For D-Backs' GM, Path Never Lacked Direction

By Dave Sheinin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 8, 2008

When the fresh-faced young man shagging fly balls in the outfield to Ron Shapiro's left sauntered over and asked for help breaking into the business of baseball 15 years ago at the Haverford College alumni baseball game, Shapiro's natural inclination, assuming he liked his first impression of the young man -- and in this case he did, immediately -- might have been to offer him a low-level job in the player-representation agency he ran in Baltimore. With clients such as Cal Ripken, Eddie Murray and Kirby Puckett, Shapiro could afford another entry-level employee.

Instead, Shapiro gave the young man the same advice he had given his own son several years before.

"I told them both, 'If I were choosing a path in baseball, it wouldn't be as an agent -- it would be on the management side,' " Shapiro recalled, " 'because that would keep you closer to your passion, which is the game of baseball.' "

By that time, the spring of 1993, Shapiro, Haverford Class of '64, was in a position to go even further for Josh Byrnes, Haverford Class of '92 -- because Shapiro's son, Mark, had taken his old man's advice and was a rising star in the Cleveland Indians' front office. A storybook moment in the annals of professional networking was about to be written. "Ron really mapped out a game plan for me," Byrnes said, "and his first order of business was arranging an interview for me in Cleveland."

Fifteen years later, Byrnes, a star second baseman for St. Albans in his pre-Haverford days, still marvels at his good fortune. Perhaps someone as sharp and driven as he was would have wound up in the same position he is in today anyway -- general manager of the first-place Arizona Diamondbacks, who open a three-game series today at Nationals Park -- but there is no doubt his connection to the Shapiros put him on this path.

"A lot of people at that stage offered encouragement," Byrnes said. "Ron offered a real plan."

When Byrnes achieved his dream of becoming a big league general manager in October 2005, he was only 35 but had spent nearly 12 years in the game -- as an intern, a scout, a scouting director, a farm director and an assistant general manager -- in the Indians, Rockies and Red Sox organizations. That fact was often overlooked by critics eager to lump Byrnes into the group of young, so-called "Moneyball" executives who supposedly valued stats over scouting.

"That label has brought something like partisan politics into baseball," said Byrnes, who once logged 250 nights on the road in a single year as the Indians' scouting director. "I did lot of traditional scouting stuff in my career. My background is in scouting."

Like most folks who work in baseball, instead of at baseball, Byrnes played the game until it became painfully obvious he had gone as far as he could. At St. Albans, he made the varsity team as a freshman at a time when the prestigious D.C. private school was winning the IAC championship every year, and made a large impression with his preternatural composure.

"People started calling him 'Sire,' because he had this regal air about him -- and it was never said derogatorily," said Mark Naples, a former assistant at St. Albans. "He was more an adult than a kid."

Mostly ignored by Division I schools, Byrnes walked on to the team at Haverford and became, in the estimation of Naples (himself a former Haverford baseball player), "one of the top two or three players in school history." ("No offense to Josh, because he was a good baseball player," added Ron Shapiro, who never played organized baseball until college, "but Haverford is probably the only team in the U.S. where I could have made the baseball team.")

Within months of his fortuitous meeting with Shapiro in the outfield before the annual alumni game, Byrnes, then 24, was driving to Cleveland to start an internship with the Indians (salary: $200 a week, pre-tax). He moved into an apartment with a handful of Indians employees (rent: $180 a month), all of them poor and in love with the game.

"We worked 24-7," Byrnes said, "and ate a lot of ravioli."

The Indians' front office in the mid-1990s, under then-GM John Hart, was one of the most progressive in baseball, in terms of incorporating video and statistical analysis into the game, and among the young talents working there were not only Byrnes and Mark Shapiro, but also Dan O'Dowd (who took Byrnes with him to Colorado in 1999 when he was named the Rockies' general manager) and Paul DePodesta (who went on to become general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and now works as a special assistant for the San Diego Padres).

By the middle of the next decade, with 10-plus years in the business -- including three as assistant general manager of the Boston Red Sox -- Byrnes was ready to be a GM .

In 2005, as Major League Baseball began the process of choosing an owner for the newly relocated Washington Nationals, speculation arose that one of the groups -- the one led by local financier Frederick Malek and businessman Jeffrey Zients, the latter a St. Albans alum -- might look to hire Byrnes, the hometown kid, as general manager. Byrnes said there was never any "tangible evidence" that the Malek-Zients group would have hired him -- and it soon became a moot point, because the Nationals were awarded to a different ownership group, and the Diamondbacks named Byrnes their GM.

At the time, Diamondbacks chief executive Jeff Moorad said he was most impressed by the way Byrnes answered one question during their interview. The question: Are you a "Moneyball" follower, or an advocate of traditional scouting? Byrnes's answer: Both.

In just his second season as general manager, Byrnes put together a division winner, as the Diamondbacks -- with 15 rookies clocking time in the majors -- won the NL West in 2007 and went to the playoffs for the first time in five years, losing to O'Dowd's Rockies in the NL Championship Series. (In fact, the last four teams alive in 2007 -- Arizona, Colorado, Boston and Cleveland -- were the four Byrnes has worked for.)

This season, the Diamondbacks were a season-best 12 games over .500 on May 18 (28-16, at the time the best record in baseball). Since then, they are 16-29, and limping into Nationals Park with a 44-45 record -- which is still good for first place in the dreadfully mediocre NL West.

"It's been a strange year, no doubt," Byrnes said. "Looking at our offense, we got better and better over the course of last year, and a lot of those guys are in their second year as full-time players [this year]. Then, we had a great April -- we were one of the top two offensive teams that month. But we've struggled offensively since then. And then, uncharacteristically, we've lost some games because of mistakes defensively, or on the base paths."

Despite the slide, the organization is held up as one of the best-run and most effective in the game. Last year, its farm system produced five key pieces of Arizona's division-title-winning squad (Chris Young, Justin Upton, Micah Owings, Tony Peña and Mark Reynolds), plus five more prospects who helped land all-star right-hander Dan Haren from the Oakland Athletics this winter.

There is every reason, in other words, to believe the Diamondbacks will outlast the rest of baseball's weakest division. And then, Byrnes, their general manager, can rest comfortably again, never needing to worry whether he should have pressed harder, on that afternoon 15 years ago, for a job as an agent.