Executive Access is running a series of throwback episodes from 2017, including this week’s episode featuring three National League West executives: Giants president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi, Padres general manager A.J. Preller and Rockies general manager Jeff Bridich.
Behind every big league general manager is an executive who helped show them the way.
For three executives currently running National League West clubs, that is certainly the case.
Farhan Zaidi was in an economics PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley, when he came across the book "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game," which chronicled Athletics general manager Billy Beane and his analytical approach to team building with a small-market budget.
Inspired to pursue a career in baseball, Zaidi sent his résumé around the league, but when he saw a listing for a baseball operations assistant with Oakland, it “wound up being pretty serendipitous.”
“I didn’t know anybody over there; I had no experience with the organization,” Zaidi said during his 2017 appearance on Executive Access. “I just submitted my résumé and crossed my fingers. A few days later, I heard from David Forst. A week after that, I was in Billy Beane’s office for an interview. It was a very, very lucky set of circumstances.”
Soon enough, Zaidi was sitting in Beane’s office.
“Very surreal,” Zaidi said.
Zaidi beat out a number of qualified candidates for the job, starting a decade-long run with the Athletics. Beane proved to be a major influence on Zaidi, who joined the Dodgers as general manager after the 2014 season before taking over the Giants’ baseball operations department four years later.
During his 10 years with the Athletics, Beane helped instill an important trait in Zaidi: a lack of fear.
“I think one of the easiest traps to fall into, or something that can really inhibit your judgement in this kind of role, is just the fear of making mistakes,” Zaidi said. “The fear of making a trade that you get burned on, the fear of signing a free agent that doesn’t work out; it can really lead to paralysis. I think if you really look deep inside the soul of any GM, they’ll acknowledge there’s a lot of that. That affects and maybe even impairs their decision-making. That is what I was able to observe with Billy and try to apply in practice wherever I can, which is to not avoid making decisions because you’re worried about them making you look bad.”
While Zaidi found a mentor in a man he once read about in a book, A.J. Preller spent several years working for someone he knew so well, he probably could have authored a biography about him.
Preller started his career with a number of different jobs, moving from the Phillies to the Commissioner’s Office to the Dodgers. In 2004, he joined Rangers general manager Jon Daniels -- his college roommate and fraternity brother at Cornell -- in Texas, spending a decade working for his longtime friend.
“J.D. is a great decision-maker,” Preller said. “Ultimately, he’s really able to process a lot of information, which you have to do in this job. There are a lot of people that are giving you information, there’s a lot that’s out there from when you go into making a trade or a free-agent signing. He did a really good job of having a feel for who to listen to, when to listen, how to feel for a moment in time, what was the right direction for the organization in a lot of cases, whether a player’s value was stock-up or stock-down. He’s always had his own really good natural knack and feel for that. More often than not, he’s usually in the right. I think he’s done a great job leading that organization.”
Like Preller, Jeff Bridich spent the early years of his career working for Major League Baseball in the Commissioner’s Office, but the former Harvard baseball captain missed the competitive nature of the game, drawing him to the club side.
Bridich joined the Rockies in 2004, working for GM Dan O’Dowd. They would spend nearly a decade together before Bridich was tabbed as O’Dowd’s successor after the 2014 season.
Asked what he learned most working for O’Dowd, Bridich had trouble limiting his answer to a single lesson.
“If you ask me the one thing, I think the scope of the job,” Bridich said. “The responsibility that you feel to the organization at large, it’s not easy. The scope is large. It’s a people game and there are a lot of people involved. The more intimate connections you can develop with those people over time or try to maintain over time, it can be key to how well your organization does.
“The other thing is Dan was always pushing the envelope, trying to make sure that people weren’t sitting on their laurels or being comfortable. He always wanted to try to push you into a zone of uncomfortableness, for lack of a better word, and that was to grow; to grow the organization, to grow you as an individual. I think he did that well.”
Did Bridich envision his former boss becoming a big television star on MLB Network?
“I can’t say that I did,” Bridich said with a chuckle. “But I can’t claim that I have an eye for TV talent.”
Listen to all three interviews on Executive Access, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, Art 19 or wherever you get your podcasts.