Talking Chop

I recently did a five-question Q&A with Dave Rouleau of Baseball Digest Daily about the Braves and some of their expectations heading into next season. He asked some decent questions to both me and Will Schaffer of CnC. (In comparing our responses to the questions I did find it interesting how the length of our answers differed - and I thought I was the blogger who was more verbose.)

We pretty much had similar answers for every question except the first one which asked if we trusted Frank Wren to continue the Braves' winning tradition. I opted to say that I thought it was time for a change in the GM's chair and that Wren would have my trust more than Schuerholz would. Will's opening line to that question shows that he would completely disagree with me on that point.

I should probably clarify my statement to read, "I trust the Wren of today more than the Schuerholz of today." Plainly put Schuerholz is not the same GM he was in the 90's.

I'll be the first to say John Schuerholz should be in the Hall of Fame as one of the best GMs of all time, but he too is susceptible to flaws and errors and they started to pile up the last few years. I was also a bit angered by Schu's stance against some agents - it seemed more like a personal vendetta, than professional disagreement. Regardless of how much you like Schuerholz, we have a better chance of resigning Mark Teixeira with Frank Wren as the one negotiating with Scott Boras. We also may not have been able to negotiate with Glavine's agent if Schu was still doing the dealing. Schuerholz seems like a guy who is somewhat self aware, so I don't think that point (his inability to work with some agents) was lost on him when he decided to step down as GM.

I'm sure we'll have plenty of opportunities to discuss the differences and similarities between Schuerholz and Wren throughout the season. This one question, which elicited two vastly different responses from two bloggers, made me stop and think for an extra minute or two.