MILWAUKEE — Milwaukee Bucks general manager John Hammond and Milwaukee Brewers general manager Doug Melvin don't just share job titles with the two major professional sports franchises in Wisconsin's largest city, they also share a friendship that goes beyond sports.
The two recently sat down with FOX Sports Wisconsin's Craig Coshun for an exclusive look inside what goes into running the Bucks and Brewers but also some perspective into how each feel about their counterpart across town. This edition of "Unscripted" premiered after Monday night's Bucks game, and the roundtable discussion is below.
FSW: When did you two first meet and what was the first impression?
HAMMOND: The day that I was named the general manger of the Milwaukee Bucks, I think it was the last regular-season home game and we had a press conference that morning, a game that night, and I was in a suite. I'll never forget, someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Hey, the general manager of the Brewers is here, Doug Melvin," and he came up and said hello to me and introduced himself on my very first night. I'll never forget that. You talk about someone that would take time to do that, and what that meant to me.
MELVIN: When I talked to John originally he told me he was a big baseball fan, and I was a big basketball fan. I think we both have a lot of experience in the game at different levels in the game. I started out throwing batting practice and keeping scouting reports, nine years of player development, scouting director. We worked our way up to the position of GM.
FSW: You're in charge of multi-million-dollar franchises. You're in charge of getting players. You're in charge of drafting them and free-agent-wise, making some pretty tough decisions. What goes into that? Do you have an ABC-type formula?
HAMMOND: I read this once, a general manager made this comment, and to be honest with you I'm not sure if it was a football or a baseball general manager, I don't think it was a basketball general manager, he made the comment that, "My title is general manager, so my responsibilities are very general." I like that. The point is, there's no job too big, there's no job too small.
MELVIN: We're the voice and the face of our organization when it comes to player personnel. We hire the manager, the head coach, the coaching staff, the trainers. It's our responsibility to be the spokesperson and get the message out of how we want the operation and the organization to be run. The players get paid the money. The players get the accolades a lot of the times, so it's our responsibility to pat the other people in the back and make sure people behind the scenes are recognized by us.
FSW: When you look at the other side, you go to a lot of NBA games (Doug); you understand things that John does. What type of different perspective do you get from the job you have to do on the baseball side versus what John has to deal with on the basketball side?
MELVIN: On the baseball side we have a lot of options, too. I think we have more options than what John does. When he picks and chooses players, he's got to be right. We maybe have more options with our minor league teams. We can go and dip into Nashville or we can go and make a trade. Trades are probably easier to make in baseball.
HAMMOND: When it comes to winning and developing players, to a certain extent, we're all on the same boat. Unless there's a team that's at the championship level right now, that's just a small grouping of people. But that's kind of who we are. There are challenges in being in a smaller market and such, but I always say that's what we signed up for.
MELVIN: What makes both our jobs tough is we both want to compete and win at a high level for our fans, our ownership for everybody. But when you do that, you don't get good draft picks. We don't want to be lousy to get good draft picks, but in John's situation, you get a tendency, you got to be careful that when you do get caught in the middle, that's a tough area to be caught in.
FSW: You guys have pointed out the challenges to being in a smaller market like the city of Milwaukee. Let's flip it over on the other side, what's the positive of being in a city this size?
MELVIN: The one thing that I've learned, no matter how many years you're in the business, you learn something every year. But the one thing we have to do, and I have to make sure our people do, is focus on what you have. Don't focus on what you don't have. If you start focusing on what you don't have, you're going to drive yourself nuts.
HAMMOND: I always go back to the story that my friend Eddie Doucette, former voice of the Bucks, said to me when I first got this job. He said "The Milwaukee Bucks fans are dying for something to support, something to cheer for. If we give them just a little, they'll give us back tenfold." You see what's happening here with the Brewers in that regard. We kind of live by a similar motto in how we do our jobs, and I always tell people . . . Tell them the Corey story about getting miserable.
MELVIN: You can lose two or three games in a row, and you're miserable after the game. My son Corey always says, "You always have to be in a good mood. I'm in a great mood until our game starts. As soon as the game starts, you can put your miserable face on." And that's true. We have to walk around each day. People still carry the loss from the night before and they're miserable about it. We can't do that. We got to go around and say, hey, we got another game tonight. Corey says he's always happy until the game starts, then he becomes miserable.
HAMMOND: That's me. When Doug told me that story I said that is me. I love that, that's what I do. I get up every morning, I'm happy to go to work, I love my job, I'm excited about the opportunity, everything about it is good. But on a game night when 7 o'clock hits, I become this miserable human being until it's over, and sometimes it lingers on. There's a lot of truth to that.
