Soccer Dad

A head for baseball?

Last year, Baseball Musings linked to a Baltimore Sun article (no longer available online) on the Orioles' use of psychological testing to determine which players to draft.
(More on this here, here and here.) What brings me back to this, is not the Orioles' recent tailspin, at least not exactly. It's a paragraph in Thomas Boswell's recent ode to Sam Perlazzo, the Oriole's new interim manager:

On one hand, the Orioles could pick handsome Lee Mazzilli, the ex-Mets center fielder known as the "Italian Stallion," who was completely unqualified to be a major league manager. But he'd been a first base coach for Joe Torre's Yankees and could spout cliches during a four-hour wow-'em interview about the power of a positive attitude. Ironically, the Orioles' other obvious choice was to pick Perlozzo, perhaps the most demonstrably qualified man in baseball.

In the original Boswell column he wasn't so down on Mazzilli, but more on that later. What struck me here was the "...power of the positive attitude." Was Mazzilli hired because Beattie and Flanagan saw that he was with their psychological program? If so, what are the chances that their hypothesis will outlive the season (and will they be general managing after the 2005 season)?
Anyway, for those who are curious, here is Boswell's first Mazzilli column, "Known more than only by name." He writes there:

You can call Beattie and Flanagan daring, or, if Mazzilli fails, you can nickname them "Dumb" and Dumber" for tearing up the standard script and going with their gut. But, for once during the Angelos regime, intelligent career baseball people have been put in charge of the club and, in this instance, they've picked their man for baseball reasons.

And now that it hasn't worked out, is Angelos ever going to let his baseball people the same freedom again? Yikes!

Posted by SoccerDad at August 7, 2005 06:44 AM | TrackBack