Reminiscing about the Lou Gorman Years

I was a teenager at the time, and even I knew Beehive was a hitters' graveyard. I went cataplectic when they traded Bagwell, because he absolutely raked there (and was just one year out of Hartford). Scott Cooper sucked, and Gorman should've known it.

Dave Owen...wow. I liked Morton alright, too. Kind of an earlier Casey Fossum. The internal talent evaluation on Gorman's staffs was really terrible. They got lucky with Clemens (who was really self-made), but had a series of stupid mistakes in Tudor, Ojeda, and Bagwell. Bagwell bothered me the most because he was so clearly a good hitter...Gorman just didn't have the sense to look at the stadium (or the ridiculous OBP...the same thinking that left Boggs rotting in the minors two years too long).

I think the Sox have improved tremendously on internal evaluation. And, most of baseball has gotten a lot better at drafting and signing talent. So my tendency with a guy like Travis is to be optimistic. It's just a sense, but it seems the washout rate for quality players (based on pre-professional hype) is lower, and the failures declare earlier in their careers. Basically, I see Travis's hitting prowess and consistency as very positive predictors, more so than the raw stats alone.

I remember the "don't let the door hit your ass on the way out" heave-ho to Sullivan. I agree that Gorman chose an unfortunate situation for himself. And he was actually pretty good at evaluating major league talent coming back. But they really struggled with core development, and they had a penchant for trading away great talents for minimal return (with the exception of Easler, who nevertheless was only around for two years). But yeah, their amateur scouting was excellent.

Unfortunately, the understanding of the role of the minor league system as core development just wasn't there at all under Gorman. Which is odd, given the Clemens-Boggs-Rice-Evans-Hurst-Boyd-Tudor-Ojeda-Lynn bunch from the early 70s to early '80s. They were just always hamstringing themselves one or two players short of a great team, and then struggling to spend ($ or prospects) to get that "one guy" who they'd had two or three years earlier and just traded away for an aging veteran who was supposed to put them over the top. The Andersen acquisition, on the heels of Wllie McGee to the A's ("where would we play him?!") was the pinnacle of their reactionary strategy. When the well inevitably dried up under Gorman, and the core that he inherited and afforded him his success aged and declined, they became a truly awful team from '91-'94. I remember those days well enough that I can appreciate Cherington's approach to the minors, even if his MLB team construction was...ahhh...suboptimal.

It's funny to say this of an organization that came within a strike of winning the 1986 world championship (as underdogs against a Mets team that won 108 games), and then won division titles in 1988 and 1990, but from my perspective the Red Sox were a very dysfunctional organization all during the Sullivan-LeRoux-Yawkey/Harrington era played out from 1980, when Lynn and Fisk left town, through the autumn of 1993 when Gorman was fired, Sullivan was bought out, and Duquette was hired away from Montreal and given carte blanche to run the baseball side of the ball club.  

I blame this dysfunction, more than Gorman, for the decline of the team in the early 1990s. You're right: Gorman chose an unfortunate situation because while he had the title of general manager, he was not allowed to shape the organization into a modern one.  His background was impeccable, too: he trained under Harry Dalton in Baltimore, which pioneered standardized minor-league instruction (at least in the American League) and produced a home-grown dynasty; then Gorman (with the support of Ewing Kauffman and Cedric Tallis) built a top-tier player development organization with the Royals from scratch; and, after Seattle, where as GM of an expansion team with no money for free agent signings (unlike the Marlins of 1997 and the D-Backs of 2001) he predictably struggled, he built a first-class player development and scouting group with the Mets from 1980-83. Granted, they had very high draft picks, but they hit on guys up and down the draft and were a very productive farm system.

Here, he was hired during the middle of the LeRoux-Sullivan/Yawkey 1984 power struggle and, as I said before, kept in place the department heads (Kasko and Ed Kenney Sr.) Sullivan had depended on. Both men were highly respected locally and in the media, but neither of them believed in the instruction-intensive player development concept that Dalton had in place in Baltimore. (And paging through old Baseball Blue Blook Red Sox guides of the mid-1980s, the number of slow, RHH, college senior first-basemen is staggering -- Dick Gernert and Norm Zauchin and Jack Baker types redux!)) It's interesting to note that Duquette was also a Harry Dalton guy, a fellow Amherst alum who broke into the game in Dalton's front office in Milwaukee. When DD began changing the guard in the Red Sox' scouting and player development groups, and longtime Red Sox hires abruptly retired or were moved sideways, the grumbling was pretty loud. (I think Lee Stange filed a lawsuit.) Duquette made it all worse, of course, with his tone-deaf and control-freak tendencies (I think the guy wrote his own Wiki page, it was so laudatory -- at least when I read it last a few years ago).  But the Red Sox did not have a system-wide field coordinator of instruction in place until Duquette hired Bob Schaefer in 1994. (A guy the Duke would later clash with, and fire, of course.)

So, anyway, Travis!  Whatever he turns out to be, at least he'll be in an organization that will (I trust) project him a little more accurately than what it might have done had he been born a generation earlier ...

Great summary of the bad old days. Those very good teams were built on the back of terrific amateur scouting, only to be sabotaged by the dinosaurs up top. Sweet Lou was quotable and did pretty well with his situation, but it was a mess to start. That they couldn't win a WS despite the ridiculously impressive run of players they had from the early '70s to early '90s (many of whom, like Bagwell, Schilling, Lynn, Tudor, etc were traded away) speaks to the organizational dysfunction. It's amazing what a change the new ownership has made. Guys like Travis (1b without power) or Betts never would've moved the needle. And forget about int'l signings like Bogaerts or Espinoza. Dombrowski makes me a little nervous as a wheeler-dealer, but I at least trust him to know and properly evaluate his own players.