- Editor's note: Sheng Peng will be a regular contributor to NBC Sports California's Sharks coverage for the 2021-22 season. You can read more of his coverage on San Jose Hockey Now, listen to him on the San Jose Hockey Now Podcast, and follow him on Twitter at @Sheng_Peng.
On the eve of the 2022 Major League Baseball season, Colletti announced that for the first time in 40 years, he would not be connected with an MLB franchise.
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From 2005 to 2021, Colletti transitioned to TV color commentator (2015-21) after a successful run as General Manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers (2005-14). From 1994 to 2004, Colletti served as Assistant General Manager (1996-2004) and Director of Baseball Operations (1994-96) for the San Francisco Giants. From 1982 to 1993, Colletti started in media relations and worked his way to baseball operations for the Chicago Cubs.
Colletti has been a pro scout for the Sharks, mostly the Metropolitan division, since the beginning of the 2019-20 season. For Colletti, hockey and baseball have been his two true loves in sports: Before the Cubs, in fact, Colletti was a beat writer covering the Flyers for the Philadelphia Journal.
So it’s now time for Colletti to spend a little more time with his other true love.
“I spent 40 years in baseball as an employee and another 20 years, watching it, as a young fan,” Colletti told San Jose Hockey Now. “I wanted to spend more time with family, I want to spend more time with the Sharks.”
San Jose Sharks
SJHN caught up with Colletti recently to talk about how hockey and baseball intersect, Colletti’s thoughts on his friend Doug Wilson stepping down as San Jose Sharks GM, and if he’d ever be interested in being an NHL GM.
Sheng Peng: Why are you stepping away from baseball?
Ned Colletti: I spent 40 years in baseball as an employee and another 20 years, watching it, as a young fan.
I wanted to spend more time with family, I want to spend more time with the Sharks.
Just having a little bit less schedule, and a little bit more life.
I teach at Pepperdine, as well. The hockey schedule, and the school schedules, kind of run concurrently.
I figured I'm going to take a little bit of time this summer when I'm not trying to help out the Sharks, take a little bit of time to kind of reset a little bit.
But I had 40 wonderful years, and I worked for three iconic franchises. I was with the Cubs for 13 years, where I grew up in Chicago and San Fran for 11. And was with the Dodgers for 16, nine as a GM, seven doing TV for them.
SP: What are your thoughts on Doug Wilson stepping down as GM of the San Jose Sharks?
NC: I have a lot of great memories and a lot of respect for him. I've known him a long time. I was in San Francisco, and he was in San Jose. We were in Chicago [at the same time].
I really started to get to know him when I was in San Francisco and he was in San Jose.
When you're the general manager of a franchise, your realm of people who understand what the job is and understand the successes and the challenges, it's very limited.
Before I came to LA, working for the Giants, and working very close with Brian Sabean for a long time, we became best friends and all of that.
But when I left, you weren't going to call the rival.
I have a lot of friends in the hockey world who are or were general managers. We could commiserate, we could talk about some of the things we were up against, the different decisions we had coming up, and things like that. So I think [Doug and my] relationship grew with that.
I consider Doug one of my dearest friends in sports.
It was a very tough day for all of us the other day, a lot of love and respect, because a lot of that franchise, a lot of the hockey ops department has been together for a very, very long time.
With a lot of success -- you don't get to the playoffs as often as that team did, all those attributes without very, very strong leadership and consistency of leadership. That's what the franchise had for the 19 seasons that he ran it.
But I'm glad that he's taking care of himself. That he's starting to feel better, finally, but again, a tough road.
I went to Toronto for the [Hall of Fame] induction and could tell he wasn't quite feeling right. He missed some exhibition games down south in Anaheim.
We'll always be close, we'll always be friends.
The job is so intensive.
A gentleman who just died this past few months named Roland Hemond, he was in baseball for 60-70 years.
Just a wonderful, wonderful guy. And when I got the GM job, he called me and said, 'my piece of advice for you is this. Celebrate the good times because you're going to have enough trial as it is.'
When you do have something to celebrate, a win or somebody plays well you drafted, celebrate it.'
You need a break, to not have to talk about your team...anybody who does that job, they're saturated in that job. There are not many days in the course of a year where you are not thinking about your team and how to make it better. Even the teams that win Cups or win World Series titles, it never really ends.
I've learned through my career, the more conversations you can have with people who you respect and they don't have to be in the same profession or even sport that you can learn a lot that way.
SP: How is evaluating hockey talent similar to evaluating baseball talent?
NC: Regardless of the playing surface, regardless of the number of games in a season, and things like that, you're looking for the same thing.
From an athletic standpoint, I start at the bottom, I work my way up, how do the feet work, how the hands work? How does the mind work? In every sport, especially these two, you've got split-second decision making that you have to do, whether it's a defenseman or a forward on the rush, whether or not to commit to a play defensively, a hitter and a pitcher, you've got a split-second to make a decision. So I look at how somebody makes their decisions. How quick are they? How accurate are they?
How do they sacrifice for the team they play on? Are they more selfish than they are team players? And I think this doesn't go for baseball and hockey, or sports, I think that goes with all of life. So I think a lot of it is transferable.
When I watch a player, I want to know how they compete. Do they compete? Do they always compete? John Schuerholz, who is a Hall of Fame GM for Kansas City, and then Atlanta, when I got the GM job, called me to congratulate me, and I asked him for something that he's always done.
And he says, Look, I haven't always been able to do this. But it was my goal all the time. And that was a simple question: Do you trust the player? It doesn't matter if it's your fourth-line center or your Hall of Fame wing? It doesn't make any difference. Can you trust the player?
