Jason and I have a comedy routine we do, and it’s gotten to the point where we break into it naturally while walking down the street. It’s about the standard sports cliches announcers use to describe matchups, and it’ll go like this:
We walk down Occidental from wherever we’ve been hiding out and you, the U.S.S. Mariner readers, have not been buying us drinks because you don’t recognize us, and see two street musicians playing close to each other, glaring back and forth between bars.
Jason: “There is no love lost between these two competitors.”
Derek: “These guys flat out do not like each other.”
Jason: “When these two musicians get together, you can throw out the sheet music, because anything can happen.”
This is adaptable to anything. When I go to the demolition derby at the Evergreen Speedway in Monroe, there are two guys who always enter the roll-over competition, and the announcers like to make it out like it’s a rivalry, so I’ll get into it there… anyway, you can imagine my amusement when I went to ESPN.com (“Working to make our pages less accessible and harder to load every day”) and found that their lead for the ALCS was
“There’s no love lost between the Yankees and Red Sox. Now there’s more at stake. The ALCS begins tonight (8 ET, FOX) with very little separating the two bitter rivals this season.”
Speaking of which — both CS games at the same time? Does Fox do this to amuse themselves?
“Bud Selig here.”
“Fox calling. Bud, we want you to schedule both games Wednesday at eight o’clock Eastern.”
“Both of them? But that doesn’t make any sense.”
“Do it!”
“Yes, master.”
“And stand on one leg.”
“Yes.”
“You’re not doing it, we’re watching from the other building. Do it! And hop up and down.”
“Yes-I’m-hop-ping-now.”
“Good. Continue hopping for at least one hour. We’ll be watching.”
Ugh. I’m on vacation, my birthday’s coming up, and I’m sick. Onwards! Today’s nine U.S.S. Mariner Season Endorsements:
Official Pre-Game Food Spot: King Street Bar and Grill
Official Pre-Game Watering Hole to Watch Baseball: Slugger’s
Best Column About The Official Player: “So Long, Edgar“*
Official Prospect of the U.S.S. Mariner: Chris Snelling
Favorite Moment of 2003: Mike Cameron’s game-winning walk-off grand slam during U.S.S. Mariner group trip
to the park
Second Favorite Moment of 2003: Pat Gillick announces resignation.
Official U.S.S. Mariner Reader-in-Germany: Shane Lidman
Official U.S.S. Mariner Reader-in-France: Jeffrey Wood
Favorite Short Endorsement of the U.S.S. Mariner: “The blog of choice among discriminating Mariners fans,” Shannon Fears, Seattle PI
Coming up: local broadcaster and columnist endorsements, and much, much more.
* Dave and Jason endorsed this, I abstained
In addition to our past endorsements (Larry Stone, Official Seattle Print Baseball Writer, Ivardog, Official Safeco Field Concession Item, so forth), this off-season we’d like to start throwing out some 2003 Season Endorsements. This is the first batch — to paraphrase the PA at Safeco, “Coming up: Official Endorsements of Out-of-Country Readers, and much, much more”.
Official Mariner of the U.S.S. Mariner: Edgar Martinez
Most Frequent Emailer: Jeffrey Wood
Most Frequent Emailer with a Weird Name: tede
Coolest Emailer Name: Aditya Sood
Worst Use of Punctuation in an Extended Series of Emails: James Biesterfeld
Official Reader Who Thinks We’re Stupid But Continues to Read and Email Us: James Biesterfeld
Official Teamster of the U.S.S. Mariner: Ivan Weiss
Official Female Reader of the U.S.S. Mariner: Jen Van Dijk (who, and we mean this in the nicest way, we think is almost definitely smoking hot by virtue of her baseball fandom)
Best Reader Submission: Paul Covert
All in good fun. Next batch tomorrow.
Good stuff on one of the candidates on the GM scorecard: Ned Colletti part one and part two. Part two is for subscribers, but if you’re hanging around here, you’re hard core enough you’ve got a subscription anyway.
