Tater Talk (2047.01): A New Potato Farmer in Town
Posted: Sat May 29, 2021 11:27 am
It was a question that perplexed him the entire flight over from Egypt. “Why me?”Granted, Woody Donahue was not going to argue. He had just been handed his dream job: general manager of a real BBA team. And he didn’t even have to apply for it. He had been in the middle of a meeting when a call came through from Francis Nephi Grigg IV, owner of the Boise Spuds. Grigg didn’t mince words; he said simply that he wanted to offer Donahue the Spuds’ GM job, and that more questions would be answered when he got to Boise.
So here he was, frantically doing his homework on the team, so he wouldn’t look like a complete idiot when he arrived. He looked over the team’s roster and saw the Spuds had the Sawyer Silk Silver Slugger winner of the last two seasons, Félix Román. This was too good to be true. Was he being scammed? He was reminded of that time he bought a “stud reliever” off Imhotep’s List, a popular underground source of talent in Egypt, only to be greeted with Berto Gámez and much lighter bank account.
Donahue wondered how the 109-loss season to which he had just led Cairo could’ve possibly earned him this type of opportunity. He wasn’t particularly good at managing finances. Nor was he good at assessing talent. But he was German, so he knew a thing or two about potatoes. Maybe that was why the Spuds wanted him.
The secret to good potatoes, much like baseball players, is to buy the right type for the end result. If you’re mashing or baking, you want a high-starch potato like a russet. If you’re roasting, you want a potato with a lot of moisture like a Yukon Gold. If you try to transform a potato into a dish it’s not suited for, you won’t have much success.
These words were second nature to Donahue, instilled in him by his German parents from a very young age. Maybe that was what Boise wanted him to do — manage these Spuds like, well, spuds.
So, leaning on his knowledge of potatoes, he went through Boise’s entire 220-man organization, and threw out twenty whom he deemed the worst of the group. One bad spud, he knew, could ruin the whole bunch.
He then targeted a few select free agents for specific roles on the team — free agent catcher Randy Bader, he noticed, was rated the highest in “catcher ability” out of all catchers in the free agent pool. And if Donahue’s potato knowledge had taught him anything, it was to buy the most suitable type for the role you needed it to fill. What attributes could be more relevant for a catcher than “catcher ability”?
By the time his 13-hour flight to Boise landed, he had submitted an offer to Bader’s agents, and had assigned each of Boise’s 200 remaining players to a team within the organization. It was amazing how much you could get done while flying over the midwest, watching miles and miles of farmland pass by below.
He could’ve been a farmer in another life, he thought. He’d be pretty good at it, too. But that dream would have to wait — for now, he was in charge of the Spuds.
