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NL DIVISION SERIES: ROCKIES VS BREWERSOctober 4, 2018Mark AttanasioMilwaukee, Wisconsin - Workout Day Q. We kind of talked to you a little bit last week about the progress at that point, but to be here again today in the postseason, just how fulfilling is it for you as an owner? MARK ATTANASIO: It's immensely fulfilling. My main challenge is to actually embrace it and enjoy it because this morning I was speaking with my wife Debbie, and I said, well, I think I'm two-thirds excitement, one-third anxiety, and it's already moved to 50/50 anxiety and excitement as I got to the ballpark here. I think what I remember from 2011 is more as you get through these games, like a relief at the end of the game if you prevail rather than elation, until you actually win the series, that is. Q. How do you feel about playing the Rockies rather than the Cubs? MARK ATTANASIO: You know, we all -- it's interesting, a number -- whether you're thinking of Craig Counsell or David Stearns, Matt Arnold, coaches, players, we all kind of came at it the same way. We were always sort of rooting for actually a 20-inning game the other night. We know the Cubs really well. We also know they have the heart of a champion, having been champions. Neither we nor the Rockies have been. We knew we'd have a little more of a home field crowd here with the Rockies, so that is feeling good. Mostly we just watched and waited. Q. Your GM got distracted last night I hear in the maternity ward. You've always talked about how he can do multitasking. Now he's really being challenged. Tell us about what you've said to him and what he's said to you just about having a baby right at this time, and if you told him anything about planned parenthood failure? MARK ATTANASIO: I'm just going to make sure I have the right birth weights and things here. So most of our texts have been about the baby. Nora Ann Stearns, 7 pounds, 5 ounces, 20 inches. Everyone is doing well today, as well. They did well yesterday and today. You know, as we try to do here with the playoffs, I advised him to embrace the moment and really have it soak in. You never forget the birth of your first child. And David Stearns seems -- I hear Whitney is doing great, which is important, obviously, and David Stearns seems really happy. I will say only David Stearns could figure out how to get a team back to the playoffs in two years and then have a baby come right in between clinching a division spot and the first game. Congratulations to the Stearns family. Q. I'm wondering in the years that you've been here, what did you know about Milwaukee when you first bought the team and how has the city grown on you? MARK ATTANASIO: Well, I knew a little bit because my younger brother Robert married into a family, the Stein family here. They own Stein's House and Gardens. But I got a much more intimate view once I bought the team. The biggest surprise to me was how welcoming everyone was, not that Milwaukeeans are known for that, but having grown up in the Bronx in New York and then living in Los Angeles, I'm not used to that type of warm welcome, whether it was -- I've said it often; once a guy literally got off a sanitation truck and came running to me and said, hello, sir, welcome to Milwaukee. And he took his glove off, too. Everyone was always very welcoming here. My family and I, it's been 14 seasons now, have just really felt part of the fabric of the community. Look, it just gets better and better. This community has supported this team over, I've said this in a number of interviews, more than two and a half million fans 11 out of 12 seasons. So the fact that we have over 2.8 million fans this year is great, but even when we're challenged, the people come out. Our TV ratings this weekend were something like 12.8, 13.8, crazy numbers for the last game against the Tigers. It was the Sunday game, which is otherwise a Packers Sunday. People were watching the Brewers. We like that. And the sponsors, as well, we have a good group of 135 sponsors. The whole community really surrounds this team. It's part of the fabric of the Milwaukee summer, and we're delighted it's now going to be part of the fabric of the Milwaukee fall, Wisconsin fall. Q. Kind of building off that, when you took over this team in 2005 I think it was, something like that, things had not been very great for the Brewers for a while, the Packers were kind of at the pinnacle. Just the way the perception of the franchise and the team has kind of changed, not just locally, but also around the game in the time that you've had control here. MARK ATTANASIO: Well, we had -- the team had something like 11 or 12 losing seasons, and that -- it had been 20 some odd seasons without playoffs. So even when we got to 500 the first year, sort of the thought was, well, but you're still not winning. That's why Doug Melvin helped get CC Sabathia here in 2008. It was a huge -- that was really the seminal turn for this franchise. He brought a complete winning attitude, which everybody saw. He still -- obviously he's a Yankee, a New Yorker, but he's still very fond of his time here, and we talk about that. So I think that was