Like what?
Well, you need to keep up a little better. When Gerry Hunsicker agreed to bow out gracefully, the business side and the baseball side were introduced to each other. Up until that time, Hunsicker made darn sure neither ever met because he wanted nothing to do with decisions made on the field that came from business operations concerns. McLane did not see eye to eye on that and of course Hunsicker was also known for his stand offish, rather caustic treatment of people in the business side. When he left, the walls came down faster than the Berlin Wall. It is also when Bob McLaren left as well to dedicate time to other McLane business interest. In came Pam Gardner, around the very same time Tim Purpura was hired as the new GM. So now the two sides promised to work with each other more to make the whole team operations as symbiotic as possible. Tal Smith had not problem with it either.
So they started to have days when business folks sat in to learn from scouting meetings and so forth. People like Dewey Robsinson, who worked in virtual anonymity in the baseball operations became more visible to business people. Pam was aggressive in trying to be the type of Business Ops VP that worked in this new system. So she had input on how a baseball decision might effect those fans who accosted McLane at the stadium. Her boss was not a sharp man when it came to baseball, but if he could have it explained in a "why this makes sense for business", he could sell it to the fans. So this great experiment started to lean to a situation that started to annoy Tim Purpura and it was not more evident than the day he had to answer for not calling up Hunter Pence as soon as everyone else (re: media and fan influenced) wanted. That was the indicator to many baseball folks looking at the Astros to say that this organization was now run by a huge influence from the business side and they were right to an extent.
It hasn't stopped. Many a baseball person who wants to work for this organization under McLane knew that this was a necessary evil. If you want a laundry list of examples, I cannot provide that for you. Only can tell you what baseball folks have told others and what they've told me.