MELVIN: I remember at halftime one time, I left the Bucks game. I just stood on that one concourse all by myself. They had a bad first half and John came down the stairs, got a hand in his pocket and he's pacing muttering about how they have to play better in the second half, got to be tougher on the boards, and then he walked away. I was just standing there by myself. That's funny. We sit here and we laugh about everything, but when the game is going on, some people think we don't get upset. We get upset, we have our moments. But we have to be careful. We don't always show it. Players get over it quicker than we do. We don't get over it that easy. A guy in the IT department was telling me about the hard drive and the computer, I said, "I know what a hard drive is, that's when you lose a game in the ninth inning and you have to drive home at night listening to talk radio, that's what a hard drive is." It stays with us. The next day we have to come in with a smiley face on.
FSW: From ownership to your position -- coaches managers, players -- who has the position you guys think you most rely on? Is it the GM that relies on the coaches or the owner that relies on you guys?
HAMMOND: The saying is you're only as good as the people around you. I think that's so true. I've got a staff with Jeff Weltman who is my assistant general manager, a guy I rely on so much. We work in a partnership on things we do. (Director of scouting) Billy McKinney, a guy I grew up with right down the road in Zion, Ill. People say to me, it's interesting you hired one of your best friends. I always tell them, not only is he one of my best friends, but he played in the NBA for eight years, and he's been a general manager for two NBA teams, so he's done what I'm doing now twice. People say it must be difficult to be in a small-market team, you have limitations on what you can do. I'll always make the point that we have an owner that if presented with the opportunity, and if it means that we can spend to win, he will do it, make no mistake about it.
MELVIN: Both our owners, you see them. They follow the games. They know what's going on. You don't want your owner being caught of- guard with something so Mark (Attanasio) is continually in contact. Obviously, the top of the organization is the face of the organization. If I present something to (Brewers owner) Mark like I did with the Greinke trade and the Shaun Marcum trade, I said these next two years is an opportunity we have a chance to go on and win a division.
FSW: With more and more ways to leak news today, what are the challenges that come with that?
MELVIN: The trades are easier when there are no leaks, when people don't know about them. I think we pulled off the C.C. (Sabathia) trade and very few people knew about it. What happens when leaks get out, there's too many people that know about it and now all of a sudden you have too many people that can criticize the trade. And that was a fun part about the C.C. trade, I don't think anybody saw that coming. I remember standing here in the clubhouse watching on the other end of the dugout, the players were sitting there and ESPN was talking about C.C. was going to be traded, who's he going to go to? I'm sitting there sort of smiling at the TV internally saying, "We're going to get him."
HAMMOND: A leak is one thing -- you know what's just as frustrating? As you're closing the deal, Doug's talking about the inability to get a deal done because of the leak and that is a factor and it can kill deals, but even now that you have the deal done, and you don't want it released for whatever reason, you want to let the player know first. I'm always apologizing to guys because they know the trade has happened before we could get in touch with them. Because of the Internet, because of Twitter, because there are so many people involved, that's a part that bothers me as much as anything, is the fact that a trade gets out before we even have a chance to contact the player.
FSW: What's the secret to success in this city? What's the game plan and how much do you have to stick with it?
HAMMOND: The plan is simple: win. At the end of the day that's what it comes down to. That's the jobs that we have. Doug goes home 162 nights either a failure or success.
MELVIN: It was a challenge to come here when I first got the opportunity to take this job, I had some people call me up and say, "Why the heck do you want that job in Milwaukee? Do you like beer and cheese?" I said, "Well, that was the second and the third reasons." The first reason was I needed a job and I thought it was a challenge. It was an organization that was stumbling a little bit. When you're in personnel, and I have this talk with our scouts, as scouts and player development people, you'd rather work for the Milwaukee Brewers than maybe some other team that doesn't use their player development system or they don't use their draft picks. All they do is go out and spend money.
FSW: What's it like to have a friend in the same job, in the same town?
MELVIN: It's good to have a friend like John in a community where I can pick up the phone and say, "Let's go to a movie, let's go have a beer, let's get together." I heard a story of Al McGuire and Rick Majerus sitting in a Denny's restaurant at 2 in the morning once, and they had the salt and pepper shakers and were moving them around with plays on the table. That's what's great about a small community.
FSW: You talked about the difficulties and things people don't understand. You both had to make difficult decisions by making in-season coaching changes. Take us back to 2008 and how difficult it was for you to have to let Ned Yost go?
