Good teams, bad teams - one big difference

There has been recent discussion, in certain corners, of Roberto Petagine, currently chewing up International League pitching while playing first base for the Pawtucket Red Sox. Petagine looked, for a time in the mid-late 90s, to be one of the best hitters in professional baseball. However he never demonstrated this in the Major Leagues, struggling in 307 at-bats scattered over 5 seasons, while pounding minor league pitching consistently. One school of thought had it that he was a "AAAA" player, good enough to excel in the minors but unable to hit Major League pitching. Another is that he was mistreated by organizations that didn't understand what they had, and never gave him the opportunity to show what he could do. I fall in to the latter camp. But that gets me to thinking about good and bad management of sports teams. Why do some management teams put winning teams on the field, while other consistently fail to?

I generally disapprove of this, but I'm about to use a football analogy to a baseball situation.

One of the differences between good organizations and bad organizations (note the vague generalizations here) is that bad organizations focus on what a player can't do, and good organizations focus on what a player can do. And, for my prime example, I look at the New England Patriots, and the three Super Bowls that they've won, and all of the players that were "cast-offs" from other teams that they've done it with. Here's a quote from Gary Horton, an area scout for the Cleveland Browns in the era of head coach Bill Belichick:

"I remember sitting in a meeting with Bill that first year in Cleveland and the scouts were going around explaining what this guy does wrong and what this other guy does wrong and on and on. It was all criticism. And Bill said, 'Stop telling me what this guy does wrong. I want to know what he does well. Let's focus on that, and I won't even worry about the rest of it. We just won't ask him to do those things.'"

That's why a Mark Bellhorn can't play for Dusty Baker ("oh, those strikeouts") but can do a tremendous job (.263/.373/.444) for the World Series champion Red Sox. There's no way that Dusty Baker and the Cubs were going to let Bellhorn strike out 177 times in a Chicago uniform. The Red Sox focused on what he did well (decent defense, excellent OBP) and had one of the most productive 2nd basemen in baseball. There's a segment of Red Sox nation who focus on the strikeouts. Thankfully, the front office and manager understand what's important...