The fourth volume of our Baseball Basics for Brits series focuses on the Front Office of an MLB organization.

This volume hasn’t needed much revision because the main points of how a Front Office is structured, and the roles played by the different positions, really haven’t changed in the last three years since the first version was published.

Quite a bit of the volume is about the work done by the field manager and coaching staff and their duties haven’t changed at all. 

It’s possible that a manager might get the additional responsibility of asking for ‘instant replay challenges’ over the next few years, but that’s not on the cards at the moment and  I hope I will not need to be adding that into the volume any time soon (as regular readers will know, I’m no fan of the prospect of the ability to know when to use a challenge or not potentially deciding a baseball game). 

I have had to slightly re-word the section about managers being ejected from games, taking into account that the all-time leader in that category, Bobby Cox, has now retired.  Will umpires miss him?  Strange as it may seem, I think they will.  Chucking Cox out of a game must have become a rite of passage for new MLB umpires.

The first version included quite a few examples of different owners, from the likes of the Angels’ Arte Moreno to the late George Steinbrenner.  On reflection, I’ve decided that these are a bit irrelevant and have taken them out.  Now that the Boss is no longer with us, there aren’t any owners that greatly captivate the general baseball public.

One bit I have added in is a reference to New England Sports Venture, noting the link between the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool FC (Liverpool fans will be very glad that the reference to Tom Hicks being their owner, as well as owning the Texas Rangers, is now redundant).  I’ve also updated the passage on General Managers being linked to Moneyball to note how Theo Epstein, Billy Beane and the Moneyball philosophy (however that’s being interpreted, or misinterpreted, at any given point) have drawn attention from British sports writers now that John Henry and the rest of NESV are leading the way with Liverpool.