Ex-Astros President Tal Smith and former Astros Manager Bill Virdon
In reaction to the column I wrote this week on “Moneyball,” a reader identified as Gary has written the following as a comment on the article:
“Stats can tell you about 90% of what you need to know about established players. Projecting amateurs and minor leaguers is a different story. And, I’m sorry, but this must be said – Tal Smith has all but destroyed the Astros. It’s obvious the game passed him him by decades ago.”
Gary, forgive me, but when anyone tells me something is obvious that I still don’t see, I have to question: Am I just stupid here? Or do I first need to raise some questions of my own before I jump to that conclusion. So, please indulge me.
Are you saying that the current shape of the Astros roster and the longstanding decline of talent in the club’s minor league pipeline is all the result of Tal Smith’s out-of-touch inability to judge, sign, and cultivate competitive talent with no help or interference from his owner or supportive staff? Are you suggesting that Smith has no idea what is needed to make a contemporary MLB team competitive for a pennant and World Series trip through the playoffs? Are you suggesting that our worn out saddle on the now-in-its-last-year-multi-season contract with Carlos Lee is the fault of Tal Smith’s out-of-touch senior view on major league baseball?
I’m not writing today to simply defend Tal Smith. He doesn’t need any help from me on that score. I am writing to question any conclusion that the Astros’ current status is the result of poor judgment on Tal Smith’s part, with no help from circumstances and decision-making that went far beyond his individual control as President of Baseball Operations.
I don’t claim to know Tal Smith in-depth beyond our occasional baseball discussions over the years, but I have to admit to some favorable impression of his ideas on what a baseball club needs – and I have been very impressed with his open and routine use of external consultants over time on the assessment of both contract players and amateur prospects. Tal always maintained his lines with out-of-the-orgnization people like me. He never criticized anyone within his decision-making loop to me for anything that didn’t work out as he might have hoped.
It’s hard to see how any employed top baseball person in any organization today can deal with the impact of owners or market prices on talent coming into play and overriding any best laid plans of the hired baseball planning leader, but I would certainly like to know what the best modern solution to these ills might be. Unless you, or someone else, can show us how Tal Smith was not up-to-speed in specific terms as a baseball operations leader, I’ll just have to place myself in the “stupid” category for my failure to see the obvious.
Now, once upon a time, Cy Young pitched in the first World Series of 1903. On days he didn’t pitch, he helped sell tickets at the gate to the other games played in Boston. Not once did I ever hear Tal Smith say, “We need a Number One Starter in our rotation who also knows how to make change.” Had Tal said something like that, I would have had to agree. He needed to retire.
What’s really behind the bitterness that some people seem to have for Tal Smith? Is it simply the fact that the franchise went a half century with Tal Smith prominently in the picture without winning a single World Series?
Easy targets are hard to miss.
How much longer will it be before some Smith-hater decides to celebrate their resentment further by proposing that the Astros level Tal’s Hill from the centerfield landscape at Minute Maid Park?
Still, I have to finish where I started: I just wonder what you have in mind when you say that it is “obvious the game passed him (Tal Smith) by decades ago?” Do we simply reach that conclusion based upon age? If that’s it, you’ve got me too.
Tags: Tal Smith
The Pecan Park Eagle 
January 15, 2012 at 4:21 pm |
I think some may have thought Tal was a figurehead that was just being kept around by Drayton as a good old boy that really played little purpose other than to chat it up with Drayton.
I may be 100% wrong on this assumption but it was my perception. Is Tal to be blamed for the Astros current position? No way – he got to stay in a job he loved and Drayton wouldn’t have kept him if he didn’t enjoy the insight Tal gave. I think Mr. Crane just is trying to put his on stamp on things and may or may not regret not keeping Mr. Smith.
No offense to Tal Smith but Tal’s hill should go. I am truly surprised no CF has jammed a knee when he starts the climb on it. Move the fence into a more reasonable distance but more so for the safety. I know this opens a can of worms as Wrigley is crazy dangerous with brick OF walls.
