Murray Chass: HONORING BUT BETRAYING ROBINSON and DUNCANS’ DREADFUL DEVELOPMENTS

[Jackie] Robinson deserves to be remembered for what he did, but he would not be impressed with MLB’s hiring record in recent years. On the contrary, he’d be disappointed, if not disgusted. If MLB has a minority hiring program, it hasn’t made an impact in recent years.

Since the Philadelphia Phillies named Ruben Amaro Jr. general manager Nov. 3, 2008, teams have hired 14 general managers. All have been white. Of the last 23 managers hired, dating to May 2010, three have been minorities, and one of them, Ozzie Guillen, no longer has his job. Heading into the 2013 season, MLB has only one minority general manager, Amaro, and four minority managers – three African Americans and a Latino.

This is the worst story I have heard in years. It’s a terrible tale of one family, a baseball family, as it happens, but it’s not the baseball aspect of it that matters. No family of any kind should have to experience it.

Dave Duncan, one of the great pitching coaches in baseball history, was forced to relinquish his position with the St. Louis Cardinals under manager Tony La Russa when his wife, Jeanine, was diagnosed in 2011 with a brain tumor.

The tumor was a glioblastoma, as deadly as any that has been found. I wrote about it last week in a column about Michael Weiner, head of the Major League Baseball Players Association, who was diagnosed with a glioblastoma last August.

But Jeanine Duncan was not to be the only member of the Duncan family so afflicted. Last October, 14 months after his mother was diagnosed, Chris, one of the Duncans’ two major league sons, was also found to have a glioblastoma, MLB.com reported. The only difference, Dave Duncan said in a telephone call, is his wife’s tumor is grade 4, his son’s grade 2, the higher number being worse.

Dierkes: GMs Advise Students With Front Office Aspirations

Duke, Daniels, DiPoto, and a cast of undiscovereds.

It’s an email that lands in the MLBTR inbox often: an ambitious high school student dreams of being a Major League GM one day, and asks us for advice.  I decided to ask a bunch of people who would know: current GMs and assistant GMs.  Top execs from 17 teams responded to MLBTR’s query: What one piece of advice would you give to a high school student who hopes to work in baseball operations one day?

Mozeliak’s ‘vision’ earns him extension through 2016 : Sports

“We have total alignment on our vision with this organization and that is to compete year-in, year-out at the major-league level and we know the only way to do that consistently is to have a strong player procurement and development program,” DeWitt said during a news conference Thursday at the team’s spring training. “Over the past six or seven years (under Mozeliak’s guidance) I think we’ve done an excellent job of living up to that vision.”

Diamondbacks Knew about Didi Gregorius’s Elbow

the Arizona Diamondbacks knew of Didi Gregorius’ elbow problem, and they had no trouble trading for him even with that knowledge.

There were initial reports that the Diamondbacks did not do a proper physical or proper medical background check on Gregorius.  That is simply not the case.  Kevin Towers, the DBacks GM, said the team knew that Gregorius had hurt his elbow preparing for the World Baseball Classic.  Gregorius was doing so in December when Arizona acquired him.  They knew.

The most bizarre offseason ever just got weirder

Piecoro: Arizona Diamondbacks didn’t get enough from Atlanta Braves for Justin Upton

My opinion on the deal is right in line with the general consensus: The Diamondbacks didn’t get enough. Which, in so many ways, is incredible to me. After close to 2 1/2 years of on-again/off-again trade discussions involving Upton, this is the deal they settle on? After saying time and again that they’re only going to trade Upton if/when the right package comes along, this is the one they deem the right one?

*This whole off-season seems like a huge overreaction, something Towers said in early December he didn’t feel any pressure to do. This is from a story I wrote just before the winter meetings:

“Even though last year was a disappointing year,” Towers said, “I still think that same ball club, given maybe a different year and a different set of circumstances and doing some of the little things that are hard to measure better and smarter, that we can be a much better ball club.

“I know everybody thinks you have to tweak it here and tweak it there and there are some years you have to, but I still look at my club and am a little dumbfounded (at the results). I think we were a better ball club.”

He mentioned the number of highly regarded prospects in his farm system. He brought up the fact that the organization has no bad contracts. He said his roster has flexibility.

“I really like the state we’re in,” Towers said, “and I don’t want to do something drastic just because we finished .500 last year.”

It seems he’s done exactly that.

AZ Snakepit, McLennan: How have the Diamondbacks done under Kevin Towers

But as we saw in reactions to the Bauer trade, a GM’s reputation is the absolute epitome of, as Janet Jackson (or Eddie Murphy, depending on taste) put it: “What have you done for me lately?” That the Diamondbacks came within a squib of the National League Championship Series last year, while spending only more than the Pirates and Padres in the league, has apparently all been forgotten. Instead, Towers has often been dismissed as “lucky” at best, and incompetent by many. Let’s see if the past two seasons have provided anything to back up those assertions, focusing for data on the simplest input and output: budget and team record.

To do so, we’ll introduce the concepts of Marginal Wins and Marginal Payroll, which was originally developed by the late Doug Pappas, for Baseball Prospectus in 2003.