And it's not just a hockey question. It's a human question. Our friendships and our workplaces, all these things are interrelated. in my mind.
I would think most of us look for the same types of qualities in the people we either have as friends or we have as people on the team that we work for. Or some of the executives we work with.
SP: Who’s a Shark that you trust, or if you can’t answer that, a baseball player that you learned to trust above others?
NC: Clayton Kershaw, my first draft was Clayton [in 2006]. The first player we picked was Clayton.
Always, you trusted the effort, you trusted the process. You trusted off the field, you trusted his commitment to the team, to his training, to his health, to getting better. This man is going to the Hall of Fame, and every time he goes to the mound, he's trying to get better.
There’s a lot of them. I could name you 50. And I would leave off 500.
SP: When did you know Clayton was someone you could trust?
NC: I saw it in his competition right away.
I called him up and his command of his pitches wasn't what it needed to be. He was running long counts, he was getting into the 90-100 pitch range by the fifth inning.
And I had to send him back to the minor leagues. And it was a tough conversation, but I didn't feel I had a choice. And I explained it to him. And when you see that, and you see the reaction, and then you see the work. Is there disappointment? Sure. But there's no sulking, there's just okay, I'm gonna go and get better at what I do. And it was just a continual building on things like that.
We went to the postseason a lot during my tenure there, and they've gone a lot since. You always have a conversation with your top pitcher before the first series, because it's a five-game series. And somebody may have to come back on short rest. He was always our candidate, obviously.
One time, we were sitting there with [manager] Don Mattingly and [pitching coach] Rick Honeycutt, and Clayton and me, we're talking about if we're down 2-0, you may have to come back on short rest.
I knew what he was going to say, 'I'm ready to do it.'
But he told me, 'I work out all winter long. Because I know we're going to have a good team. And I know we're going to have this type of conversation.'
I work out all winter long so that when I sit in this room with you guys, I can look you in the eye, and I can tell you, this is what I prepared to do. This is how I prepare my entire year [so] when you have this conversation with me about helping the team out and coming back on short rest, yeah, you got it.'
That's somewhat unique to me. That somebody would have that type of thought process to it.
SP: How good was it to see Clayton finally win the World Series in 2020?
NC: No doubt. A lot of times, those [lesser] postseason performances were due to pitching on short rest and trying to do what he could to help the team.
He was always ultra-reliable. I don't believe you can control results. But you can control your process, to put yourself in the best possible place in a competition to gain a result.
He was always somebody that you never gave a second thought to anything that you had to wonder about. You always knew that the process was going to be as pure and as thorough as anybody whoever took the mound.
SP: You care about team-building. Now, in all honesty, a lot of people have lost faith in the Sharks. What other teams have you seen return to winning on a consistent basis in a similar situation as the Sharks – a couple years out of playoffs, a lot of veteran contracts, uncertainty with prospects?
NC: Well, I'm gonna answer this question in a general way. I'm not answering this in a specific, one-team way.
Winning is difficult. And anybody that doesn't think it's difficult hasn't had to make a living doing it. To have sustained success is challenging, to have sustained success in a cap league is even more challenging.
There's many examples of teams that have had great runs, have fallen back, and then put together great runs. I worked for one of them. San Francisco Giants, tough runs when I first got there, 1994, 1995. 1997 to 2004, tremendous. Another lull from '05 to '09, then certainly it changed. Three championships in five years.
SP: There’s also parallels with the 2006 Dodgers, who went from being one of the worst teams in baseball to the playoffs in your first year as GM.
NC: What I've told people in LA about the Dodger days because when I got here, I inherited the second-worst [Dodgers] team since the end of the Second World War. That's the team we started with. And we went to the playoffs in the first year, we started to change it, and started to do different things.
We did the same thing in San Francisco too. Brian Sabean took over as the general manager on September 30, 1996. Look at the '95 and the '96 Giants. I went from director of baseball ops to assistant GM the same day. Then you look at the '97 Giants up through 2002. And that was not a re-build. That was making changes, changing on the fly, so to speak.
I did the same thing in LA. We had some good young players coming, but we also found some veterans that knew how to win, knew how to play. Billy Mueller, former Giant. Nomar Garciaparra. Rafael Furcal. Kenny Lofton, who I had in San Francisco as well.
We started there and you start to get some momentum. And once you get momentum, and you get some confidence, a lot of good things can happen.
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SP: You’ve gone from baseball to hockey. Hypothetically, if you were to go back, what would you carry from hockey to baseball?
NC: I think the intensity of the athlete, how hard they play, through injury, through different things. It's still to me very remarkable.
They hold each other accountable. They play hard, they play for the team, play for each other. That, to me, is really part of the allure for me to work in hockey.
It takes a lot to get a player out of the game. It takes a lot to have a player sit out.
That, to me, is remarkable. And I don't know that I could say the same thing about baseball all the time.
It's not meant to be anything more than a generalization [though].
SP: Do you have any interest in being an NHL GM one day?
NC: Every day, I wake up, trying to figure out how I can help the organization I work with get better. That's it, that's all. How to help people get better at what they do and how to use my experience and the vastness of it and the differential of it. It's two sports in 40 years, I just try to help, whatever that is, big or small.
SP: Thanks so much for your time, Ned. Last question, for the locals, how do you think the San Francisco Giants will fare this year?
NC: The Giants last year played as hard as any team I've ever seen play. They executed, they took advantage of every opportunity. They were difficult, boy, they were difficult to play against.
We'll have to see how it goes for them. When you have a year like they had, sometimes it's difficult to repeat that. But there's no debating how well they played, how well they were led and managed, all the way down. It was ultra-impressive.