John Coppolella Resigns as Braves GM
So much for a boring Monday with no baseball news.
BREAKING: #Braves GM John Coppolella expected to resign today, sources tell The Athletic.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) October 2, 2017
Resignation of Coppolella believed to stem in part from issues with #Braves’ talent acquisition in Latin America.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) October 2, 2017
Special assistant to the GM Gordon Blakeley also involved in issues #Braves are facing, sources tell The Athletic.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) October 2, 2017
Jeff Passan adds a little detail here.
Sources: Major League Baseball has been investigating Braves GM John Coppolella in recent weeks. @Ken_Rosenthal says he plans on resigning.
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) October 2, 2017
And then the Braves confirmed it.
#Braves confirm Coppolella resignation, citing breach of rules in international market.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) October 2, 2017
Obviously, with this little information out there, it’s impossible to know what went down, but if it really leads to Coppolella resigning as GM, it has to be pretty serious. MLB has punished teams for breaking rules surrounding international signings before, but it hasn’t led to a high-level executive being pushed out since 2009, when Jim Bowden resigned in the wake of allegations of a host of improprieties under his regime.
For the Braves, this is obviously not how they wanted their offseason to begin. John Hart seemingly remains as the team’s president of baseball operations, and will likely handle the regular GM duties until the team finds a replacement, but with the team just recently bringing in several new assistant GMs and restructuring the front office, it will be interesting to see how the new front office will operate. An outside hire would likely want to bring in their own staff, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Hart just served as the team’s de facto GM for 2018.
Either way, the Braves are going to have to make more decisions now than they had planned on, and it will be interesting to see whether any course direction is made coming off a disappointing season and now a resignation of the team’s GM.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
Wonder if Maitan’s signing ends up being undone, like the Red Sox’s
Well, Acuna was the previous front office, so I’m not too worried.
previous front office, but under Coppolella as assistant GM/scouting director…
Passan has a full article up now, and it’s worth the read.
https://sports.yahoo.com/john-coppolellas-resignation-just-start-atlanta-braves-problems-230643724.html
Lots of juicy stuff in there, but the big fish is that there is a non-zero chance that Maitan will be declared a free agent.
what the
“An outside hire would likely want to bring in his own staff”
Small point, but it is not 100% completely certain the new GM will be a man. I’d use “their” here to indicate unknown gender. This sentence was just a bit jarring for me given the existence of (however few) non-male baseball executives. Kim Ng has interviewed for the job of Dodgers GM, for example.
Dave was probably just using it as a catch-all. He did just record an entire podcast with Carson about the need to drive social change so Dave is well aware of the nee for diversity and growth in baseball.
Noticed that as well. Pretty big oversight
It’s an oversight, sure, but I don’t think we need to be sprinting over to our fainting couches.
Changed. Thanks for the catch.
Replies like Dave’s are not the #1 reason why I love Fangraphs – that would be the baseball analysis. But they are on my list.
No problem. Thanks, Dave.
Well aren’t you a precious sjw. Please shut up and go away. I am more concerned about quality than some silly little feel good action. God this is so tired.
Is there a reason that you don’t think Kim Ng would be a quality GM? She’s as qualified as any first time GM would be.
“Is there a reason that you don’t think Kim Ng would be a quality GM? She’s as qualified as any first time GM would be.”
Perhaps you can help me out here, I find no one, other than you, saying this.
To start with, by “qualified” I mean having the requisite background/knowledge/experience to do the job. First time GMs are an unknown quantity, so this has to play a large role in the decision making process unlike, say, the Red Sox hiring Dave Dombrowski.
Ng has worked full time in baseball for 26 years. Her list of positions in front offices includes: Assistant Director of Baseball Operations, Assistant General Manager, and Vice President and Assistant General Manager. She has worked all aspects of baseball operations, from arbitration to trades to player development. She worked as the Director of Waivers and Records for the AL and is currently with MLB as the Senior Vice President of Baseball Operations.
She interviewed for the GM spot for at least four different teams, I don’t think no one else is saying she’s qualified.
Joe Torre has said it: “I always talk her up at owners meetings. At some point, somebody just has to ignore the fact that she’s a woman and just make a baseball decision. And if they do that, then I think she will get an opportunity. Somewhere.”
