I don’t think the full article is up yet (UPDATE: Yes it is. I missed it. It’s Insider only, however), but Buster Olney writes today that ESPN.com is going to run the results of a baseball general manager survey in which the GMs rate one another on things like who’s the easiest to work with, who’s the toughest negotiator, etc. I’m loking forward to reading it.
But Buster does give us a delicious preview of the results, and it matches a gut feeling I’ve had for a long time:
Without a doubt, however, the GM who got hammered in a way I never
expected was the Giants’ Brian Sabean, for one simple reason — rival
executives say they cannot get him on the phone. They cannot get him to
return messages. In a couple of cases, some GMs say they don’t even
bother calling Sabean, they just go straight to assistant Bobby Evans.The
feeling of the other GMs is that beyond the issue of simple etiquette
— “It’s just flat-out disrespectful to not return a call,” said one GM
— Sabean isn’t putting himself in position to hear trade ideas that
could benefit the Giants. “What happens if somebody calls to offer Brock for Boglio?” said one GM. “That’s what I get nervous about — what
if the other team is shopping a really good player and he gets traded
without me getting involved? That’s why I return all calls.”
People can’t really change what they are, and what we are comes out no matter how hard we try to hide it. In addition to hurting his own team, not returning calls is jerk behavior, and Sabean has shown himself to be a jerk before (read the part about former trainer Stan Conte’s disagrements with Sabean and tell me that Sabean isn’t a jerk of a boss).
Always fun to read some good Sabean slamming.
