Our blog, Off the Bench, has recently been re-branded. Each of the major players in the blog has branched out into our own respective Twitter lives. As I filtered through who I wanted to follow, I found that I could once again follow ESPN’s Jim Bowden. See, somewhere along the line I had been blocked for repeatedly calling for his firing, and repeatedly blasting his inept analysis. I also made fun of him for prematurely giving out offseason grades. Oh and I tweeted about it a lot.
So obviously there is a history here. I’m not sure I have ever engaged Jim directly before yesterday, opting instead for the more passive subtweets and general mockery of his diction. I’m not sure if it was the fact that I actually saw a Tweet from Bowden for the first time since at least July, 2015, or if it was because this latest piece had Mickey Moniak as the third best player available in the upcoming draft, but I decided to remind Jim of his draft success as a real-life GM.
.@JimBowden_ESPN In your GM career, 6 of your first rounders produced career WAR totals > 0. **12** were negative or never reached MLB
— Sean Morash (@OTBB_Sean) June 7, 2016
That favorite on my tweet there? Not from Jim.
That screenshot is my full conversation with Jim Bowden. As of this writing he hasn’t enlightened me. That doesn’t stop me from enlightening my readers about how….let’s say…. frequently mistaken Bowden is. In the spirit of my other posts, I’ll dissect Bowden’s writing. This time, his little fingers typed out their half-coherent ramblings at me. Without proper capitalization.
Actually Sean I was never the scouting director… so I didn’t make the decisions you are referring to…
You can see my reply in the above, but I still want to go over this in far greater detail. I outlined Bowden’s own version of Draft day from a general manager’s perspective. He really did write that quote I referenced, along with a note on the importance of draft day for organizations: “We invest millions of dollars in employees, hotels, transportation, computers, radar guns and meal money just to make sure we draft the best player — or best fit — with each of our selections.”
So what’s the first thing that Jim Bowden does on draft day? I’m glad you asked.
“The first thing I would do was go directly to the draft room and change the order of the draft board, just to have some fun with the scouting director.”
This guy is a buffoon. He is literally there making his underlings’ lives more difficult. He’s like the boss in every Dilbert, except possibly with worse capitalization.
But I digress. Bowden’s larger point is that he shouldn’t be held responsible for the misses in drafts while he was GM. This is a wild assertion, especially when the GM has veto power. The GM effectively signs off on every draft pick that an organization makes. The cognitive dissonance required to overlook that nuance when it was literally his job for 18+ years is amazing.
Imagine if the President of the United States declared that he couldn’t be held responsible for a law he signed while in office because someone else wrote the law. Bowden’s logic is effectively the same as an athlete who insists that he doesn’t know how a PED entered his body. I wonder how long and well this deflective technique served Bowden over his respective tenures with the Reds and Nationals.
but since you never worked for an MLB club… I can understand you not knowing any better…best wishes to you
Ugh. Bowden went there. Sure, my general loathing of Bowden is grounded in the jealousy knowing that he’s made his career working in baseball. I think I’m a better analyst and I’m jealous that his full time job is to churn out content written with the apparent breadth of knowledge equivalent to a set of incompetent interns.
But I hate that Bowden has that over me. He’s right. I don’t know how the inner workings of those draft rooms work. I have the fact that I played college baseball in my back pocket, but that doesn’t help in a battle of front office experience.
And that smug “best wishes to you” is so dismissive. Why engage me at all if you’re just going to dismiss me? Why, Jim? WHY?
not really Sean… did you work for Marge Schott? do you know who the scouting director reported to? Did you ever work for a team? sorry but you think you know something you don’t
Again with this. I never worked for Marge Schott because I was 13 when she died, but that’s not the point here. Bowden is trying to drive home that he wasn’t in charge on game day, again skirting, ducking, avoiding responsibility for a decision that he at least contributed to.
What’s more, Bowden’s defense that A) “wasn’t my fault” and B) “You never worked in an MLB front office so you really have no clue” miss a potentially far more effective rebuttal to my criticism:
Every team misses on draft picks and his teams really weren’t that different from the MLB average.
Look, my quick googling didn’t turn up any studies on the success of first rounders measured by the same metric that I used (career WAR), but there were plenty that outlined how much chance is involved. Baseball America found that just 1 in 6 draft picks make the majors. Michael Jiminez found the success rate of MLB draft picks by slot. Bowden’s picks hit on relatively the same rate of successful players as any average draft.
The fact that Bowden missed this larger point is embarrassing for him and ESPN, but I won’t even begin to start on ESPN.
Back to Bowden: I’ll grant that I was under his skin and that he likely wasn’t in peak-Bowden articulation form. That’s no excuse. For all real purposes, Bowden was engaging an internet troll (a handsome internet troll, I might add). He’s got to be better if he wants to keep his job. I don’t want him to. Join me to convince ESPN to #FireJimBowden
-Sean Morash