Former GM Dan Evans: “There is no one in the game who could question her ability to be that person.”
http://www.espn.com/espnw/news-commentary/article/13371785/will-kim-ng-mlb-first-female-gm
I don’t know if you were being purposefully contrarian or if you just don’t know her background, but there is ample evidence that she is as qualified as anyone who hasn’t actually been a GM already.
You’ve just completely missed my point and just glossed past the question you asked. Perhaps I could have left out the second sentence, but I wanted to provide some context for your quote. However, you’re fighting a strawman. I still don’t see anyone, other than you in that accusation, bringing up anything about her being unqualified. If you feel the need to virtue signal and jump up on your soap box, fine, this is the internet and all, but perhaps wait until there is a valid opportunity that doesn’t require you fabricating an argument to stand up against.
You asked, “Is there a reason that you don’t think Kim Ng would be a quality GM? She’s as qualified as any first time GM would be.” However, what you fail to provide is ANYONE who has said that she’s not qualified.
The OP on this thread stated “This sentence was just a bit jarring for me given the existence of (however few) non-male baseball executives. Kim Ng has interviewed for the job of Dodgers GM, for example.”
The person to which I replied said in response “Please shut up and go away. I am more concerned about quality than some silly little feel good action.”
This I interpreted, fairly I think, as him saying a hiring female interviewee such as Kim Ng would not be because she is a quality candidate but rather a feel good action.
I think we are not privy to the nature of the criteria used to evaluate GM candidates. She might interview badly, but she has been interviewed for a lot of positions and been awarded none. One can infer from this a) she does not have the desired characteristics based on the interview; b) she has the right baseball characteristics but people are biased (intentionally or not) against women and/or Asian women as GMs; c) that she is not thought of as a viable candidate but is given interviews anyway because it looks like franchises are more progressive in whom they considered for the job than they ever intended to be; d) other. Unless someone talks, we’re not going to know why she wasn’t a fit.
1. You aren’t every reader.
2. There is no reason a woman GM couldn’t be good at her job.
3. I’m tired of reading nonsense like this too. We agree on that.
I will be interested in how the Braves handle things. Hart’s been around forever and is an accomplished GM himself.
“Their” there is technically grammatically incorrect. “An outside hire” is referring to a single person, so his/her is preferred.
Although yeah, probably safer to not offend than it is to be correct in today’s environment.
There’s actually a long history of using “their” for a single someone who is indeterminate, and their gender is not known. What’s newer is using it for a person whose gender is known, but that’s not what Dave did.
By the way, to linguists “ungrammatical” means basically “this would never be passed in conversation.” There really is not a set of rules you can write down that specifies how English works. Syntacticians work on that project, but you’d have to staple together ten thousand PhD theses and it’s still far from done.
So you’re saying “I’m not used to that language change”, which is fine, but doesn’t carry special weight of rules on stone tablets.
Yep, it also generally accepted that a person use their own gender as a substitute for hypothetical persons of unknown gender. Many women now use “her” and “she” as default pronouns when referring to an person of unknown identity in hypothetical examples.
I think Jetsy should get their own column on baseball and linguistics. I would read.
If you’re going to be pedantic, don’t use “their,” because it’s grammatically incorrect. “Their” is plural. You have to go “he or she,” it’s the only way.
Except that using the plural form in this way (aka the Singular They) dates back well before Shakespeare (who used it on occasion) and had half a millennium of attested usage before a bunch of scolds in the 19th Century tried to remold English to their arbitrary Victorian sensibilities (including imposing alien Latin grammar rules on it).
Pedants at the front of classrooms, and especially those on the internet, seem to want to restrict language from evolving (presumably so the rules they spent so much effort learning don’t change, and they can use them to derive satisfaction from correcting everyone else). But evolve it does. There’s plenty of precedent for exactly this sort of development, btw: we’ve already done it with “you.” Old English used thou for the singular second person and ye for the plural (which is why y’all actually is more correct than pendants realize); you was restricted to being the object (like “him” and “her”). Old English pendants would have railed against the incorrect usage of “you” we now employ everyday.
And I spent so many years trying to break myself of saying “Y’all”.
I’ve actually adopted “Y’all.”
