FELLOW EXECS: DOMBROWSKI A GOOD CALL

Fellow personnel men laud skills, style of new Sox boss

All it took was a few phone calls.

That’s how Ed Wade remembers it anyway. It was June 2005, and the Phillies needed a reliever to pitch the eighth inning in front of All-Star closer Billy Wagner. Wade, Philadelphia’s general manager at the time, identified Ugueth Urbina as a solution and dialed up his Detroit Tigers counterpart.

As usual, Dave Dombrowski was ready to deal.

“There wasn’t a lot of back and forth,” Wade told the Herald in a phone interview last week. “I think it was two or three calls. Every conversation with trades, even prior to that, was pretty matter of fact and to the point. Dave always seemed to get to the crux of the matter pretty quickly.”

If this was fantasy baseball, Dombrowski would be the guy nobody wants to trade with, if for no reason other than the newly named Red Sox president of baseball operations is really good at it.

As the Florida Marlins GM, Dombrowski stole third baseman Mike Lowell from the Yankees for three minor league pitchers in 1999. He famously acquired slugger Miguel Cabrera for the Tigers in a 2007 blockbuster and got an up-andcoming eventual Cy Young Award winner two years later when he swung a threeway trade for Max Scherzer.

And in the deal with Wade, Dombrowski extracted second baseman Placido Polanco, who batted .311 with a .355 on-base percentage in five seasons in Detroit, helping the Tigers win the pennant in 2006. Urbina posted a 4.13 ERA in 56 appearances for the Phillies, then was jailed for attempted murder in his native Venezuela and didn’t pitch again.

Early in 2013, ESPN’s Grantland studied Dombrowski’s career and determined he had won 11 of his last 15 trades. And that was before he scored shortstop Jose Iglesias in a three-team deal involving the Red Sox, second baseman Ian Kinsler in a move that allowed the Tigers to unload Prince Fielder’s burdensome contract, and ace lefty David Price in a win-now grab at the trade deadline last year.

“You need to make sure you’re on your game when you’re talking to him, because he’s certainly always going to be on his,” Chicago White Sox GM Rick Hahn said. “And his track record speaks for itself.”

Indeed, the 59-year-old Dombrowski has mastered the art of the trade. And with the Red Sox trusting him to orchestrate a rapid return to contention in 2016, it’s worth examining what makes him such a skilled wheeler-dealer.

Always seeking info

Thirty-seven years ago, as a student at Western Michigan University, Dombrowski wrote a 63-page honors thesis entitled “The General Manager, The Man in the Middle,” which explored the evolution of a baseball GM.

It helped land him a job with the White Sox in 1978.

“I saw him as an outstanding young prospect at the front-office level,” said ex-White Sox GM Roland Hemond, who hired Dombrowski as an administrative assistant and quickly promoted him through the player-development ranks all the way up to assistant GM. “And he’s lived up to all my expectations and beyond.”

In particular, Hemond was struck by his protege’s inquisitiveness and his endless search for information.

While other front-office types were content to sit in their offices, Dombrowski went to the field and chatted up the likes of well-respected hitting coach Charlie Lau. When the White Sox hired a tutor to teach their scouts basic Spanish, Dombrowski became fluent. (Years later, when he got his first GM job with the Montreal Expos, he learned French, too.)

Dombrowski cut his teeth at a time when traditional scouting triumphed over advanced metrics. And under his direction, the Tigers lagged behind most other teams, especially the Bill James-influenced Red Sox when it came to employing a large analytics department.

But to those who accuse him of being anti-analytics, Dombrowski points to conversations with Hemond 35 years ago about looking beyond traditional data points. Rather than focusing on a pitcher’s ERA, Hemond suggested WHIP or strikeout-to-walk ratio as more telling stats. For hitters, he prioritized total bases over hits, strikeouts-per-at-bat over batting average.

“I always said, ‘You have to have an open mind,’ ” Hemond said. “Dave’s smart enough to take whatever information the analytics stuff gives you and have your scouts express their sentiments and ask good questions and then put everything together and pull the trigger on trades. He’s one of the best at that.”

It helps, too, to have a nearly photographic memory.

Forget names and faces. Dombrowski remembers obscure dates and details told to him in passing. According to former Cincinnati Reds and Washington Nationals GM Jim Bowden, Dombrowski is notorious for surprising rival executives with a card or email on the occasion of a promotion, the birth of child or a death in the family.

And when it comes to player evaluation, almost nothing escapes his ironclad memory.

“He would be in a meeting with our scouts preparing for the June draft or the offseason, and he’d say, ‘A year ago you didn’t like this player. What makes you like him now?’ ” Hemond said. “He has a great, retentive mind.”

Said Hahn: “He knows his personnel extremely well, and he knows your personnel extremely well. You’re not going to catch him off guard. Whether that’s a tribute to his memory or his preparation, it’s a fantastic ability that he has.”

‘The whole package’

Given his knack for dealmaking, it would seem to make the most sense for rival executives to simply let Dombrowski’s calls go unanswered in the interest of self-preservation.

But win, lose or draw, most GMs who have traded with Dombrowski say they enjoyed working with him. Bowden respects him so much he predicted Dombrowski will “lead the Red Sox back to another world championship, sooner rather than later.”

To do so, Dombrowski almost certainly will have to win a few more big trades.

Like Wade, Hahn said Dombrowski tends to be “always direct, always to the point.” Bowden, who worked with Dombrowski on the Dmitri Young-Juan Encarnacion swap in December 2001, described him as “up front and straight at you,” though he admitted to some spirited back and forth.

“His proposals were usually initially lopsided his way, although he’s told me he felt the same way about me,” Bowden said. “When he’s ready to make a deal and he’s close to the finish line, he can close deals as good as anyone in the game. It’s usually fast-paced at the end of the process, and you know it’s about to happen and how far he’ll go.”

All of which suggests Dombrowski operates with great decisiveness once he’s gathered the necessary information, anecdotally from his trusted scouts and statistically.

When it comes to trades, few do it any better.

“He’s a well-rounded baseball man in every respect — business background, education, he’s the whole package,” Hemond said. “It was a real coup by the Red Sox to pounce on him.”