Breaking News: Chicago Bears name Phil Emery General Manager

So mad that the teasers were for a Honda commercial rather than a sequel. One of my all-time favorite comedies.

and if he has a good combine, just may pass up John Martin on a lot of peoples big boards

DeSulky can stay in Philly.

Emery is much older than Theo, and Emery has never been a GM. Theo has had great success as an executive. This Emery’s first opportunity.

The Bears would’ve had a very difficult time beating the Saints in the Superdome. Although, they might have beat out the Lions for the 5th seed. At Giants….

one quick thing to say. when the Cubs began their search, Ricketts and his team actually created a brand new analytical study of all the most winning franchises in baseball, compiling numerous amounts of data and info to compare on winning and the people mist responsible for winning. that study helped form the list of smartest men I’m baseball. theo was at the top. you can read about thus process in a Ricketts interview on BCB.

in cimoarison, the bears approach is a complete train wreck

And without writing some sort of an essay response… If I can remember what his initial point was… Oh, right is the Emery hiring a true committment to winning? I guess time will tell. But right now, I’m going to temper my expectations, since I’m not able to find a lot out there on Emery, other than he’s a “very hard worker.”

That doesn’t mean that the obvious big-names were actually the smartest people responsible for building winning organizations.

Let me throw you a bone, so you can become better educated. Since you refuse to read the interview on BCB. One who refuses to learn, is one who will never become wise.

Interview
BCB: To begin, describe the process of how you wound up with Theo Epstein here.

TR: I’d be happy to talk about the process. It kind of began, obviously, in August. One of the thoughts on the timing of the announcement on Jim [Hendry] was that it would give us a good runway to do some homework before the end of the season because you really can’t talk to people that are employed by other teams during the season. Typically you want to talk to teams that are on their way to the playoffs and it’s really awkward and you just want to wait till the end of the season. So we had about six weeks to do a fair amount of background work, and there were really two types of background work.

We did a lot of quantitative work. I worked with Ari [Kaplan] on our staff and another outside consultant that we’ve used to really study all the teams in two categories. We studied them in wins and we studied them in player development.

On the win side, we looked at how many wins each team had over the last 10 years, how many games they’d won for how many dollars they’d spent over the last 10 years and then how consistently they had won over the last 10 years. Then we tried to rank the teams in who has really won over the last 10 years.

So we looked at which teams had won, and we looked at which teams had better systems. In terms of player development, we had some reports that we generate here about how many players of each team make it to the major leagues. We looked at what they call bona fide prospects in each system over time, like how many of the players in each system rank at what would be producing productive major league players. And we also looked at systems in terms of which system had on balance across the entire system the best rankings in terms of looking at each player, projecting them forward and then again ranking all the teams.

In terms of wins and in terms of player development we also built a tool that kind of cross references them so you could take a team and see where they are in these various different, on these different scales.

So, on the quantitative side, we basically tried to figure out which systems were outperforming the others. And in general, there are probably seven or eight that rise to the top when you look at it. And some are probably several of the teams that you’d expect. But, there are a handful of teams that have out-performed on those metrics.

On the qualitative side, or kind of on the personal side, I talked to about 20 people in baseball who I thought I could trust and who had perspectives I thought would be useful. That’s some current GMs, some former GMs, some future GMs, agents, owners that had been through the process, other people who had been around baseball, really with two focuses.

One is to ask them, of the teams that we see that have outperformed the others, are there certain people on those you think should take a larger share of the credit for what’s going on there? Because you don’t want to take a system and think that you have the right guy when you’ve actually taken the wrong guy. Which front office people do you think deserve a lot of the credit and success their teams have had? And then, in a perfect world, if you were me, and looking at the problems or the issues facing the Cubs, who would you be thinking of as the first call you would make as a GM?

Of all those people, everybody gave me a few ideas on who they like and who they think is good and Theo was at the top of everybody’s list. So through that process, not only what they have accomplished in Boston but what I heard about him from all the phone calls that I made, he just became our first choice.

BCB: Did you think he would be available at the time you started the process?

TR: I had no idea who’d be available, who wouldn’t be available, who was available but not interested. You just don’t know. So that’s why when I looked at it with the analytical guys I told them, “I don’t want to hear any names. I’ll worry about the names. You just give me the numbers.” So we didn’t know if he was going to be available. Toward the end of the process, or toward the end of the season, we said, let’s just wait until the Red Sox are done playing and then we’ll see if he wants to talk.

So it does apply. Chris, not Bill was the GM in Indy. Bill was the Pres in Indy, not the GM.

Funny enough, his son wasn’t involved inthe GM duties there because he wasn’t hired to be a GM in either of those places.

I’ll bet the same would have been true if Chicago had hired Bill as GM.