Judgment

I, above a lot of people, would hate to be judged only by the errors or poor judgments I've made on my quest to become an octogenarian.

Like most of us I'd rather critique the judgment of others as opposed to myself. Unfortunately, like a black cloud overhead, not unlike the one that followed Joe Btfsplk in the Lil Abner comic strip, my memory is better than I would wish in that regard..

Despite that I continue to make judgments about the management team of my beloved Pittsburgh Pirates.

Now, being an owner of the Pirates apparently comes with some special privileges. I can recall one writer's column during the off season (as opposed to the off - in season of the Pirates) that the Pirates were allegedly considering raising the price of their tickets during 2010.

Stick with me here, folks. In the Pirate organization it is not unprecedented. I wondered aloud how an organization that consistently failed to produce a decent team, let alone a winning record for 17 years, would have the chutzpah to raise their prices and then provide the rationale behind that decision as, "we had to do this because attendance was off".

See, to my way of thinking, this is like not recognizing your responsibility to try to make a bad marriage better and instead concluding the situation justified you having multiple external affairs.

Yeah, I know the logic - or absence of same - sucks, but so does the many ill advised decisions made by the Pirates management team.

It is not my intention to bore you with the specifics. Go to Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.com if you really want validation and a much better perspective of the whole mess by people much more qualified than this writer.

Management has made so many bad decisions in the form of trades and acquisitions that one has to wonder if they really have a clue as to what they are doing. This assessment is not meant to speak to just their actions in the current year . It includes those years even before the powers that be opted to extend the contracts of both their hapless stoic manager and their G.M.

I'm sure the folks in charge at Ford Motor also felt the engineers who designed the Edsel were "the most qualified available", but, at some point they asked those engineers to move on and shelved the Edsel regardless of it's pronounced namesake status.

Let's assume for a moment that the Pirate fans are stockholders in your franchise. They have bought your stock in the form of tickets and pierogies. After 17 years of consistent losses how long do you believe the exec's in any other business would hold on to their jobs?

Unless you are a political appointee how can you possibly justify expecting to continue to be rewarded for your terrible judgments.

My career would have ended abruptly - much shorter than when I opted to take early retirement several years later - had I not had the wisdom to understand that I was in way over my head in certain areas of my job description.

Each year I was asked to take on more and more responsibility. I was told this was due to a perceived modicum of success in my management style.

The problem was that my ego was too big to allow me to say "NO".

Finally, I went to my superiors and asked for their assistance. We jointly agreed that a better plan was for me to stick to the things I do best and carefully delegate the matters for which I was insufficiently qualified to those folks who could run rings around me in some of the specialty areas.

It was a game winning plan and resulted in what I was told was a contributing factor in my having had a successful management career. It was not just the folks I supervised who made it work- and trust me- they were fantastic -it was the intelligence of those to whom I reported as well.

It's a plan I wish someone would implement with the Pirates. After all, this is a management team who was wise enough to rehire their dissident Pierogi Man.

I have met Neal Huntington several times at Spring Training. He is a charming and gracious man who has been extremely patient in addressing the many questions my brother and I have asked of him. However, a judgment as to his knowledge and qualifications as a major league scouting resource is very much up in the air.

If you truly appear to know little about the scouting of professional athletes, why would you not seek out and pay people appropriately who do have that knowledge?

Honestly, there are a lot of people out there in the other 29 team organizations who know so much more about player personnel than just how to operate a radar gun.

In conclusion: There is considerable dissatisfaction out there about this management team . However, apparently there are not enough people in a decision making position who are willing to make the requisite changes that a good organization requires.

Of course, that's just one man's opinion - or judgment- as they like to say..

But, then again, that apparently isn't a "judgment" shared by everyone.