybe not Dopirak – he joined the team when JP was GM, of course, but I hadn’t heard that Ricciardi was particularly involved and I don’t think he would have been. Murphy was the most involved, from what I’ve heard.
Rzep, maybe not, he was drafted under Ricciardi but I’ve read that generally the GMs aren’t too involved after the first couple of rounds and Zep was a 5th rounder.
Cecil, Snider, Romero, and Arencibia are all Ricciardi.
Lind was a 3rd rounder so I don’t know how involved Ricciardi was. I’d say he deserves at least partial credit.
Also, don’t forget Aaron Hill, another Ricciardi 1st rounder and Shaun Marcum (3rd round).
Of course, you could list some picks that didn’t pan out – Russ Adams, and a few that haven’t worked out yet – David Purcey and Kevin Ahrens. I haven’t looked at all the other teams, but Riccardi seemed pretty adept at drafting players who could contribute at the major-league level.
"Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our closed rooms... The game of ball is glorious." - Walt Whitman
Shortcomings
JP in a nutshell.
The Good:
Excellent judge of underrated, underappreciated potential on other teams, especially involving pitching (Scott Downs, Justin Speier, Jeremy Accardo, Shawn Camp, Ted Lilly)
Excellent judge of pitching at the draft level (Brett Cecil, Ricky Romero, Brad Mills)
Good management of draft and scouting at the draft/independent level for pitching (Scott Richmond, Marc Rzepczynski, Tim Collins, Jesse Carlson)
Solid ability to pick up good utility pieces at little cost (John MacDonald, Joe Inglett, Marco Scutaro)
Solid ability to draft bats (Adam Lind, Aaron Hill, Travis Snider)
Good management with key players to sign quality contracts (Roy Halladay, Aaron Hill, Scott Downs)
The Bad:
Poor ability to sign impact free agents (Frank Thomas, BJ Ryan, Billy Koch)
Poor ability to communicate with players (Wells/Glaus ‘killing the team’ in 2006, players/Gaston blowup in 2009)
Unwillingness to re-assess players targeted on a year by year basis (Brad Wilkerson, Kevin Mench, Shannon Stewart)
Overpaying unnecessarily after big years (Eric Hinske, Josh Towers, Reed Johnson)
The Ugly:
His giant mouth that caused more damage to the organization than any other move made (Adam Dunn, It’s not lying if we know the truth)
Gutting the scouting and talent assessment organization (2001-2204 mandate which could have been reversed at any time past that)
There is one big thing JP gets bashed for which is not on this list is Vernon Wells contract. While it is a bad one in hindsight, especially at the time, it was all but mandated by ownership, and less than what the Yankees, Dodgers and Mets were rumoured to be prepared to offer.
So yeah, there were a lot of good things Ricciardi did, and there’s a lot of positives the organization can take from his tenure. But there’s also a lot of moves that maybe says he wasn’t ready to be the head of a whole organization, and his value was oddly likely more in the type of job he held in Oakland, heading up scouting and assessment, helping on the contractual side, and letting a more diplomatic and disciplined person serve as GM.
a solid analysis
The ironic and sad aspect to all that is that, according to “Chasing Stienbrenner”, JP was one of the most well liked guys in the game before getting the job. It seems he really let the stresses of the job bring out the worst in his personality.
he doesn't come off all that well in Moneyball
but I wonder if you’re not right and if Ricciardi felt like he had to be someone he wasn’t to be a GM. It never really felt his media personality fit him all that well, and it doesn’t really go with the family man we know he is.
"Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our closed rooms... The game of ball is glorious." - Walt Whitman
I think he’s a little too thin skinned to be a General Manager. I really liked how, even when he was getting villified, he was still willing to do radio shows with the fans, take tough questions. But when criticized, it was like he needed to fill the dead air, make his position irrefutable by stretching the truth as opposed to saying less and moving on. After all, he’d been an undisputed wunderkind for Beane in Oakland, and because he was a functionary as opposed to the GM, I don’t think his abilities ever really got questioned until he hit Toronto.
If a GM can’t take powerless bloggers ripping him up, then he probably shouldn’t be a GM. That has to be the worst excuse for his poor management that I ever heard, blame it on the fans?
in fairness to J.P.
he didn’t actually blame it on the fans, he said that the fans couldn’t appreciate how difficult it is to do the job.
"Look at me! I'm Tomokazu Ohka of the Montreal Expos!"
All in all what he said would happendid not happen , nothing else matters.
His plan , the time frame to win , we were close about ten wins shy a few times in the best div. In baseball
lucas
by TorontoBluejays10 on Mar 16, 2010 10:04 AM EDT via mobile reply actions
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