The Crawfish Boxes

After some thoughtful deliberation, we of the Crawfish Boxes have thrown out into the world thirteen distinct qualities that could be prized in our next manager.  Today, I am asking commenters and lurkers a like to take a minute or two out of their day to select the five qualities on that list that they find most important and then rank them.  I know, I ask a lot. But if you're already reading this, you're already procrastinating at something, so you might as well do something productive while procrastinating (I believe that's called rationalization).

Here's the aim of this silly little endeavor from my piece on Saturday:

With ten candidates being interviewed in the ensuing weeks, there has been various...[w]riters touting a certain manager for certain qualities...My thought is why do it that way? Instead of identifying what positive qualities a candidate possesses and then making a case for why that combination of qualities is in fact that best, why not just figure out which qualities are the most important?  Once we know what are the qualities that are most prized, coudn't we then just determine who best fits the mold?

I know, I know.  It's a stroke of genius.  It's either genius or the manifestation of a mind desperately trying not to occupy itself with the bleak outlook for this team in 2010.  It's for sure one of the two...or some combination thereof.

So with the "why?" question answered, we'll move onto the "how?" question.  Like I said above we have thirteen potential qualities.  I am going to list them out.  You get to select your five and then rank them from MOST important to LEAST important.  So that's 1) Most important. 2) Second most important....and so on.  

I'm being painfully blunt about this because I don't want any hanging chads in this election of sorts.  Aside from bad political references, truly I'd like for this to be as close to consensus opinion as possible on what is we as informed, intelligent, and passionate fans would like to see in our next manager.  Not because I think Ed Wade will take it under advisement, but because I think it can add real merit to our consideration of potential candidates and aid in our potential praise or lamentations of whomever it is that receives the position.

Once you input your ranked qualities, it'll all be posted to a spreadsheet that I can then mess with to do the following: Reward every first ranked quality with 5 points, every second ranked quality with 4, and so on down to fifth ranked quality with 1 point.  Then a quick summation and viola: preferences revealed.

For my sake, I am going to insert a one word summary of each quality, in bold, at the end of each quality.  I ask that you copy and paste that exact word into the field so that I don't have to discern voter intent (it's unconstitutional). Either please do that, or just don't screw up the first letter of each word as type it in.  (I am taking down the ballot on Tuesday at whenever I got bed...so roughly 11PM CDT.)

The List (in no particular order):

• Being young at heart or actually young.   Young
• Intelligence and knowledge of the game.   Know
• Communication and motivation skills.   Comm
• Ability to judge talent.   Judge
• Handles pitching staff well (likely a former catcher).   Pitch
• Ability to utilize resources for maximum production.   Util
• Current/previous ties with the Astros organization.    Astros
• Ability to understand tactical and strategic basis for winning (sabermetrics preferred).   Win
• Not a MLB veteran.   Not
• MLB veteran.   Vet
• Relationship with the media.   Relations
• Ability to select and work with a high quality coaching staff.  Staff