MELVIN: That was one of the toughest things I ever had to do because when Ned was here as our manager, and I hired him, he was my first hire when I came here. I didn't know Ned Yost when I hired him, but I felt he was the right guy for the organization at that time when we drafted and developed players. He has nothing to do with the drafting of the players. He has nothing to do with the players in the system until they get closer to being with him. But what made it difficult to let him go was he was the guy when other people wanted to send Rickie Weeks down to the minor leagues, he said Rickie Weeks is my second baseman. If he's our second baseman of the future, I'm willing to take losses on my back for Rickie's future. When J.J. Hardy was hitting .170, and people wanted Hardy sent back down to the minor leagues, Ned said I'm OK. I'll take the losses on my back and on my record, for J.J. to play now because playing here now and failing now, he's going to succeed in the future. That was the part that was difficult for me. He was someone who had the entire team, that he was here to develop them, and then I had to let him go when we were that close to winning. He had to go through all the sweat and the torture of losing seasons and developing players but didn't have a chance to experience the winning.
HAMMOND: We're people. There are emotions involved here. It's not easy. It's not fun. With Scott (Skiles), there's similarities, but sometimes situations can be different, too. With Scott, we were mutually agreed that it was the best thing for Scott and for the organization. Some people probably say, well, in that case it probably wasn't as hard. But it's still difficult. I appreciated Scott, the coach that he was and what he stood for. You talk about Ned and putting young players out there ... we drafted Brandon Jennings with the 10th pick in the draft, and Scott from Day 1 put the ball in his hands and said, "You go, you run this team." It was the right thing for the organization, and a lot of coaches wouldn't have done that. We appreciate those sort of things. You don't forget those things.
FSW: You guys know each other well, know each other's teams well. Go out on a limb for me. If you could switch jobs for a day, Doug, what would you do with the Bucks organization or change something if you had the power to?
MELVIN: I would make the court a little bit bigger. The guys are bigger, faster, stronger. You have three officials to try and cover the game now. I would make the court, not a lot, but I'd make the court a little bit bigger. People love offense don't they? I'm an offensive-minded guy.
HAMMOND: GM for the day for the Milwaukee Brewers. I think what I would do I would demand that I want healthier food in the suite before the game. It's not that bad, but Doug's my friend and I worry about him going up there before the games and loading up on too much fried food, too much stuff like that. If I were the GM, I might go a little more veggies, a little more fruit. Just try to be a little healthier.
FSW: This is a fill-in-the-blank. I _________ Twitter.
MELVIN: I dislike it because you can put all the information you like on a Twitter account, but how do you know if the information is any good? Someone right now has got an imaginary girlfriend right? You don't know the information, and I try to tell our people, our scouts and everybody, you think you're getting a lot of information, but information is only good if you know it's fact. The Jonathan Lucroy story last year, where we were playing the Dodgers and I was back here with the draft. I went home for dinner that evening, my wife asks me to stop at the grocery store, so I'm at the grocery store. A guy comes down the aisle and asks how long Jonathan is going to be out; I heard he broke his hand. I didn't know anything about it. I'm in a grocery store, and this guy that is stocking shelves had a Twitter account and he got the tweet from (MLB.com's) Adam McCalvy, who was in our locker room doing his job, and he sees Lucroy walk out of the training room with his hand all bandaged. I didn't know anything about it, so that's the kind of stuff you live with today with Twitter. I told the guy I'll be back next week to catch up on the Brewers news.
HAMMOND: I don't Twitter. I almost feel like I'm a little behind to a certain extent. My wife Twitters. I got a staff of guys in the office, so we follow everything that's happening on Twitter. We follow things in the NBA, in college, especially guys for the draft. You can kind of get to know guys a little bit, get a feel for who and what they are to a certain extent. I do think it can be advantageous. It's something I don't do and probably I should. You start talking about Twitter, how about this: Just a couple years ago, (then-Bucks forward) Charlie Villanueva sent a Tweet out at halftime of a game. Simple little tweet like, "Hey, coach just got on us a little bit, got to go out and play hard the second half." It got out, and we had no idea as an organization what to do. Do we discipline a guy for this? You can't talk about what happens at halftime of a game. We contacted the league, and the league didn't really know what to do with it. Today, it's darn near common place for things like that to happen. It's changing very fast. That's another thing with Doug and I, we have that commonality, I'm probably more so than Doug, but we are both a little bit technically challenged.
FSW: Last question, I want your favorite NBA player and your favorite major league player.
HAMMOND: My favorite player as a kid and still one of my favorite players was Oscar Robertson. I had a cousin that was a year older than I that was a great player. I bet you we played at least 1,000 one-on-one games, and he beat me in 999 of them. I couldn't beat the guy. In those days, I was always Oscar Robertson and he was Jerry West.
MELVIN: I grew up in a small town in Canada, 30,000 people, and Ferguson Jenkins came from there. I grew up, I turned in my hockey skates, and focused on baseball because of Fergie. At that time, Canadian baseball players were very rare.
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