January 15, 2012 at 4:41 pm |
I sure as hell am defending Tal Smith. The man still has that fire inside of him. Major League owners respect Tal enough to leave him in charge of their finances in baseball arbitration cases.
When a new owner takes over, this is what happens – they want to start the slate clean – but considering their limited knowledge of the game, sometime they are better served by swallowing their pride and huge egos and be willing to learn from those who have been committed to the game all of their adult life. Their mistake was not keeping Tal Smith.
The demise of this ballclub lies squarely at the feet of Drayton McLane. It was Tal who helped the Astros make their first playoff appearance in 1980 and it was Tal who was still with the organization when it made it’s first World Series appearance.
If their is one thing one might say Tal was guilty of is loyalty and it is a trait found in few individuals that I admire and respect tremendously.
January 15, 2012 at 5:10 pm |
If the game ever passed by Tal Smith, it certainly wasn’t several decades ago. As I recall, Tal Smith was among the very first baseball executives to join SABR, and the team’s scoreboard was among the first to post something besides batting average (i.e. OBP, SLG, and OPS) when announcing a batter. I can’t claim to know what decisions Smith actually made or influenced, but the Astros, as I recall, had one of the best winning percentages in baseball during the years from 1994 – 2006. And as I further recall, I believe that 2007 was about the time that Drayton McLane’s lame duck status as an owner first poked up its head from under the infield tarp.
So I’d echo the notion that it’s easy enough to take a pot shot when fortune takes a u-turn. Especially when the critic offers absolutely nothing to back up his or her (“Gary” could be a pseudonym) opinion.
That said, several things could have helped to shape the current pickle. The rise of the Nolan Ryan-led Texas Rangers franchise clearly has left the Astros eating Rangers dust. He of course affiliated his Round Rock club with the Rangers, and the Astros affiliation in Oklahoma City has proved deadly, as was illustrated so clearly at the Hornsby Chapter meeting yesterday.
Despite Smith’s obvious affinity for statistical analysis, the franchise somehow drifted away from hiring, drafting and developing the personnel most capable of optimizing a wise blend of both scouting and statistical input. I have wondered about that.
Especially since they’ve probably known their time with the organization was limited, I’m very disappointed that no one officially part of the team’s business side ever spoke out forcefully against the move to the American League or described what they did to try to block it. I have a feeling of dread about it.
My worst case scenario is that it will lead to the death of the franchise. There is virtually no AL history in this city. Games will be mostly in western time zones, when elderly fans – like my parents, who watched every game faithfully from beginning to end – will be asleep. The younger generation that grew up on Biggio, Bagwell, Berkman and Oswalt and pulled for them in all-star games will grow disinterested. At $200 a pop for two people to attend a game (in the field-level seats), disinterest isn’t something you want to cultivate. Your fan base begins with children. What sort of marketing analysis went into the thinking behind the move to the AL? I’ve seen nothing in print about this.
Our team isn’t built for the DH or the kind of pitching staff necessary for dealing with the absence of an automatic out in the lineup. Actually, our pitching staff – the very worst in baseball last season – is statistically projected (by Scott Barzilla) to be the very worst again this season. And that’s WITH the automatic out. 2013 shows promise of being a very scary season.
With a scary bad team, declining television viewership, and loss of the youth generation fan base around which a franchise’s future success is built, the move to the AL impresses as one of singularly poor timing from a marketing perspective, and which could add significantly to the troubles of an already highly stressed franchise. That the new ownership would agree so readily to this suggests either surprising naivte, or something more sinister.
I’m one of the last people I know who is prone to conspiracy theories. But:
We have now a foreshadowing of significant difficulties generating the revenues necessary for the new ownership to run a successful (i.e. profitable) franchise. There is a corridor rapidly growing along I-35 between San Antonio and Temple that currently includes more than 3,000,000 residents, and which almost certainly will be deemed an attractive prospective market for a new major league franchise.
Ownership typically needs (or likes to find) an excuse for moving a franchise so it can be justified on paper. Selig sweetened this little deal with a $50,000,000 “incentive”. $50,000,000 can cushion a lot of lost revenues.