a shift. And then that group of players, that entire group of players, we still have one of them in Ryan Braun, but Prince Fielder and Corey Hart and the whole group of guys who grew up together. We had the terrific 80's teams into the early 90's with that terrific team, and now we have a third terrific team to embrace, and that's really fun. Q. You said David Stearns got this team back to the playoffs in two years, and I'm wondering because David Stearns will never put timelines on anything, he's not calling it a rebuild, anything like that, but how do you view it in terms of where he inherited this team and the moves he made to where it is now? MARK ATTANASIO: Well, you know, it started -- Doug Melvin did an exceptional job of literally -- any number of contracts that we would have addressed were pretty much moved, bringing in -- I believe we got Corey Knebel, Zach Davies and Josh Hader in trades that Doug made, three critical pieces to our team. And as written, David Stearns has really taken the best -- we kept virtually all the key baseball people in Doug's group in some role for us and then filled in around that exceptional group of people that David recruited starting with Matt Arnold. And so while this is our third season, I guess, under David, really last year, I felt the turnaround was two seasons because we had won Game 61 last year, and that very first season he was just moving pieces around. You know what was interesting to me was the skill set to add -- the very first add was Junior Guerra, was a Rule 5 add, really you find a diamond in the rough, and he's found a bunch of those. So we saw he had that skill set. We wouldn't know he'd have the skill set to make a bold trade like he did for Christian Yelich at the same time he made a bold free agent signing. That was our largest free agent signing ever. To get Lorenzo Cain and do them on the same day, $150 million of commitments, that was bold, especially when everyone thought we should be adding a starting pitcher or two or three. And so he's shown an ability to execute and manage at a very high level. Some guys are good at building teams, but not getting to winning. Some guys can manage winning teams, but he's shown the ability to do both. Having the most wins in the National League this year is an absolutely extraordinary accomplishment. Nobody would have said that. If David and I were to announce here three years ago, we said, our goal is to have the most wins in the National League in three years, we'd have had probably the same reaction I had when I said my goal was to win here. And so I think that David and Craig, they really get the credit for all of this. I will say I did two smart things. I hired Craig Counsell as a manager and I hired David Stearns as a general manager. Those were two pretty good moves. All the rest is their doing. Q. Many of your colleagues in ownership, particularly in smaller markets, have embraced the concept of some people call it tanking, some call it rebuilding, but giving up a few years to get better down the road. You've been more resistant toward that. Why is that? MARK ATTANASIO: Well, you know, a lot of my mentoring in the sports frankly came from Doug Melvin. The reason I'm so fond of Doug is -- you know, I thought I knew a lot about baseball before I bought the team, and when I bought the team, I found out how little I knew about baseball. And we would talk a lot about how hard it is to win and how hard it is to get back. And you can break things down, but it's not easy. Just because you break them down doesn't mean you're going to get back to where you want to get to, plus I just hate to lose. So you put those two together, and when I -- I think I mentioned in a prior interview a few days ago here, David and I in the interview process talked about process and methodology. We didn't talk about rebuilding or breaking things down. He obviously saw how things had worked in Houston, and he was pretty convicted with me that this was a different situation. Things were in better shape in Milwaukee than they were when they got to Houston. So it wasn't going to be -- he had got the job, which he obviously did. It wasn't going to be exactly the same program. I liked the fact that -- it's sort of like getting something custom made. This was custom made for the Milwaukee Brewers, what he and Craig have done. And I think frankly without the two of them interacting together, we never would have -- we needed not only terrific manager, terrific general manager, we needed them to be able to work well together. Q. We've talked a lot about the transition from Doug to David in 2015, but the end of 2014, you were not exactly pleased with the way things ended. How much did that season -- did you think you'd be back at this point so quickly? How much did that one sting? MARK ATTANASIO: Well, losing 22 out of 31 games doesn't feel good to anybody, and so it stung a lot. It also -- I believed in that group of players, and we were in San Diego on August 24th or 25th that season, and we won 10-0, and I had the Padres ownership saying, my God, your guys look like men and our guys look like boys, and they're big and they're strong and they're fast. From