Having an effective second person plural is so fucking nice.
Include the distinction between “y’all” and “all of y’all”, and English would have a leg up on most other languages regarding second person pronouns.
The funny thing is that English professors under the age of 40 (of which I am one) no longer adhere to the silly Latin-based rules of not splitting infinitives and not ending a sentence with a preposition. Only the old fuddy-duddies continue to follow them. Many younger professors are also coming around to the “they” argument, which is why the AP just changed their rules. APA will likely be next, with MLA dragged into the twentieth century in about 5 years.
“An outside hire would likely want to bring in a new staff.”
Most disputed pronoun usages are completely extraneous to begin with. If you limit pronouns to cases where they have a specific antecedent, you can dodge this issue while also improving your writing.
As others have noted, this is no longer true (and wasn’t true before about the nineteenth century anyway). The Associated Press style guide, which I assume journalists like Dave follow, now notes that the singular “they” or “their” is acceptable when the gender is unknown and it would be awkward or clunky to use his/her: https://www.poynter.org/news/ap-style-change-singular-they-acceptable-limited-cases
I would argue it’s always clunky to use his/her, and whether you like it or not, not every person identifies as one of those two binary options. No, it’s not a huge deal to them if you assume his/her and they don’t identify as either one. But it costs you literally nothing to be a slightly more open and generous person in using “they” when it is a) no longer incorrect and b) makes some percentage of people feel better.
Whats up with all of the downvotes here? Is it that much trouble for some readers that another ask an author to consider over half the population as an option? Nobody claimed Dave was evil or anything. Just something that could be considered.
FH, I wish I could give your comment more than one ‘thumbs up”.
Maybe FanGraphs should have a “Two Thumbs Up”.
I think there is a high degree of appreciation and admiration from the Fangraphs community of the writers and site managers for putting such a high quality product out for free. That’s great but it gets to the point that the community almost universally angrily and defensively reacts when someone criticizes any part of an article. If someone comments negatively about some part of an article without prefacing it with some sort of appreciative “I love your work” statement, it will get downvotes regardless of how true the comment is. This is true for even minor comments like this where the authors don’t take it personally and say thanks for the catch.
If I didn’t respect Dave or think it was anything other than a minor oversight, I wouldn’t have said anything. I don’t know why this had to explode into a giant thread and take over the comments. I guess I should just use email for stuff like this. I thought the underlying assumption of gender of a new GM might be worth pointing out cause it’s the kind of thing that a lot of us do. It’s the kind of thing I’d appreciate others correcting me on so I thought I’d do the same for Dave.
I suspect it has more to do with people feeling tired of their everyone thought and utterance being a PC battleground. Particularly in cases like this where the percentage chance the replacement is male is what, 99%? Higher?
Clearly nothing was meant by it from Dave, so pointing it out just functions as an additional infinitesimal skirmish in the ongoing culture war over gender equity. A noble cause, but perhaps one people do not want to be in constant contact with, particularly when there was no question that zero offense was meant and the stakes were so low. Dave has zero control over who the Braves hire, and it will almost certainly be a man.
In fairness, the notion that “I don’t want to be in a constant skirmish over” something is exactly why all injustices (including those much larger and more important than this one) continued to exist for so long. Pretending like it’s not an issue and “I just wanna enjoy baseball without worrying about this stuff” is exactly what is wrong with football right now. (Well, that and a bunch of other things)
I think the people upset with the kneeling is just insane. That is an extremely innocuous gesture, and this isn’t a cult. Dissent is fine, particularly on such a vexed issue.
That said I think the internet and the constant communication with like minded people it provides has really served to delude people about what rate of change is possible/reasonable. It is particularly frustrating when the progress has been incredibly substantial and impressive. I know sometimes it doesn’t feel that way, but by pretty much any measure there has been rapid and accelerating progress on social issues over the last 100-150 years.
There is an element to picking your battles that I really feel is missing on the left these days. I think that if there were less people correcting “his” to “their” in silly/benign contexts there might be more appetite for things like the kneeling. Conservatives/reactionaries feel under siege, and rightly so because they are. But perhaps rubbing their face in it at every conceivable opportunity is not the best way forward.
