STAYING IN TOUCH NEW GM GETTING TO KNOW HIS STAFF, CHANGING CULTURE ONE CALL AT A TIME
James Click’s conversations with his new employees include a barrage of questions.
“What’s happened to you in the last 12 to 18 months?” Click may first ask.
“Where do you want to go? Where do you want to take this? What do you want your personal career path to look like?”
The Astros endured a lot of attrition across the past year and a half, with some exits much more public than others. Click can only gauge the psyche of his organization’s remaining employees with direct dialogue.
General manager James Click is making it a point to give his staffers lots of feedback after many said Jeff Luhnow had grown distant in his last years with the club.
Click prefers conducting such heavy discussions in person, but the coronavirus pandemic prevents it. Telephone calls, FaceTime or Zoom must suffice for the Astros rookie general manager, who nowadays vacillates between home-school lessons on second-grade fractions to tasks most baseball teams can’t complete in an ordinary regular season.
“Baseball ops is doing (things) that are always on your to-do list but you never have time to do,” Click said Tuesday. “It’s improving our processes, im
Photos by Karen Warren / Staff photographer
proving our models, improving our ability to coach, improving our ability to scout, improving our ability to make decisions.
“It’s a good chance for everybody to take a deep breath after a pretty tumultuous offseason, kind of look around and get a feel for what’s going on and think about how we’re going to do this going forward.”
Click has talked “at some level” with owner Jim Crane about the economic impact of the pandemic and how it will affect future roster construction. Manager Dusty Baker and his coaching staff have communicated with Click “about how we want to manage games and what tools Baker wants when he’s putting together lineups and making moves in games.”
“I have a better feel for the organization now,” Click said. “While it’s not ideal to do it remotely, it is certainly something that can be done. It’s hard to say how much more of a feel I have for the organization, but definitely more, and I’m hoping they also have a feel for me. We’re all still getting to know each other.”
Click is the most public face of the Astros’ new long-term direction. Behind him are a bevy of Jeff Luhnow’s former lieutenants, most of whom were thrust into new roles just before his dismissal, owing to the departures of Mike Elias, Sig Mejdal, Oz Ocampo and Mike Fast over the previous 18 months.
In response to Brandon Taubman’s firing in October, a slew of front-office promotions were announced Dec. 12 — less than a month before Crane fired Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch when MLB released its sign-stealing investigation and penalties. Among them: Ehsan Bokhari’s promotion to senior director of player evaluation and Sarah Gelles’ elevation to director of research and development.
Pete Putila, now the team’s lone assistant general manager, has held his title only since last September. He added oversight of the team's sports medicine and performance department as part of his wide-ranging new duties. At the same time, Bill Firkus, formerly the director of sports medicine and performance, became a senior director of baseball strategy.
Firkus’ new role included involvement in roster and payroll management, contracts and trades. Last November, Luhnow said he brought Firkus
to the general manager’s meetings, in part, to introduce him to rival baseball executives, agents and others in the sport.
Under Luhnow, an industry veteran, Firkus and his coworkers in new roles could learn on the job.
Can these employees be afforded the same leeway with an unfamiliar, first-year general manager while the team is under a microscope?
Click declined to divulge specific personnel decisions — such as whether he’s altered roles or changed titles since he took over in February — but he maintained his desire for a culture shift within the organization. Most of his time during the quarantine has focused on “specific feedback for employees” stemming from those aforementioned questions.
“It is time-consuming providing people the right feedback and the right tools, giving them the right skills to develop. It’s not easy. You can look to a lot of other industries and get a lot of good ideas of how you do that for people,” Click said.
“That’s one thing we’re working on right now, and it’s going great. Everyone is open to feedback. And they want feedback. They want to know how to get better. That’s part of the employee-first culture we’re working on.”
The tactic is a major transformation. Some employees who worked under Luhnow have described him as growing distant during his final few years with the Astros.
Commissioner Rob Manfred criticized the culture under Luhnow, calling it “insular” and a “staff of individuals who often lacked direction or sufficient oversight.” Crane twice disagreed with Manfred’s characterization.
On the day he was introduced, Click did not comment directly on the previous culture, but he vowed to institute the sort of people-first operation he had with the Tampa Bay Rays.
Click said he’s found his Houston employees “tremendously” open to dialogue.
“And I’m going to be as open with them as I can be,” Click said. “People are hungry for feedback and thoughts and communication and conversations. Fortunately, that is one thing we can continue to do aggressively. Obviously there’s no substitute for sitting down face-to-face with people and having a conversation that way, but all the phone calls and other technology is a pretty close approximation.”