Other teams are already knee-deep in offseason decision making and preparation for free agent/arbitration season. The M’s need to get cracking.

If you are in charge of business, and you hire someone to be in charge of baseball, they shouldn’t need to run baseball decisions by you; you hired them because you trust their judgement about baseball (whether this trust is well-placed or not).

The trouble with this plan is that the baseball decisions often overlap with the business management decisions. In particular, if your GM signs a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract with some mediocre pitcher, he has saddled the business with an accounting liability (and likely a baseball liability) for years to come.

So, you can’t simply say to the GM: “Go and make all the baseball decisions”. Because in doing so you’re losing control over your company’s costs, always a bad idea.

A better, but still unworkable, arrangement would be to say: “For 2009 you’ve got a payroll of $95M. Go out and do the best that you can with that.” That would work if all baseball contracts were for one year only, but there are multi-year contracts to worry about. And unless you’ve got a crystal ball that tells you what you know your payroll should be for 2010 and 2011, you can’t tell your GM “spend $95M in 2009, $105M in 2010, and $120M in 2011″. Those payroll numbers could easily turn out to be non-optimal when 2010 and 2011 roll around. But you’ve already hamstrung your GM to tie his (or her) 2009 decisions to those locked-in-stone 2010 and 2011 numbers.

It pretty much has to be a continued process of negotations, where the GM says to the President or CEO “hey, if you let me commit the team to a contract of 5 years and YYY million dollars, I can get CC Sabathia for 5 years”, and the team has to decide if that’s a gamble that good enough to make.

Unhappily for the Mariners, that means that Armstrong and maybe Lincoln too have to be involved in these decisions. If they get a really sharp GM who they really trust, they can rubber stamp those decisions. That might be the best way for the Mariners to go, given how well Armstrong’s and Lincoln’s decisions have all too often gone in the past. But usually you don’t want to give carte blanche to your GM (or indeed to any one person) in that fashion. They’re likely to overspend, in pursuit of on-field victories. Someone’s got to play the role of budget bad-guy, keeping a rein on the spending.

I don’t think DMZ was referring to Gates’ or Jobs’ egos there…

Yeah, but I was….(or, at least, keeping that more in mind as opposed to actual skill)…

If you’re going to argue that working with Steve Jobs or Bill Gates is in any way representative of “any other organization” you have either a seriously warped view of working with those two or of working in every other company in the world.

I’d say there are a few equivalents in the world of sports…Al Davis, Jerry Jones, Mark Cuban, Peter Angelos, and anyone name Steinbrenner.

In fact, these sorts of “companies” are probably more common in the world of sports franchises than they are in the rest of the business world. Eqomaniac owners, that think they know better than anyone they hire.

Of course, that isn’t the way the M’s work, nor would I want it to be.