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COPYRIGHT 2001 South Florida Sun-Sentinal
Byline: Mike Berardino
FORT LAUDERDALE _ Syd Thrift has huddled with physicists and kinetics experts. He has spent countless hours swapping ideas with renowned thinkers in the fields of nutrition and vision training.
He can tell you, for instance, that the human eye has 14 muscles. He can scrawl out the formula for power ("force times distance divided by time") and routinely tosses around phrases like "elastic muscle" and "brain topology" the way his counterparts can quote a pitcher's fastball velocity or a leadoff hitter's time from home to first.
It was Thrift who hired a little known third-base coach named Jim Leyland to manage the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1986. It was Thrift who gave Cincinnati Reds General Manager Jim Bowden his start in baseball.
It was Thrift who signed Al Oliver and drafted Rickey Henderson and, from 1970-72, launched a short-lived experiment called the Kansas City Royals Baseball Academy in which raw athletes with little baseball experience were taught the game and its fundamentals.
In 1990, Thrift even wrote a book, The Game According to Syd: The Theories and Teachings of Baseball's Leading Innovator, in which he divulged many of his secrets regarding the evaluation and accumulation of baseball talent.
"Syd is a pioneer," says Fred Ferreira, Expos director of international operations, "like he knows he is."
So it galls Thrift, absolutely horrifies him, to read and hear the sort of things being said about the Baltimore Orioles these days. "Birdbrained," shrieked the headline of a Sports Illustrated expose of the club and its meddling owner, billionaire litigator Peter Angelos.
Worse still, it bothers Thrift greatly to know many of his peers are whispering about him and his decisions as vice president for baseball operations for one of the game's proudest franchises. His deadline deals last July, in which he shipped off such known quantities as Charles Johnson, B.J. Surhoff, Harold Baines, Will Clark, Mike Timlin and Mike Bordick for a collection of borderline prospects and perceived reaches, have been widely mocked.
At 72, Thrift is the oldest active general manager in the game by nearly a decade. With his birthday last month, he surpassed former Dodgers GM Tommy Lasorda...
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