A few months ago I read an article about a UFC fighter who was renowned for getting pummeled by some of the best fighters in the history of the sport before they were rich and famous. He had been fighting for an insanely long time (and pretty much any amount of time in the UFC is insane), but had compiled, at best, a .500 record. He said (obviously, I’m paraphrasing here), “If you can’t beat me, you haven’t got a future in this sport.”
And that, my friends, is exactly how major league general managers should view Jim Hendry. Today, another young, ambitious GM on the rise, Jack Zduriencik of the Seattle Mariners, cut his teeth in the industry by fleecing Hendry and left Cubs fans like myself wondering yet again whether gross incompetence can really be considered a “curse.” Over at MLB Notebook, Zach Sanders is calling it reason enough to label Zduriencik “the best GM in baseball.” I’m as big a Zduriencik fan as anybody, but he’ll need to accomplish a little more before I’ll consider him the equal of Epstein, Williams, Beane, and Jocketty. In this case, he’s just one in a long line of crafty execs who have stolen Hendry’s lunch money and wedgied him in the process. Let’s recount…
See my horrified analysis at The Sporting Hippeaux