Also:
“If ownership here was profit oriented, we’d have taken profits out. We haven’t.”
This is absolutely not true: ownership is taking huge sums of money out to repay the paper losses they claim on owning the team in the past. It’s hidden profit-taking, but it’s profit-taking any way you slice it.
From that Tribune article:
Q: How does it feel to have a team payroll of $94 million and be called cheap?
A: It’s a different experience. We finished over budget this season – we started at about $92 million and finished at just under $95 million. It’s the maximum we can afford to pay and still run the business at a break-even level. Compared to the rest of major league baseball, we come out pretty well. We’re fifth or sixth in the game in terms of payroll. I don’t see a reduction for ’04. Will there be an increase? That’s premature.
I have a couple of questions:
1) How do you figure the payroll is $92m or $95m?
2) Didn’t the Sanchez for Kelly swap and Nelson for Benitez trade both come out about even?
3) Then how do you figure the payroll ended $3m higher than it started?
4) The team made, conservatively, $40m last year. How can that be close to break-even level?
5) Why does everyone in the local press parrot a $92-$94m payroll figure?
There was a good article in the Tacoma News Tribune this morning about the M’s hunt for a GM. Some encouraging comments made by Lincoln, including that he he’s looking for a GM that will be a mix of both the old school approach that Gillick brought and the new school approach that Billy Beane would bring. For those who didn’t read my review of Moneyball over at strikethree.com, I’m not 100 % sold on the Oakland A’s way being the best way for teams with actual major league payrolls. The A’s do some things out of necessity that I don’t believe the Mariners should implement, and it is one of the reasons I’m not pushing for DePodesta as the M’s next GM. There is a lot of truth in the A’s way, but it isn’t perfect, and I’d rather see someone who can glean the truth from both sides.
Also, we’re going to be publishing a FAQ to help answer some of the inside jokes we use and give our new readers a better sense of who we are and what we do. So, if there’s anything you’d like to know, email us, and we’ll get it in the FAQ.
Next version of the GM Scorecard is up. I continue to refine this based on email feedback (we’ve gone through 4-5 versions so far — can anyone guess I’m an IT guy into prototyping and McConnell?), so if you see something you like (or don’t like, or want changed, or changed back), drop us a line and I’ll see what I can’t do. And expect to see a new version every couple of hours, as I’m on vacation and tinkering with this thing today.
Or I might write my application essay to the Mariners. Either way.
First version of the long-awaited, much anticipated, ugly-looking GM scorecard is up. Quick, email us with feedback so we can make it better before too many people see it. Please read the disclaimer and realize this right now, this thing is more an opening lob by me than a definitive statement about who’s better at what.
Omar Minaya, the strip miner
OMAR MINAYA
“The Strip Miner”
Over 1,000 Words of Goodness
Because you demanded it!
Omar’s in a difficult situation, and this is what people will point to when they excuse his faults: “What else is he going to do, given that his team is owned by MLB?”
And I agree, a little, in that I’ll give him some sympathy. Beyond that, his record in Montreal and his general outlook offer little evidence that Minaya would be a good general manager in Seattle.
One thing we agree on here at the U.S.S. Mariner is that when you look for a GM candidate, you should look for someone adaptable, willing to learn. Minaya will not learn, and seems to have a great deal of disdain for those who do. One of my favorite Minaya quotes is ““I don’t talk about on-base percentage. I’m old school. I’m not a stat guy. I’m a talent evaluator. The guys who taught me the game of baseball never talked about on-base percentage. Give me talent and I’ll give you on-base percentage.”
He’s got a ton of gems like that. Two years as Montreal’s GM, the team went 83-79 twice. The problem is that Minaya knew he wasn’t going to be around for a while and essentially has left the Expos minor league system in a state that (were it in the US, anyway) might qualify it as a Superfund cleanup project.
