J.J. Picollo has a new job as the Kansas City Royals’ GM. It was a long time coming
Two years ago, the Royals were stuck. The big-league team had lost 104 games the season before and the front office had expected the next season to be worse. Perhaps even more concerning: Their farm system was generally considered to be in the bottom third among all major-league clubs.
Hard questions needed to be asked, publicly and, more importantly, inside the organization.
In hindsight, it’s a fascinating and defining moment. There are owners who would have flipped front offices. There are front offices that would have kept on with the same processes, preaching patience and faith.
The Royals — and here it’s worth noting that the top of the Royals’ front office has been together forever — chose the other option:
Ten years after building what Baseball America said was the best farm system in the history of its rankings, the Royals essentially tore down how they developed talent and started over.
“I probably shouldn’t say this,” said J.J. Picollo, the man tasked with heading the change. “But initially there was some pushback above me.”
The results have been spectacular. The Royals now have baseball’s No. 3 ranked farm system, according to Baseball America, with best-in-baseball jumps in minor-league slugging and walk rate for hitters and strikeout and walk rates for pitchers.
Picollo did not do this by himself, of course, but the results are part of why he is the seventh general manager in franchise history. Dayton Moore, who hired Picollo shortly after becoming GM in 2006, is now the president of baseball operations and retains final say on personnel decisions.
Picollo serves as a gatekeeper of sorts. Moore has always empowered his assistants to make decisions, often with light or even no final consultation. Part of Picollo’s charge will be to integrate what’s been successful in the minor leagues to the big leagues.
Assistant GM Scott Sharp and major league scouting director Gene Watson will work closely with him. The minor leagues will now be run by a group already trusted and in place — director of baseball operations Mitch Maier, director of hitting performance and player development Alec Zumwalt, and director of pitching performance Paul Gibson.
In some ways the changes will be subtle. Picollo is sort of a younger and taller version of Moore. They have similar worldviews, similar priorities, similar values. They are former college players and coaches, with sons who are now college players. They are each hyper competitive but have retained a romanticism about baseball even decades into making it their livelihood.
In other ways, the changes will be tangible. Picollo’s recent experience in uniform and designing processes to marry analytics, biomechanics and old-school baseball scouting and coaching are what every team is focusing on, or should be.
“There’s aspects of this job today that J.J. is more qualified to do than me,” Moore said. “It’s as simple as that.”
This promotion is a long time coming. Picollo first interviewed for a GM job a decade ago, with the Astros. He interviewed for several others, including his hometown Phillies. Two years ago, Moore convinced Picollo to take on a hybrid role that would put him back in uniform and in charge of transforming the Royals’ player development system.
A wardrobe change from uniform to suit-and-tie used to be common for GMs, but more recently this is rare. The irony is that Moore presented the previous role as a path to being a GM — whether with the Royals or somewhere else.
Picollo’s career path is a little like that — a mix of old- and new-school, a variety of positions he’s taken on with the Braves and Royals with the attitude marked by the Abraham Lincoln quote on his desk:
Whatever you are, be a good one.
Picollo played college ball at George Mason, where Moore was an assistant coach. Picollo always thought his post-playing career would be as a college coach, a role he held at George Mason and George Washington for five years.
“I had every intention of being a head coach in college,” Picollo said. “That’s what I wanted to do. For whatever reason, being on a field, I wasn’t as fulfilled as I thought I was going to be.”
Moore had since left George Mason and joined the Atlanta Braves. He offered Picollo a scouting job that wouldn’t require he relocate. Picollo dove in. He was two days into a 10-day scouting school program when he called his wife.
“This is what I want to do,” he remembers telling her.
Which was conventionally … odd?
Picollo started the new career three weeks before his wife Nicole gave birth to their first child. The job required a pay cut and more travel than coaching. That’s a hard sell to a spouse, right?
Picollo asked for seven years. If it wasn’t working by then, he’d find something with an easier schedule.
He didn’t have to wait that long. He was a scout, then a scouting supervisor, then the assistant director of player development, then director of minor league operations. Moore hired him again shortly after arriving in Kansas City, where Picollo has worked roughly a gazillion front office jobs.
Whatever you are, be a good one.
“I believe the only reason I was asked to move to the front office in Atlanta is because I was doing the job I had and apparently doing it well enough to get a promotion,” Picollo said. “So I’ve taken that same attitude along the way with every job I’ve been asked to do.”
The Royals’ evolution under Moore has been subtle, but steady. Their baseball operations setup now includes 266 people. When Moore was hired, that number was 85 — and that was a bump from previous years.
They have added new departments and added new layers to old departments. When they started, analytics was still largely a debate about on-base percentage and player evaluation. Now it’s an integral part of game prep and player development. It’s a part of communication, and what’s more important than communication?
Picollo’s charge is to continue that transformation, to bring the processes that have worked so well in the organization’s lower levels to the majors.
Moore will still do the news conferences, and he’ll still be the one with ultimate accountability. So if Picollo does this job well, you might not even notice.
If he doesn’t do this job well, it’d be a first.
This story was originally published October 1, 2021 at 5:00 AM.