Of such events baseball history is altered:
It was 1976, and John Schuerholz was farm director of the Kansas City Royals. Joe Burke was the general manager, and Dayton Moore was a 9-year-old Royals fan in Wichita, Kan.
“A couple years before that, I was an assistant to Lou Gorman,” Schuerholz said, referring to a club executive. “We were at a meeting in Chicago. I had been given permission to talk to the Yankees. They called. It was Cedric Tallis, who had been hired by Gabe Paul.”
Schuerholz knew Tallis from their time together in Kansas City, where Tallis had been the first general manager of the 1969 expansion franchise.
“Pat Gillick left the Yankees and Cedric recommended me to take that job” – coordinator of player development and scouting. “They called to ask permission. Joe asked me if I wanted to interview. In Chicago I got on the phone with Cedric and Gabe and they offered me a job that blew my socks off.
“I accepted that position and came back to Kansas City. I went into Joe and said, ‘They offered me that opportunity, and I accepted the job.’ Joe said, ‘That’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made in your life.’ He said, ‘Give me 24 hours.’”
Burke died in 1992 and isn’t around to explain his warning to Schuerholz, but he was in baseball when George Steinbrenner bought his way onto the baseball scene and had witnessed enough to issue the warning. Wanting to save the 35-year-old Schuerholz from the Steinbrenner syndrome, Burke, as quiet and low key as the Yankees’ owner was gruff and bombastic, spoke to the Royals’ owner Ewing Kauffman, then promoted Gorman and elevated Schuerholz into his position.
“He offered me a position that was the best I ever hoped to have in Kansas City,” Schuerholz said in a telephone interview last Thursday. “We loved Kansas City and we loved the Royals.”
So how might Schuerholz’s history and the Yankees’ history have turned out had he taken the Yankees’ job? Given Steinbrenner’s tumultuous history with general managers – Paul, Al Rosen, Tallis, Gene Michael, Bill Bergesch, Murray Cook, Clyde King, Woody Woodward, all in what would have been the Schuerholz decade – Schuerholz almost certainly would have become part of the rotation, but just as certainly he would have lost his place in the rotation to make room for another scapegoat.
Meanwhile, the fellow who got the job Schuerholz didn’t take didn’t last long in it, suffering a nervous breakdown.
As for Schuerholz, had he taken the Yankees’ job, another phase of baseball history, at least as significant as the Yankees’ part of it, would have been altered. After producing two division titles and the 1985 World Series championship in Kansas City, general manager Schuerholz moved onto Atlanta and oversaw an unparalleled 14 consecutive division titles and the 1995 World Series championship.
Stan Kasten was president of the Braves in 1990 and was struggling with a bad team that was getting worse. Bobby Cox had previously managed the Braves and also served separately as their general manager. He began his second term as manager in 1990, descending from his office nearly halfway through that season.
Kasten and Schuerholz were headed home after an owners’ meeting, Schuerholz recalled, and he had a car but Kasten didn’t so “Stan and I shared a car to the airport. He told me he intended to keep Bobby Cox as manager and he said, ‘I’m looking for a bright young general manager. You have a lot of contacts. Think about candidates.”
As often happens in these situations, the person who is asked for recommendations winds up with the job, and that’s what happened with Schuerholz.
“The Royals were going through an ownership flux,” Schuerholz said. “Mr. K’s health wasn’t good. He didn’t want the franchise to leave Kansas City. He found Avron Fogelman to be part-owner. But there was an unsettled circumstance that was taking hold of the organization. A transition plan was put in place that I would take over the role that Joe Burke had. I was selected as the heir apparent to Joe.”
In other words, Schuerholz was to become the club president.
“It didn’t feel right to me,” he said. “It felt wrong. I began talking to my wife about it. I told Joe what had happened and asked permission to talk to the Braves. He said you have to talk to Mr. K. Mr. K. said if that’s what you want to do you have permission.”
Schuerholz said the idea of going to Atlanta was “exciting and attractive to me. It was the best thing I ever did in my life.”
It turned out to be pretty good for Dayton Moore, too.
“I take the job, I come to Atlanta, Paul Snyder tells me about this young college coach in Virginia who is so bright and is interested in getting into professional baseball,” Schuerholz said, referring to the Braves’ scouting director. “He wants to be a scout. I met him over the phone. We hired him.”
But Schuerholz went further. “I said you can’t have this guy living in Virginia. You want him to help form the organization. Get him involved. He came into the office and became one of my two top assistants.
He would talk to me about positions. Eventually his opportunity came. He eventually took the Kansas City job.”
Moore became the Royals’ general manager in 2006, replacing Allard Baird.
“When the Royals had a general manager vacancy David Glass reached out to John and requested permission,” the 47-year-old Moore said, referring to the Royals owner. “I had no desire to leave Atlanta. I enjoyed my time there, enjoyed the people I worked with.
“My desire to be a general manager was not that strong. I was enjoying what I was doing. I met with the Glasses because the Royals were my boyhood team. It wasn’t something I was born to want.”
Moore was named the Royals’ general manager May 30, 2006. Sixteen months later, Schuerholz moved from the Braves’ g.m. office to club president. Frank Wren, an assistant general manager, succeeded him. Could Moore have been that person instead had he remained with the Braves?
“Who knows?” Moore asked in response to the question. “You just never know. I’m sure somebody discussed it. If we had continued to win and they were satisfied with my work….”
“I could be going down that path and maybe have been considered but I had to go somewhere to prove to myself, if not to the baseball world, myself as a competitor that could go somewhere and win.”
Moore said he could have stayed in Atlanta – he would most likely be general manager by now because Wren was fired last year. “We could have played it safe and stayed there,” he said, “and proved myself, but I figured I’d try to win somewhere else and take the seed that had been planted.”
“I was raised by Paul Snyder and John,” he added. “They sowed skills with me and groomed me as a baseball man. But I felt the best way to honor them was to go somewhere else and prove we could win. If I had stayed in Atlanta, I would have been very happy. But I felt leaving the nest was better.”
As he spoke to me Friday, Moore had the Royals in the World Series for the second successive October. Two days later, his team was one victory from winning the World Series.
As for the possibility of his having stayed in Atlanta, Schuerholz said, “His time to become general manager happened faster than my time to stop being general manager. It was time to spread his wings. I felt that was a perfect place for him. Based on what I knew about the community, I thought that was a great place for him. Now he’s where Burke was, where I was.
The job he’s done is a wonderful story.”
MLB’S SOS: SAME OLD STORY
In the early years of this web site, it occasionally prompted comments that were vile and obscene. I eventually concluded that the comments came from ignorant young readers who understood metrics but not English. They eventually stopped trying to read the columns that appeared here.
With one e-mail from a regular reader last week, the stench of those so-called readers has evaporated:
“I’m impressed at the impact you have – you’ve been writing about the failure of teams to hire people of color for managing and GM jobs, and finally MLB listened. Black hired by the Nationals, Green by the Padres, and Mattingly, a Dodger Blue guy, by the Marlins. Now the Dodgers should hire Dallas Green or Roy White, or maybe Vida Blue.”
For that reader’s cleverness, I provide an update on the hiring scorecard after a flurry of appointments last week:
4 new managers – all white
11 general managers and other executives –10 white, 1 Latino
3 club presidents – all white
Total – 18 (17 white, 1 Latino)
Conclusion: The numbers are a testament to the genuine level of the diversity efforts of Commissioner Rob Manfred.