Nate Silver has a blog post up on Michael Barrett being traded, and follows it up with some comments about the organization's decision-making process:
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This exact pattern has played itself out at least a half-dozen times over the past five seasons. It happened with Hee-Seop Choi. It happened with Mark Bellhorn. It happened with Sammy Sosa -- I've never seen a city turn on a player faster than Chicago did on Sosa in the waning days of the 2004 season. It happened with Corey Patterson. It happened with Todd Walker. It's on the verge of happening with Jacque Jones.
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The Cubs have a pronounced lack of self-confidence when it comes to their own decision-making abilities. . . . The Cubs are that person that takes five minutes to figure out their dinner order, that spends the entire hour flicking through the channels on the remote control and never finding a program they like; they're the person who takes a new job and is contemplating the next one two days later.
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Let's make a decision here, fellas -- and let's keep our chin up and see it through. One trait that distinguishes successful people in any industry is that they don't do a lot of second-guessing themselves. The reason is because they had a robust decision making process in the first place; maybe a decision turned out poorly, but they remain confident that they evaluated it correctly based on the facts and circumstances at the time. But the Cubs, partly because they don't understand sample sizes, will take the same set of facts and circumstances and come up with a different answer on Wednesday than they did on Tuesday.
This strikes a chord with me...it seems like it encapsulizes one of the biggest problems with the Rangers in the Tom Hicks era, and in particular, during the John Hart/Buck Showalter years...
And it is something that I am hopeful Jon Daniels is correcting within the organization...