Pat Gillick Set Standard for Modern GMs

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. -- There is no better way to judge just how well Pat Gillick did his job than to look at how well Gillick's successors fared in the same job.

Gillick, elected to the Hall of Fame Monday by the Expansion Era Veterans Committee, left the Blue Jays a year after Toronto had won back-to-back World Series titles in 1992-93. The Jays have had one finish as high as second place since.

After a three-year stint in Baltimore from 1996-98 in which the Orioles made consecutive appearances in the American League Championship Series, he left and they haven't had a .500 season since.

Currently a consultant with the Phillies, Gillick spent four years in Seattle when the Mariners averaged 98 wins a season, setting the AL record with a 116-win 2001 season. The Mariners have had just one second place finish and no 90-win seasons since.

You can look at each franchise and spell out why they have trouble winning. But when Gillick was in charge, they didn't have that kind of trouble.

So when Gillick Monday tried to deflect much the record that made him the first entry into the Cooperstown class of 2011 by assigning some of it to the scouts, managers, players and front office types he worked with, it was best to keep in mind that other general managers, working with some of the same players, scouts, coaches and execs, haven't succeeded.

"I think really the job of the general manager is not to select the correct players," Gillick said. "It's to select the correct people to select the players. I think that's really the job of the general manager. And as I said, everywhere along the way, I've been very fortunate to have people that were good evaluators of talent."

If only it were that simple. Those who worked with him, against him and watched him know better what Gillick's record says.

"He's a legend," Texas GM Jon Daniels said. The Rangers made it to the World Series for the first time this year. "It's been just the one time for me, and when I see all that it takes to get there, and to see his record, it's amazing."

Gillick teams won the World Series three times, twice in Toronto and once in Philadelphia. He spent a decade building a team from scratch in Toronto, and after that his teams were competitive almost every year. In his last dozen full seasons as a GM, in addition to the three World Series wins, Gillick's teams won 90 or more games eight times and had only one losing season.

"He was arguably the best general manager of his generation," Seattle president Chuck Armstrong said. Gillick stepped aside to take a consulting position with the Mariners after back-to-back seasons in which the club didn't make it to the playoffs, even though Seattle won 93 games both years. "He's extremely gifted, and we knew that. We didn't want him to leave.

"We tried very hard to get him to change his mind after he told us he was stepping aside. But we hadn't made the playoffs, and he was very sensitive about that. The 93 wins were one thing, but we didn't make the playoffs."

Gillick, who came close to tears at the announcement, said that part of being good as a GM meant being flexible in assessing not only the talent in the market, but in assessing the direction of the game itself.

"I think really the job of the general manager is not to select the correct players. It's to select the correct people to select the players. ... I've been very fortunate to have people that were good evaluators of talent."
-- Hall of Fame GM Pat Gillick "When I started out in this game, I thought it was 70 percent ability and 30 percent character," Gillick said when talking about the construction of winning teams. "The longer I've been in it, I think it's 60 percent character and 40 percent ability. Because if you're going to be out there through spring training in 162 games, you need people with character.

"We were very fortunate on most of the clubs that we've had, that we've had good character people on the club and people that pulled together at difficult times."

If so, it was because Gillick adapted as his 70-30 philosophy evolved and brought the right people together at the right time.

Gillick grew up in the era went scouting meant everything, but as baseball morphed into an era of new-age stats, charts and graphs, he wasn't left behind.

As Armstrong said, Gillick "is a sponge for talent." He doesn't care much for emails, and he doesn't answer his cell phone, arguing that it's for making calls, not answering them. (He does answer his office phone, when he's in his office, which isn't often; he likes to be on the road looking at talent). What he does do is burn up the cellular world dialing a contact list as extensive as any in baseball.

"He will call everybody he knows," Armstrong said. "And sometimes that would result in rumors getting started. But sometimes the calls were for purposes of comparison. And there was the occasional red herring. But he reached out to everybody as part of the decision-making process."

He was always willing to stand up and talk back to power. Before taking the Blue Jays' job, Gillick spent 1974-76 as the Yankees' scouting director, and as such he had to deal with the win-'em-all philosophy of Yankee owner George Steinbrenner.

"George wanted to go 162-0, just like in football,'' Gillick said. "And I told George one time, 'George, you know, if we are going to win 100, you have to lose 62, at least.' He didn't quite understand that."

Gillick did. When he got to Toronto, he and his boss, Paul Beeston, invested heavily in scouting in Latin America, setting up a huge pipeline of talent that had few equals at the time. As a result, when the Jays were good enough to compete in the early-1990s after a series of trades, they had a farm system ready to put forward quality players in supporting roles.

"I believe that to be competitive year after year, the core of your team has got to be homegrown," he said. "That sets the tone for the club. You look at the Yankees and the Phillies, and that's what they're doing."

They're doing it the Gillick way.

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The FanHouse TV crew discusses Pat Gillick making the Hall of Fame and others missing out: