November 19, 2001 "Up Close" with Mike Glander ROY FIRESTONE: Welcome to "Up Close", the show where I try to get all of my guests to cry on camera. Today's guest shouldn't be too much of a challenge. Please welcome Mike Glander, manager of the Salem Cowtippers, also known as the "Atlanta Braves of the BDBL." MIKE GLANDER: Hello, Roy. Thanks for having me. RF: Well, Mike, I guess this isn't how you envisioned your season coming to an end, is it? MG: Gosh, Roy, there are so many things about this post-season that I didn't envision that you'll have to be more specific. Sweeping my way into my first championship series only to be swept right out of it? Making Stamford's trip to the World Series so easy? A 2-for-28 "effort" by Sheffield and Bagwell? An 0-for-13 "effort" by our shortstop combo? Five hits combined from Fryman and Sosa? A total of zero RBI's from Berkman, Kent, Fryman and Sheffield? Nine runs scored in four games from the league's top offense? 11 hits in our first two games combined? A .220 team batting average? Eight earned runs through five-plus innings from our "ace", Mussina? Eight runs through eleven innings from our #2 and #3 starters? A 5.29 team ERA? 22 walks allowed by our staff in 34 innings? In all honesty, if you took the worst team in the BDBL and put them up against the Zoots in the same best-of-seven series, they could not have possibly done any worse. This series far exceeded my worst nightmares, Roy. It would be literally impossible for me to envision a worse outcome than the one I witnessed on November the 17th. So no, Roy, I think it's safe to say that nothing that happened that day is what I even remotely envisioned. I tend to be a pessimist, but even I couldn't have conjured up such a cruel joke. RF: Hmm. You seem a little tense, Mike. You feeling okay? MG: I feel like I've been kicked in the nuts, Roy. After all I've given to this team, their performance in the biggest series in franchise history was a real slap in the face. RF: But as bad as it was, it really is a familiar story for you, isn't it? MG: Sure, this is a recurring theme. Thirteen years ago, my old team in the CBL finished with a 22-6 record and blew away the competition both at the plate and on the mound. Our starting rotation included Roger Clemens, Orel Hershiser and Mike Scott. To say we dominated that season would be a gross understatement. But that team was also swept by the Zoots in the playoffs when none of my players performed as well as they did during the season. Sound familiar? Two years ago, we fielded a team that I felt was superior to Stamford. We lost that one, too, but at least we put up a fight. What happened on the 17th was simply humiliating. RF: Boy, it's kind of funny how history keeps repeating itself again and again and again, isn't it? MG: No, not really. RF: The vaunted Cowtippers offense certainly did collapse in the OLCS. But you have to give some credit to the Zoots pitching, don't you? I mean, everyone knows good pitching does beat good hitting. MG: Wrong, Roy. A good pitcher will make a good hitter less successful, but he doesn't totally remove him from the game. And if you string together seven good hitters, the chances of that pitcher having great success against all seven is about a million-to-one. Good hitting beats good pitching just as often as the reverse. I give Brown and Johnson all the credit in the world. They are great pitchers, there's no doubt about that. But they can be beaten and they have been beaten. And Bohanon and Dempster are hardly Koufax and Drysdale. We should have murdered those two. But we didn't. And our good pitching certainly didn't stop their good hitting. This series was a total team effort. All 25 players on our roster failed miserably. RF: How do you explain what happened? MG: You know, when something like this happens, you tend to turn to philosophy for answers. You start asking yourself why bad things happen to good people, stuff like that. A lot of people turn toward the supernatural when things like this happen, blaming it all on curses, gods and demons, but I don't subscribe to any of that nonsense. Look, we just ran into an incredible streak of bad luck at the worst possible moment. Why this always seems to happen to us, I'll never know. But one thing is for sure. If nothing else, this series has proven beyond the shadow of doubt that there is no such thing as "karma." RF: Care to elaborate? MG: Well, there are certain people who believe that if you do the right thing, work really hard and treat people fairly, you will be rewarded for your good behavior. And if you don't do all of those things, you will eventually pay for your actions. This series is conclusive proof that karma doesn't exist. RF: Interesting. If that's the case, would you change anything that you have done over the years? For example, you once mentioned that you had a chance to acquire Randy Johnson from the Blazers in exchange for Todd Greene, Ryan Bradley and Butch Henry, but you didn't pull the trigger because you knew it would have been a terrible trade for New Milford. In retrospect, do you wish you could take that trade back? MG: No, I still wouldn't do that deal. Listen, I admit that I can be very stubborn about certain things. Perhaps that's a personality flaw. But in this case, I just don't think I could sleep at night if I did such a thing - especially to poor Billy. Aside from that, though, I've always believed that if I rip someone off at the trading table, they'll never trade with me again. But that is clearly not the case in this league. RF: Hmm. Some might say that you just don't want it badly enough. You seem to value integrity more than success. Would you say that's true? MG: I don't know, Roy, I guess I do. But that sounds to me like justification for being a loser. Look, everyone has his own philosophy about how to build a winning ballclub. In the end, the only thing that matters is whether or not that philosophy was successful. Just think of this game as "Survivor for Baseball Fans." You can be a loser with integrity like Cody, or you can be a ruthless opportunist like Dick Hatch. Say all you want about Dick Hatch, but he's a million dollars richer than Cody. RF: Would you say that your philosophy has been successful? MG: Yes, I would. Listen, we have been the second-best team in the history of the BDBL. That's something to be awfully proud of. We've had some incredible bad luck in the post-season to say the least. But to be honest, I really don't know what the post-season is supposed to prove anyway. Especially in light of what just happened, the post-season just seems so random to me right now that it has little revelance. I place more value on the all-time wins list than I do on the all- time championship list. RF: But it sure would be nice to have that trophy on your shelf, wouldn't it? MG: Yes it would. RF: Why has your OLCS opponent, Paul Marazita, been so successful in this league and others? MG: Quite simply, Paul Marazita has a gift. And that gift is identifying and exploiting flaws in baseball simulations. He recognized and exploited the flaws of the old "Earl Weaver Baseball" software we used in the CBL better than anyone, and used that knowledge to win three championships. And he is about to do the same in the BDBL. RF: What flaw has he exploited in Diamond Mind Baseball? MG: The biggest flaw in the game is that it relies far too heavily on split stats. Studies have shown that split stats tend to be very inconsistent from year-to-year, and will normalize given a large enough sample size. In fact, the folks who created Diamond Mind concluded the very same thing in their own study. Yet for some reason, this is not reflected in their software. As a result, a team can do very well in a short series by playing hitters and pitchers who had extreme splits over a handful of plate appearances. In this game, you are better off having two part-time players with extreme splits than one all-star player who has proven his ability over a full season. Not only will they perform better, but they're cheaper, too. Over the past three years, we've seen guys like Joe Oliver, Luis Polonia and Fernando Seguignol batting cleanup in the lineup of the league champion. Players like Luis Alicea and Chad Curtis have also contributed greatly to the Zoots in the post-season. And their bullpen is made up solely of pitchers with extreme splits. Marazita understands this quirk in the game better than anyone, and he has exploited this to great benefit. Let's face it, the Zoots would not be a great team in reality. No self-respecting Major League manager would ever put someone like Oliver or Polonia on his post-season roster, never mind the cleanup spot. But the Zoots have proven that this strategy works in Diamond Mind Baseball. RF: Now that you recognize this, will that change the way you manage? MG: I have to tell you, I'd have a hard time sitting Jason Kendall and putting Keith Osik in the cleanup spot. But I think that if we ever want to compete in this league, we'll all have to change the way that we think about the game of baseball. Unfortunately, as accurate as the Diamond Mind software is, it's not perfect. I'll tell you one thing that will definitely change is my philosophy at the trading table. RF: How so? MG: We traded a player who I believe is a future Hall-of-Famer in exchange for our catcher. Marazita traded an 18th-round draft pick and a player who was cut two weeks later in exchange for Oliver, who had a much better post-season than our all-star catcher. We traded a young pitcher who was, at the time, one of the top five pitching prospects in the game, plus a very solid reliever for next season, in exchange for our closer. Marazita traded a middling prospect, Alex Graman, for his playoffs closer, Lou Pote. Last year, he traded a draft pick that was never used in exchange for his playoffs closer. We traded Alfonso Soriano for a key pinch hitter. Marazita traded Onan Masaoka for his key pinch hitter, Bubba Trammell. You know, everyone focuses on the big-name trades Marazita and I have made over the years, and certainly those helped us both get to the post-season. But the difference is that Marazita has always been able to pick up those part-timers who become playoff heroes due to their extreme splits, while I have focused on star full-time players, who tend to be far more expensive. I give him all the credit in the world for recognizing this flaw in the software and acting on it. RF: Of course, Marazita has also been able to reel in the big names as well. MG: Gosh, Roy, you seem to be obsessed with Marazita! Yes, Paul has been extraordinarily successful at the trading table. Always has been. His other amazing gift is the ability to acquire star players at little-to-no cost to his franchise. This is something that no one else in the league has been able to do on a consistent basis. And that difference can really hurt a franchise over the course of time. For example, I had to trade two years of Javier Vazquez to get one year of my ace, Mussina. Marazita got two and a half years of his ace, Johnson, for two players (Rosado and Ward) who have been total non-factors. This year, he made a huge mid-season deal to acquire two big bats, and so did I. But I had to give away four top prospects to get those bats. He gave up two middle relievers that he'll hardly miss next year. I added Chen and Castillo to my rotation, and had to give up Cirillo and Graves to get them. Marazita has added Smoltz, Dempster and Bohanon to his rotation over the past two years at the expense of Cameron, Halama, Helling and Kip Wells. And Helling was basically acquired straight-up for Angel Pena, who was released two weeks later. The list goes on and on. Over the years, I've given away more talent than any other team in the league. I didn't do it because I'm a nice guy. I did it because I had to in order to compete. And that's what everyone else in the league has done as well. But Marazita can acquire the same amount of talent - if not more so - while giving up far, far less. And that's really what being a great GM is all about, isn't it? To me, that makes him the greatest fantasy baseball GM ever. Period. RF: That's some very rare high praise from you. MG: I don't think it's rare at all. I praise Marazita all the time, but he's usually too busy being defensive to recognize it. Listen, the time when one could argue with a straight face that the Zoots aren't the greatest fantasy baseball team ever, or that Marazita isn't the greatest fantasy GM ever, passed a long time ago. He's about to win his third straight title, matching his CBL total, and we've only played three seasons in the BDBL. And as long he can continue to find that one person every year who is willing to feed the Zoots Dynasty, he'll continue to win. You can say all you want about how he gets there, but the fact remains that he is the king of the hill until someone comes along to knock him off. RF: You think that someone will be you? MG: Roy, let me tell you something. I've been playing fantasy baseball for 15 years and I've built some pretty amazing teams during that time. When I say that the 2001 Salem Cowtippers were the best team I've ever built, I really mean it. To have a starting lineup of Jason Kendall, Jeff Kent, Gary Sheffield, Bobby Abreu, Jeff Bagwell, Sammy Sosa and Travis Fryman is simply ridiculous. I mean, our #7 hitter hit .330 and drove in over 100 runs, for crying out loud. You just don't see that in any league - real or fantasy. To have four starting pitchers with sub-3.80 ERA's in this day and age is unfathomable. To have Derek Lowe, with 42 saves, as your right-handed setup man, and Mike Myers, with a sub-2.00 ERA at Coors Field, from the left-hand side, with Keith Foulke closing, is a manager's dream come true. If I play this game another fifty years, I will never, ever, build a better team than that. It literally can't be done. Yet the Zoots not only beat that team, they humiliated that team. So no, Roy, I don't believe I will ever win the championship in this league. I thought we had the best team in the Ozzie League in two of the last three years, and I was proven wrong both times. If I couldn't win with that ridiculous team that I had this year, then how on earth could I ever win? RF: So why go on? MG: You know, Roy, I asked myself the very same question, oh, around Game Two. I really don't have an answer for you. I guess I play simply because I enjoy the process of building a team and managing the games. But I'm dead serious when I tell you that the hope, excitement and expectation that a person usually has at the beginning of each season, that dream of winning it all, is completely gone. RF: How sad. I think I'm going to cry myself. Let's change the subject before I do. The OLCS was such a boring series in terms of strategy, but two moves you made that evoked a bit of criticism were pitching Mussina on three days of rest and attempting a suicide squeeze with one out and Piatt at the plate in the ninth inning of Game Four. Care to comment? MG: C'mon, Roy, the series was over by that point. When Moose got spanked in Game One, I took him out early, so he had no excuse for getting spanked again in Game Four. And Piatt is a "Vg" bunter, and the way we were hitting, we were forced to manufacture runs the entire series. I certainly didn't trust Kendall to come through with the big two-out clutch single we needed to score that runner from third. I thought that was a good call, and I'd do it again. Like I said, though, the series was over by that point, so there's no use in even discussing this. RF: You took yourself out of the game in the middle of Game Three. What was going on in your mind? MG: I was contemplating whether to throw either myself or the computer through the window. It was the fourth inning, we were down two games to none, and losing 4-0 in the third game. But we somehow managed to put our first two runners on in the fourth against Bohanon, and I felt as if this insane slump was finally about to end. Then Piatt grounded into a 3-6-1 double play and Sosa grounded to short, giving us a total of one run in our first 22 innings of the championship series. It was a little too much to handle, and I could literally feel my blood boiling at that point. I knew I'd be useless as a manager the rest of the game, and would probably make some stupid decisions because of it. So I got up and turned to (Litchfield manager Phil) Geisel and told him to take over the team. I couldn't stand to watch it anymore. I honestly considered just getting in my car and driving back to Salem. I was that upset. RF: That's not the first time you've done that, correct? MG: Yes, history repeated itself several times over that weekend. I also let Geisel manage my team in the 1990 playoffs against the Murphy Maulers or whatever the hell they were called. That series is the only one that even comes close to approaching the insanity and humiliation of this one. RF: You also threw a highly-publicized temper tantrum in Game One. Care to comment? MG: Yes, actually. I want to apologize to everyone who witnessed that tantrum, including Mr. Marazita. It was completely uncalled for. I could feel the pressure building inside my skull as Mussina coughed up two early runs in the first. Then, when Oliver hit that longball off Mussina to lead off the third, I just lost it completely. I called Mr. Oliver some very choice words and just let my rage fly for about 20 seconds or so. Marazita was sitting there with this big shit-eating grin on his face, ready to recite Oliver's slugging percentage against righties to me, and if he did, I think I would have strangled him. I settled down after that, though, and played the rest of that 8-0 game without saying a word. But I knew right then and there that I had lost the series. I hope that those who were there that day understand my complete and utter frustration at that moment. RF: What about this rumor that you were "brooding" afterwards? MG: I have heard that, and I honestly don't understand where that's coming from. I thought I handled my defeat very well, especially considering the circumstances. I was understandably disappointed, but I thought I displayed extremely good sportsmanship. I mean, how on earth was I supposed to react? I think that the people who started those rumors expected me to be a lot worse than I really was. Perhaps they're confusing those expectations with reality. I don't know. RF: I know you had stated several times before the OLCS even took place that you thought you had no chance against the Zoots. In fact, Stamford won their last seven of eight against you during the regular season, and swept you in your final series. So you really weren't that surprised by this outcome, were you? MG: Look, it's ludicrous to even think that the Zoots were a better team than the Cowtippers this season. Aside from Johnson, I wouldn't exchange any one of our 25 players for any one of theirs. And even then, I might go with Chen over Johnson given the way they pitched this season. But I know the history, and I know that the Baseball Gods always shine upon the Zoots in the post-season. I even told Marazita before we started the series that I'd have to win it alone, since I'd surely get no help from the Baseball Gods. If only I'd known then how little help they were about to give me, I wouldn't have even bothered to show up. But I have to admit that a small part of me believed that this was a special team, and the time just seemed right for a changing of the guard in the BDBL. I have been disappointed so many times on the fantasy baseball field, but I have to say this one tops them all. As I said, I'm not a believer in "fate" or "karma" or any of that stuff, but for some reason, I thought that I was somehow "owed" a bit of good luck after all these years. It's been a rough year for me in general, and I really thought that I deserved some good luck to come my way just this once. I worked harder at building a winner this year than any other year of my career. I spent more time than I care to imagine building and preparing for this. I threw caution to the wind and sacrificed the future of my franchise several times over in order to ensure beyond the shadow of a doubt that I was fully insulated against failure. But after eleven long months of hard work, all of my hopes and dreams were dashed in a matter of a few hours in a basement in New Jersey. I am quite simply shocked by the injustice of it all. Congratulations, Roy, you got me to cry.