What is a James Click Front Office Like?
We Have Seen Little of James Click's Stamp on the Astros in His Two Seasons in the Big Chair. That Is Starting to Change.
We are approaching the second anniversary of the hiring of James Click as the General Manager of the Houston Astros. That is two year of Click being in charge of baseball operations and guiding the team to a pair of deep playoff runs.
And yet for a number of reasons, we still do not have a complete idea of what James Click is like as a general manager. In this article, I’ll explore the reasons why there is not yet a clear James Click stamp on the Astros, either on the field or in the front office. But I’ll also examine how there is change coming on both fronts. There are signs that Click is putting his stamp on both elements of the team, and that both the 40-man roster and the front office will slowly but surely moving toward Click’s vision.
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Before I get into my analysis, let me start with an important caveat. It is difficult for outsiders to understand and evaluate the operations, organization, and decision making process of the front office of a baseball team. We can only see the results, and only the results that happened. So we do not know the process that a front office undertakes to make decisions about what players to sign, call up, demote or trade.
It is hard to know if the Astros have an optimal organizational structure within their front office because we do not actually know the org chart for the Astros (or any major league team for that matter). We also do not know the alternative options available for either who to hire for particular jobs or what the organization should look like.
James Click (and Jim Crane) run a large operation. Some people in the operation are in charge of executing particular ideas and some are in charge of identifying information to assist Click’s decision making process. But we do not see those actions. We only see the transactions page.
In short, analyzing how a front office operates is necessarily an exercise in speculation and tea leave reading. The success of a front office is vital to the success of a baseball team, but it is difficult to analyze how they do that vital job.
The Odd Transition
James Click was hired into the Astros in an unusual position for a general manager. Normally, baseball operations decision makers are hired when a team has performed poorly and a new front office direction is needed. Or the team is successful, the current GM is promoted or retires, and internal candidate is elevated to provide steadiness in the front office.
Click was hired under neither circumstance. Instead, the Astros GM position opened because Crane fired Jeff Luhnow in the wake of the commissioner’s report on the Astros “banging scheme.” The public relations hit from hiring an internal replacement for Luhnow compelled Crane to look outside the organization for a GM.
But even if Crane wanted to hire from within the organization, there was not a clear internal replacement. At the time of Luhnow’s firing, the #2 position in the organization was vacant. Assistant General Manager Brandon Taubman was fired after he tried to shame a female reporter for caring about domestic violence by pointedly crowing in front of her about the decision to acquire the pitcher that had blown the save in Game 6 of the ALCS.1
Click was was placed on top of a front office that had been effective over the last several years, and had a strong internal culture—though one whose insularity certainly contributed to the ethical blind spots evinced by the Taubman rant and the sign stealing effort
For example, the #2 spot in Click’s front office was taken by Pete Putila, who was promoted in late September (i.e. before the Taubman rant and the sign stealing revelations) to an Assistant General Manager position. Putila had worked his way up inside the Astros organization from when he was first hired as an intern even before his graduation from West Virginia.
For the ethical blindspots of the Luhnow front office, it was extremely effective at player evaluation and development. As a result, there was no desire to change the operations of the front office, but its culture.
So Click did not bring in “his” guys to implement “his” vision as a general manager. Instead, he was brought into a situation where he sat at the top of an organization built by someone else, and which did not want to change much in terms of things like evaluation and player development.
The odd transition also meant that on-the-field product did not reflect Click’s vision for the 2020 season. Click was hired on the eve of Spring Training, so most of the decisions about the 2020 roster were made before Luhnow’s firing. In addition, the Astros had a stacked team that needed few improvements from the outside.
In March, the coronavirus pandemic hit, which reduced the 2020 season to a 60-game sprint. Click made few roster moves, mostly promoting internal replacements to cover for guys who went on the IL. His biggest outside acquisition during the season was Brooks Raley, who took over a middle relief job. While the team floundered to a 29-31 record in 2020, they came alive in the expanded playoffs, winning a series against the Twins and A’s before falling to the Rays in 7 games in the ALCS.