the next day, it was in a different direction. That stung a lot. We brought that whole team back in 2015 because we did believe in the team, and we thought that group of players deserved the opportunity to try to show that that last month was a mirage and to really -- I also believed that you need to -- it's a lot -- I really have been very humbled by the sport. And so I try to take lessons from business, and it's better when you're going to change things to make large changes, and so I wanted that group of players to have their opportunity. And then when it clearly didn't work out, I think we lost 12 of the first 14 games or something like that, and then it was time to just say, okay, now this is -- we're going to move in a completely different direction. But we needed to see that that was the case. Q. The thing that you just mentioned about Craig and David working together, it's a little bit extraordinary in baseball because often a manager who's in place when a new general manager comes in, if he doesn't go right away, he does go, and instead of that, you guys extended Craig and his relationship has grown tighter. Why do you think that you guys were able to go against the trend of that separation not happening? And also, do you think it's important that Craig is a Brewer and a Milwaukeean and a Wisconsinite for what it means to him to lead this team? MARK ATTANASIO: Yeah, so first of all, we interviewed seven or eight candidates, and I told all of them that Craig was going to be the manager. So that would have disqualified a candidate if they had a problem with that, and I'm pretty attuned to watching body language, and nobody had a problem with that. But had they -- that was a pre-condition to the job. And that was unique, I think, as you pointed out, for something like this. You know, Craig was the perfect manager for a lot of reasons, one of which was that he had worked in Doug Melvin's baseball ops group for a few years before he took that role. And I remember one Spring Training, we were really on the edge of the edge of looking at analytics, and we brought in a group that did advanced video scouting using video instead of human eyes to scout. And to my surprise, the absolute first guy into that meeting from the baseball ops group was Craig Counsell. He stayed for the entire meeting, and it was like two and a half hours. So I knew he was open to new ideas. I also knew that -- he told me, and this is a man who scored -- I believe he scored the winning run in two World Series. And he felt like, well, all he had left to do in baseball, which was a big task, was to win a World Series for the Milwaukee Brewers, so that meant a lot to me, also. He's just been a real force. Q. People are going to be talking about what Yelich and Cain in particular meant to the team this year. Can you talk about a move that David made that maybe not a lot of people have talked about, but that really made an impression on you? MARK ATTANASIO: Well, I think the -- let me just start more broadly. Those guys are -- David gave an interview recently where he said that this may be his one day off. He is always on, and his guys, they're working. He was in Australia somewhere on a vacation, and he was communicating. He is always trying to make the team better. In between having a baby and playing in these playoffs, if there was a way to acquire a player tomorrow, whether he could play or not in the game, he would. He's really committed to making the team better. I think his -- he's got a very high batting average on the moves he makes. Not everyone works, but I don't think there's anything -- I don't think there's -- there's so many good moves. We added, what, six players in July and August. I think all of them have helped us win games. We see how competitive it is. It's one-game differences, you're in or you're out. Jonathan Schoop hit a grand slam to win a game. Xavier Cedeno made some great pitches. Curtis Granderson helped us win a game. Even if you pick the two offensive players, if we had one win less, we would have been in the Wild Card game the other night, and we could have been losing in the 13th inning. Every move was important. Q. Where are you in your contracts with David and Craig, and are you concerned that some other more deep-pocketed organizations might go after them? MARK ATTANASIO: Well, they both have -- I don't know to the date, but they both have at least two to three years left. I forget if we made the contracts go terminus or not. I feel more important that -- contracts are contracts, but what you want to do is create a healthy working environment for people. You want to support them as much as you can, whether it's financially, whether it's through intellectual conversation, whether it's through helping provide support for their families as needed. And so I feel like the best way -- and this is a great place to be, and I think David and Craig both think it's a great place to be. And so that's really how I try to motivate folks rather than having them locked up under a contract, although we have years left on both. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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