There were already rumblings about the Braves due to the lack of success of the 2017 MLB club, so the optimistic spin would be that perhaps this was not a major infraction, but more of the last straw for the team.
Passan’s got quite a tweet-thread going on this.
https://twitter.com/JeffPassan/status/914896403184287744
And then this, too:
https://twitter.com/JeffPassan/status/914903534134538240
I am quite curious to hear more about this. I don’t have a good enough imagination to think what would cause that level of interest in the Braves’ organization. I mean, AJ Preller only got a suspension for lying about player injuries in trades. What level of creative rule-breaking could he have done to merit this?
Preller’s malfeasance (with the Padres) has been miscast so many times that the story has its own mythos now.
No kidding. And braves fans have been complaining about it worse than boston fans.
I am just glad I won’t see this in the chats anymore.. “coppy: what team will give me their 18 best prospects for Teheran and a box of big league chew?”
Hi, AJ. Didn’t know you commented here. The alias isn’t fooling anyone.
I’m curious that Hart is not also part of the investigation. There was the interview earlier this year where Coppolella said he spoke to Hart more than his wife. (https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/john-harts-giving-tree-of-innovation/)
If that’s the case, it’s hard to believe Hart didn’t know about what his top man was doing.
That’s good. It would be pretty weird if Coppolella spoke to Hart’s wife more than Hart.
Maybe Hart was part of the initial investigation and they were able to rule out his involvement early on.
I think we should also direct a lot of the blame on Kiley McDaniel, because we can
I think you’re trying to be funny, but I actually wonder what’s going to happen to the guy. I think he was a Coppolella hire. For now, I’ll just go with the assumption no news is good news for Kiley.
He was, and he spoke highly of “Coppy” at the time (if only because that’s what you have to do with your new boss).
https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/instagraphs/saying-farewell/
SOMEONE TELL ME KILEY IS OKAY
Someone is going to be walking into a very good situation.
I would find it annoying if it turns out to be Dayton F. Moore, but I guess I don’t know who would make me all excited.
I totally understand that this is unlikely and crazy, but I have a feeling this will end up being a way for the older guys in the FO to push out Coppolella, given that he was setting the team up to move a little more towards analytics. (see: recent front office shuffling)
1) As some have mentioned, there has been no word on Hart taking a fall. I have to assume whatever Coppolella was doing, Hart was also in the loop.
2) There have been really hollow “reports” lately of infighting among the Braves FO, and a lot of them point to character or personality issues with Coppolella, but there has never been any good evidence of that actually being the case upon any follow-up efforts.
3) I have no doubt that IFA rules were broken, but I’m skeptical that they were any more serious than the rule breaking we all know happens on a regular basis.
If the team eventually brings in Dayton Moore to be GM, I will take that as loose confirmation that Schuerholz, Cox, and the old timers just wanted to get the band back together.
It’s Hart’s show until it isn’t, and he’s hardly a head-in-the sand guy when it comes to analytics.
There are rumors about Moore coming back flying around now. I don’t know that’s a great move, but at least he’s a steady hand.
https://twitter.com/BNightengale/status/915001372373917696
If I were the Braves, I’d look to bring in Amiel Sawdaye. Top of the line analytics guy, good leader.
Kim Ng fires he resume up, takes a slug of whisky, and hits submit. (Good luck, Kim.)
“Her” resume. looks like a typo.
I think if mlb really wanted to prevent the cheating in the international market your would void all the contracts on the guys that were signed.
Can’t wait to apply once this is posted to FG
You must be fun guy at a party during rivalry week.
My hot take = an international draft just went from “impractical and unlikely” to “necessary and imminent.”
Somehow, to be serious enough for him to resign, it’s got to be about $$. I mean, would improper contact invite this? Seems unlikely. Best guess, $4.25M was not the best offer for Maitan, and somehow it got accepted because there was money sent to the Buscan who told Maitan it was the best offer.
Or the $4 million offer was shook on before Maitan was eligible and no one realized that he would be worth two to three times that amount on the open market once he was of age. at that point, it’s in the braves and the bucon’s interest to keep the original pact in order (the buscon to ensure his word is good with teams in the future) but certainly not Maitan’s. If Ona was worth $7 million, Matain was worth $15.