There was little basis in 2020 to understand what Click wanted to do as GM. There was little opportunity for him to show anything.
Signs of Click’s Vision
Click has moved slowly over the last 2 years, both on the field and in the front office. But we have started to see change in both areas which indicate that Click is putting his own stamp on the Astros.
On the field, this has been most notable in the organization’s commitment to its own prospects and internal development. Luis Garcia was given the opportunity to win a job in the starting rotation in Spring Training 2021 and took the job and ran with it.
Chas McCormick was promoted to the big league roster and he responded with an excellent season as the 4th outfielder. And in Click’s most distinctive move, he promoted Jake Meyers to the centerfield to replace Myles Straw, who was traded for more bullpen help. That moved paid off in the regular season when Meyers was an upgrade on Straw at the plate, and in the playoffs, when Phil Maton delivered an excellent performance in the World Series run.
In 2021, Click chose not to pursue a center fielder from outside the organization, and handed the job to the unproven Myles Straw. It looks Click will do something similar in 2022 at shortstop.
In a mailbag segment at The Athletic this week, Jake Kaplan wrote that “I do get the sense that the Astros are prepared to give [Jeremy] Peña a shot to win the job. If one was setting odds on the identity of their Opening Day shortstop in 2022, he would be the favorite.”
In the front office, it is obviously more difficult to see the philosophical or organizational differences between Click and Luhnow’s front offices. But we can track the personnel moves in the front office as a way to get a handle on the issue.
Last week, the Astros announced the hiring of two new assistant general managers. Notably, these AGMs came from outside the organization. Andrew Ball has worked for the Angels most recently as their Director of Baseball Operations., and before that worked for the Rays along with Click. Scott Powers, who has a Ph.D. in Statistics, was the Director of Quantitative Analysis for the Dodgers.
The openings for Ball and Powers were create by some recent departures from the Astros front office. In October, the Cubs hired Ehsan Bokhari as their Assistant General Manager, after serving as the Astros Senior Director, Strategic Decision Making. In November, the Orioles hired Brendan Fournie away from the Astros, where he served as Senior Manager, Player Valuation and Economics.
The turnover in the front office has allowed Click to bring in people from the outside who owe their job to him. This diversifies the perspective in the Astros front office.2
Yet the Astros also have continued their long standing practice of promoting from within. The same press release the announced the hiring of Ball and Powers also announced promotions for Jacob Buffa, Charles Cook, Matt Hogan, and Will Sharp. Only Sharp has worked for another major league baseball team, and Sharp has been with the Astros since 2012.
So Click seems to be striking a balance between bringing in outside voices and promoting those from the inside with ties to the organization longer than his tenure as General Manager. He presumably could have promoted an internal replacement to Bokhari and Fournie’s roles, but elected to get candidates from outside the organization. Yet he is still promoting internal candidates to important roles in the organization.
And the balance is also present in the top 2 jobs in the front office. Click is the outsider, who came from Tampa Bay to run the Astros. But his top assistant is Putila, who ascended tot he AGM job before Click was hired and who has maintained his position within the organization since.
Will this balance in the front office work? As I noted above, it is difficult to say from the outside. The Astros sit in an enviable position, having one of the top rosters in baseball and a solid core of young players and are again favorites in the AL West. Yet there are always key decisions to make for a front office and challenges that lay ahead in holding off a rising Mariners for AL West supremacy over the next several year. In short, they need it to work.
But while I can’t say whether or not the new organization of the Astros front office will work, I can say that it will bear more and more the influence of James Click. Click’s attempt to balance between new and old in the front office will be mirrored on the field, where the team will try to balance between its old veterans (e.g. Altuve & Bregman) and its young prospects (e.g. Pena & catching prospect Korey Lee). The new balance will be a key to the Astros near term future.
It’s far and away the most indefensible thing the Astros have done in the last few years.
Though I should note that it does not diversity the racial or gender composition of their decisionmakers. Click and the assistant general mamagers are all white men. With that being said, the Astros did also hire Sara Goodrum as their Director of Player Development. That’s a front office position that one that works with minor league coordinators to improve the skills of Astro minor leaguers.