Four and Twenty

You're absolutely right. However, that focuses on the tendency for individuals to be chiefly concerned with their own well-being. I'm referring to the concern of the manager for the well-being of the individual. I'm sure you have had both good and bad bosses. Ask yourself, under which did you perform best? The point is Maddon is a guy known being among the best at providing an environment that promotes the well being of the individual. There is real, near tangible value in that. Value that makes a difference. You can't put a number on it, but you can listen to the testimonials of his former players.

You basically just agreed with me while trying to disagree. Which is understandable, because you missed the point entirely by reading what was theoretical in absolute terms. People within an office also make different wages and some have more control over their futures than others. You can provide as many differences as you'd like. None of them change the fact that both are a collection of human beings with a designated leader working together toward a common goal. However, that wasn't the point. I wasn't claiming that baseball is like any other workplace. Rather, the role of the manager is the same regardless of the business. Managers of any profession manage people and their work environment with the goal of achieving the best possible results. In baseball, that goes for decisions made on and also off the field. The term for it is "clubhouse culture." Deny it all you want, but there is real value in having someone who can handle the myriad interpersonal dynamics within an organization. This is even more so in baseball for the very reasons you offered, among many others. Fans, especially those who are sabremetrically focused, tend to neglect this value because it cannot be quantified. Theo, someone who is often praised for his prowess in blending old fashioned scouting with modern analytics, understands this and presumably recognizes that value in Maddon.

I see this notion all over the place and it always fails to recognize the role of manager beyond game time decision making. If horrible managers can find themselves in the postseason, why bother trying to quantify the credit a manager deserves? Perhaps the only way to truly discern the good from the bad is recognizing their ability to manage people off the field. Think of a baseball team as any other work environment. While a manager isn't going to write a report for an employee, they will have an affect on the quality of their work. Employees respond to the atmosphere of the work environment their manager provides. The healthier and more positive the environment, the better the work produced. Conversely, the more dysfunctional and negative the environment, the poorer the work. Baseball is no different. By all accounts, this is an area Maddon excels in and what separates him from the rest of the pack.

Oh, hey, back on topic... Absolutely no word lately regarding the possible posting of Tanaka by the Golden Eagles? Matsuzaka was posted November 2nd, 2006, and bidding for Darvish ended on December 11th, 2011 (I didn't bother looking further than Wikipedia.org for this information, I must admit), so I suppose we still have somewhat of a wait ahead of us.

this should not go unappreciated Apparently, I have an innate affinity for the use of alliteration, as I hadn't noticed that line until after it was written. Though, regardless of the alliteration, I do believe it describes his writing style as succinctly as humanly possible. Well, "[expletive] crazed" may be more succinct, but not as descriptive.

Where is Purple Fanta shirt guy when you need him?

If you are going to continue to compose these long, rambling posts with tangential thoughts on an excess of erratically sequenced subjects, take the effort to add a space between your paragraphs. I don't find the nature of your often non sequitur thought process to be particularly irritating, but the lack of spacing is egregious to the point of causing my eyes to hurt. Please, it takes a minimal amount of effort. To illustrate, you pressed the buttons on your keyboard 2982 times to compose the quote above. I pressed the buttons on my keyboard 10 times to format it to be readable. I don't post often, though I am an intermittently frequent lurker and know at times you are ostracized. That is not my intent in writing this, but rather I think everyone here would agree that a slightly longer post is preferable to one that is hard to read.

hahaha Fixed. But maybe "Drops from Jupiter" is better. Yeah, it is.

Drops of Jupiter.

I really like all the CGI used for player pictures instead of, you know, real ones. Also, from the same site, did you guys know? Cool.

We down to 15% yet?

Adjust that burka.

Yes. Jed and Theo are operating in the entire spectrum. All we're seeing is red.

And MLB Trade Rumors misread that and reported that they didn't. rofl I was wondering if I saw that correctly. Definitely puzzled me briefly until I refreshed.

No Valentine? I know he was hard on Castro (as was Quade at times) during that game he was broadcasting, but I don't see that as necessarily a negative.

And I'll go for the drunken trifecta reply: It is absolutely amazing Ricketts pulled this off. Friedman would have been great, but this coup could not have played out better. The brightest era of Cubs baseball has dawned.

if we hired francona it would be too much boston. theo is all the boston we need. The Ricketts brought in this leadership heirarchy to completely and fully emulate the Red Sox. And truthfully, the more Boston the better (minus the petty, vindictative megalomaniac ownership). The similarities between the two franchises are aplenty, except the Cubs have no other big market competitor to contend with. It is the choice model to copy, and that's why they hired the men they did.

A year of Quade, to give Francona (I'm on board with never, ever calling him Tito) some time off, then Francona when the salaries fully come off the books (aside from Soriano). Or just fire Quade and hire Francona.

Yes. I was driving from Big Sur (45 minutes south of Monterey, CA) to San Diego yesterday and caught up on about 40 pages of it while riding as passenger. The last 15 pages have been borderline unbearable in places. I couldn't hold back making some smart ass comment any longer. You spent hours reading 40 pages of NSBB while one of the most beautiful stretches of highway the world has to offer passed by right out the window. Wow. I live in Big Sur, California, with an ocean view 700 feet above the Pacific. Nothing south of it compares, especially by night. So yes, I spent my time reading NSBB threads while driving through LA traffic. Wow, sure.

Go look at Laura's most recent posts and you will not have missed much otherwise.

Yes. I was driving from Big Sur (45 minutes south of Monterey, CA) to San Diego yesterday and caught up on about 40 pages of it while riding as passenger. The last 15 pages have been borderline unbearable in places. I couldn't hold back making some smart ass comment any longer.

Might have something to do with your user name. Just sayin. I'll stop derailing (though it doesn't appear to be much of an issue in this thread), but I should mention that the username has a dual meaning. 4+20 is a CSNY song, as well as the time I used to like partaking in a certain activity frequently. Though that frequency has dwindled to all but never these days. Again: THEO FN EPSTEIN

Yes. It would be more worthwhile if I bothered to post trite and asinine drivel at a rate of roughly 3,244 posts a year. Enough. THEO FN EPSTEIN.

Who are you? I was wondering the same of you. Weirdo. I've been lurking here for probably 6-7 years and I can't remember any of your twenty two thousand posts. Now that is weird. Actually, it isn't. Anyway: THEO FN EPSTEIN

43% of the jackassery afoot is his doing. I crunched the numbers with science. You've blinded me. Though not as much as some of his posts in this thread.