For Derek Falvey in 2016, the whirlwind of a Game 7 World Series loss, a big-time job promotion and a move to Minnesota was just settling down. Named the Twins’ chief baseball officer that November after a stint as Cleveland’s assistant general manager, Falvey was starting to think about ways to improve his new team.
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And so he wanted a booklet made to prep him for free agency — with information on the players available and a team-by-team breakdown of needs.
The problem is, he didn’t know who to ask.
“Who is the person who can do that?” he remembered thinking. “I don’t know who that is.”
It was proof that, in a general manager’s first offseason, the whirlwind does not really stop. Especially for someone hired from outside the organization, he has to learn an entirely new infrastructure — a new major-league roster, a new farm system full of prospects, a new group of coworkers and colleagues to trust. He has to figure out who’s good, who’s tradeable, who’s irreplaceable, and who can make the free-agent booklet.
It can all be a minefield.
“The first offseason, it’s really easy to make mistakes,” Cubs general manager Jed Hoyer said. “You don’t know the players as well, you don’t know the prospects as well. You may have a sense of those players from the outside, but you might not know them as well.”
Hoyer brought up Chicago’s decision to trade DJ LeMahieu, then a prospect in Triple A, to Colorado for Ian Stewart. It’s a move he still regrets.
“That was a first-offseason mistake,” he said. “That first offseason is really tough to be active because you don’t know those players as well as you may think you do.”
It’s a classic case of unknown unknowns. Now entering his second offseason as general manager of the Mets, Brodie Van Wagenen has a better grasp on everything the job entails — and what he didn’t know this time last year.
“Last year, I came into it thinking I knew what I didn’t know,” Van Wagenen said Wednesday. “This year, I’ve learned that I didn’t know what I didn’t know.”
Van Wagenen doesn’t think those unknowns hindered him too much in his first winter at the helm of the Mets — even if there’s a chance that, like Hoyer, he’ll still regret trading a certain prospect years down the road. Van Wagenen pointed to the presences of Omar Minaya and Allard Baird, a pair of former general managers on his staff, as “tour guides for me in terms of navigating the waters that I hadn’t traveled before.”
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“One year makes a huge difference in the way you look at things and how you may go about them,” said Baird, a veteran of multiple front offices and one of Van Wagenen’s assistant general managers. “(Last year) we talked a lot about the organization and how much he knew going into it — and he had done his research. But nothing substitutes for when you have to live day to day in an organization. There’s just no comparison for that.”
“The first go-round, you’re drinking from a fire hose for the first six months. You’re trying to learn as much as you can about an organization,” said Falvey, who on Wednesday received an extension and the title of president of baseball operations from the Twins. “The second year, you feel a lot more prepared for what you’re doing … You still want to make improvements, but there is a feeling that now you know everything and now you have to have a clearer plan.”
“Being somewhat patient that first offseason and getting to the summer and to the next offseason, there’s a lot of value to that,” said Hoyer, who pointed out he also did acquire Anthony Rizzo in his first winter with Chicago.
“I probably knew more about the organization (in that second offseason),” said Milwaukee general manager David Stearns. “I probably had a better feel for where we were headed as an organization.”
Van Wagenen’s introduction to life as a GM was even more complex than that for most of his peers: Even if they hadn’t worked for that specific team before, they’d at least worked in a baseball organization before. Coming from an agency, Van Wagenen had a broad knowledge of every organization. Now he needed to know one comprehensively.
Even his basic experience of watching baseball was different in 2019 than it ever had been before.
“I feel it in my stomach a lot more than I felt it as an agent,” he said, having in the past mentioned rooting for his individual clients like a kind of fantasy owner. “I think having skin in the game, so to speak, makes it a lot more fun on a daily basis. Being able to measure success and failure daily is something I enjoy.”
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Now that Van Wagenen has been through it once, he feels better prepared to steer the Mets in the proper direction this winter. He admitted Tuesday that walking into the GM Meetings this year felt different than a year ago — “like I’m part of the fraternity a little bit more.” Baird said that’s maybe more important than you think.
“This year, he has a better feel for how each general manager profiles out — how they like to do business, the pace in which they like to do business,” Baird said. “And also vice versa, for other general managers to understand how Brodie goes about doing business. Both sides have a much better feel in the way they go about business and the possibilities of matching up.”
“Understanding the marginal difference between winning and losing every day is probably the biggest eye-opening experience, because the level of detail to which I’ve tracked the game this year versus in my previous job is significant,” Van Wagenen said. “Knowing our system is important, knowing our players and knowing our player development capabilities are all key factors in terms of feeling good about where we are now versus a year ago.”
Baird and Falvey brought up time allotment — and the feeling that there just aren’t enough hours in the day for all of a general manager’s tasks.
“You have to prioritize, you have to delegate,” said Baird.
Falvey said he was more capable of planning ahead during his second offseason with Minnesota.
“The first go-round, you’re trying to handle what’s right in front of you and just get that done and move on to the next thing,” Falvey said. “The second go-round for me, I was much more attentive to what’s coming in the next two to three weeks. What do I need to make sure some of our people are handling so when we get there in two weeks, we’re set up to where we need to be? That’s a function of getting to know your people better and who you’re relying on to do certain tasks.”
Like, you know, creating that free-agent booklet.
(Photo: Joe Camporeale / USA TODAY Sports)