GMs juggle club needs, players' feelings

BALTIMORE

You'll rarely find Brian Cashman patrolling the players' dressing area of the Yankee Stadium home clubhouse, and that's by design. The strategy puts him in a better position, he believes, to deal with crises such as the Jorge Posada shutdown from last Saturday.

"Our manager's job is to create an atmosphere where 25 men come together and pull in the same direction," Cashman said recently -- before the Posada incident. "My job is to find the 25 people who have the character to do this. My job isn't to pull them together.

"Everyone in our clubhouse knows my job is to find someone better than they are. How am I in a position to be these guys' confidant or best friend when my job is to find the best people to win?"

Cashman's former counterpart Omar Minaya, the Mets' GM from 2005 through last year and the Montreal Expos' GM before that (2002-04), took a noticeably different approach to the job.

"I wanted to be visible a little bit," Minaya said. "You care about them as players, you care about them as people, and as family."

General managers of all professional sports teams must strike a balance between ally and adversary when they're dealing with players. Baseball provides its unique challenges in the frequency of the games -- more decisions must be made -- and in the strength of the Players Association, which factors into two of the most contentious arenas: player discipline and contract negotiations.

Said current Mets GM Sandy Alderson: "I try to remind myself that the relationship needs to be friendly and supportive, but professional at the same time, recognizing that there are long periods of parallel interests and, almost inevitably, some periods of conflicts of interest. You have to be able to bridge those two things to build a relationship.

Player-front office friction

The GM-player dynamic has come into greater focus recently in baseball, thanks to a few high-profile incidents. Most notably, Cashman went at it with Derek Jeter last winter during Jeter's free agency, challenging the team captain to find a better offer elsewhere, and followed that with the Posada adventure.

In Texas, popular Rangers veteran Michael Young publicly requested a trade while professing that he was "misled and manipulated" by GM Jon Daniels concerning his status with the organization.

Daniels forged a peace agreement with Young, who remains on the Rangers and has been their best everyday player. Said Daniels: "Like with anything else, each relationship is different. It's not like there's a formula."

For instance, Mets rightfielder Carlos Beltran, who has worked for four GMs -- Kansas City's Allard Baird, Houston's Gerry Hunsicker, Minaya and Alderson, offered high praise for Baird's honesty. Said Beltran: "That's all you can ask for, honesty, in this game. People who tell you the truth, the way it is. It's a matter of, it's not what you want to hear or not. You want the truth. And he was one of those guys."

Yet as former Mets GM and Orioles vice president of baseball operations Jim Duquette, now a host for MLB Network Radio, pointed out, "Not every player can handle that." After all, neither Jeter nor Posada accused Cashman of dishonesty. They just didn't appreciate the public nature of the discourse.

What GMs must remember, Daniels said, is, "You're in a position where you're not only doing things for yourself. You're representing the interests of the organization."

Daniels and the Rangers faced a potential disaster when manager Ron Washington privately confessed to using cocaine during the 2009 season, and then when that became public during spring training of 2010.

"There's a close, personal relationship," Daniels said, "but there's a responsibility to the community and the industry." The Rangers stuck with Washington, who earned a contract extension when the Rangers reached the World Series last year.

Make sure to draw the line

So the relationship with players (and managers and coaches, as with the Washington situation) can't be entirely personal. However, when you spend as much time together as a baseball team does, bonds develop naturally. The key is to draw that line.

"I know it's part of the job, but I'm not comfortable with any of that stuff,'' Cashman said. "I'm not comfortable saying goodbye to Hideki Matsui or Johnny Damon. Those were the right decisions, but I wasn't comfortable with it. These are people we do care about."

Said Alderson: "Being too friendly creates unrealistic expectations about what happens when conflict arrives. Being too professional and distant doesn't work for everyday things, where there's an identity of interest and common goals.

"In terms of the job, that's what I enjoy the most. It's mostly about, how do you get the most out of an organization, including yourself and other people?"

Beltran noted that Alderson "is not around a lot in the clubhouse," especially compared with Minaya.

"That's their space," Alderson said, "particularly in New York, where there's a lot going on. It's not just players but also the media and other people who are there."

Nevertheless, Alderson said, "You have to show the flag, too. You make sure people know you're there, particularly when you're not going well."

"Everybody does it differently," Minaya said. "I just felt that, as a GM, the players want you to be available to them. You want to be visible, but not too visible."

And friendly, but not too friendly.

More than anything, perhaps, versatile. "You celebrate together. Walls are broken down in October," Daniels said. "But then the offseason comes, and things change."

Sometimes, as Cashman experienced last Saturday, they change an hour before you're facing the Red Sox.