Has anyone seen or heard any marketing pitches from the new ownership attempting to court the affections of the local population? A friendly “howdy” T.V. spot reassuring the fans of all the terrific things they want to do to make Houstonians happy with their baseball team? A billboard ad or two saying how much they look forward to partnering with us in returning our Astros to an exciting, competitive baseball team? Assuaging our anxieties about their commitment to the team’s future in the community?
Seriously. Has anyone seen anything like this? The fact that I haven’t doesn’t mean I’m claiming it isn’t happening. I’m just looking for feedback, and reassurance, from anyone who has seen such normal and expectable promotion occurring.
See where I’m going with this?
I hate to sound like a Gloomy Gus, but bad dreams start from somewhere.
Somebody talk me out of this – please!
Mark
January 15, 2012 at 5:16 pm |
Correction: I meant to say $100+ a pop.
January 15, 2012 at 5:21 pm |
Tal Smith led the Astros out of the wilderness in the late 1970s. His reward was to be fired when John McMullen want to bring in his Yankee cronies. Tal came back to the Astros after McMullen sold the team to McLane and the franchise went through another renaissance, culminating in a Worlds Series appearance.
I think Houston and the baseball fanship of the Astros have far more to thank Tal Smith for than they’ll ever have to condemn him. There are no baseball executives worth their pay who haven’t whiffed a time or two on player decisions but that duty lay more with the scouting directors and general managers by the time Tal returned. I can’t see why Tal should be singled out for abuse.
I do think some lash out at Tal as a scapegoat for when they should have lashed out at McLane or the GMs. I don’t blame him for wanting to stay around with the franchise but I also don’t think Jim Crane owed him anything but a handshake and a severance check. Baseball is a business and these things happen.
Anyone believing Tal is an idiot should look at his record in arbitration cases. He might have saved the Astros as much money over the years as Woody Williams cost them.
January 15, 2012 at 5:39 pm |
Mark, I think the Astros have abandoned the I-35 corridor to the Rangers and, with their new tv network, may never get it back because Rockets games can’t be shown in Spurs territory so why would Central Texas fans pay for a channel that can only give them baseball of the 100-loss kind in the same league and division as the vastly-superior Rangers? It makes no economic sense.
I think it leaves the door wide open for a third Texas team in the I-36 corridor, preferably an NL team which will have the marketing advantage of offering a different game and a different competition than their American League neighbors. That development could kill off the Astros if they are still bottom-feeders by that time.
January 15, 2012 at 5:51 pm |
What I’m saying is that that team could end up BEING the Astros, and that such a shift already may be in the planning stages, which includes shifting the team to the AL, keeping it as uncompetitive as possible for a few years in order to drive down revenues and community support, and thus to justify a move to central Texas, where the really big money awaits. But it will remain an AL team, to maintain the scheduling “balance” that prompted this move to the AL and to promote an “I-35 rivalry” for marketing purposes.
January 16, 2012 at 1:37 am |
The Astros have been the laughingstock of baseball the last couple of years while the Rangers have been kicking you know what. That’s on Tal and his BFF Ed Wade. I appreciate what Tal Smith did 30+ years ago, but he does not understand the modern game.
January 16, 2012 at 6:48 am |
And who are you to say that Tal Smith does not know the “modern game of baseball”? What credentials do you possess? Have you ever been involved as an official of a professional baseball club?
Making claims without validation aren’t usually taken very seriously by knowledgeable baseball people!
January 16, 2012 at 4:58 pm |
Come to think of it, $150 a pop makes the most sense, when you add in the parking pass, food and drink.
January 17, 2012 at 6:17 am |
The Rangers were bottom-feeders for years, giving them advantageous draft choices. The Astros, under the leadership of McLane, ever the lackey of Bud Selig, often lost the draft choices they did have by virtue of not being willing of paying ‘slot’ money. I don’t think either of those situations can be laid at the feet of Tal Smith.