Now part of that is MLB’s fault: the wholesale looting of the Expos by Jeff Loria as he left for the Marlins resulted in the team losing institutional ability (for lack of a better term): they lost scouting guys, coaches, whoever — it seemed like almost everyone in the organization known for their good work in player development went to the Marlins or found employment on another team. Knowing that’s true, you can look at the strip-mining in one of two ways (whether or not you think the deals were good)
– Why not? Without a minor league system, the Expos are going to suck in a couple years anyway, and they might not be around at all. They’re close to competing, go for it
– No way. This last crop of minor leaguers is going to be the only source of cheap, good talent the team will have to build around while under severe budget constraints for the next couple years until the farm system can be rebuilt
Neither of those is right, or wrong. But Minaya was given a chance to run a major-league team with some crazy caveats, and he thought about it and decided to make a splash, and it worked. He’s a leading candidate for the Reds job, or so we read, and is mentioned constantly here in Seattle over better candidates like Kim Ng.
What about what he did to make that splash?
In the 2003 off-season, when Minaya had to make some deals to cut salary, he did nothing, and teams found other solutions, chopping his leverage out from under him (is leverage choppable? Does it support one? Onwards!) $15m isn’t easy to cut, but Minaya had no plan and it hurt him badly.
Take Bartolo Colon and the Indians who (by way of contrast) were trying to chop salary quickly. Colon went to the Expos for a prize package that (to me, anyway) is the last great prospect trade MLB has seen: Colon and Tim Drew went to the Expos, and the Indians got Cliff Lee, Grady Sizemore, and Brandon Phillips (and took on a year of Lee Stevens to even the contracts out). Then when it came time to move Colon, they got… nothing. A free Orlando Hernandez, damaged rotator cuff and all, and a turkey sandwitch. In defense of Minaya, we hear the turkey sandwitch was delicious. It did not, however, come with cheese.
Minaya seems to flit from opportunity to opportunity. Chance to pick up some starting pitchers from teams looking to create a roster spot and willing to pay most or all of the salary? Hey, we’ll take him — bing! Livan Hernandez, who weirdly puts up an amazing season.
Minaya’s also got a scout’s background, which will make him appealing to Gillick (who is “a scout’s scout”, someone probably said once). On the positive side, Minaya does some of the things we razz Gillick for: he put together cheap, effective bullpens, he took his chances on waiver-type talent and roster pasting by acquiring guys like Tomo Ohka who were at one time highly regarded. Frank Robinson and their coaches then got great work out of them, and the team prospered. But this was essentially Jim Bowden’s style, and it never got him to the playoffs or built a prosperous franchise there, either (interestingly, Bowden worked under many of the same type of financial/ownership constraints that Minaya has in Montreal).
Even there, there’s no plan: when they picked up Cliff Floyd, they gave up Carl Pavano, Graeme Lloyd, Mike Mordecai, and Justin Wayne, along with a PTBNL that turned out to be Don Levinski. Not a huge loss, only Pavano is particularly talented out of that group (and this year started well for the Marlins and then struggled badly). When they discovered that Floyd and his bad legs didn’t like the turf, and the team fell further out of contention, three weeks later Minaya ended up dumping him on the Red Sox for Seung Song and Sun-Woo Kim.
That’s the kind of thing Dan Duquette used to do with the Red Sox: if he didn’t make three, four moves in a week, he’d go home thinking he’d failed to earn his GM check. But patience and an ability to stick to a plan is one of the greatest qualities of any executive.
What would Omar do here? He was an assistant GM for the Mets as that franchise floundered, spending wildly on the veteran-of-the-week trying to stay at 85 wins, and then in Montreal he’s blown up the remnants of a farm system in an attempt to generate some ink. The M’s have one of the strangest mixes of veteran talent and young prospects, an intriguing off-season challenge that will require someone who can swing both ways, patch some roster spots, maybe work a trade, and see if they can’t get 90, 95 wins out of the team.
This can be done. Teams can reload on the fly as they compete, working new players into the lineup, finding stars and role players to complete the roster, while maintaining a fertile farm system. But when you look at Omar’s history, there’s two ways he might go with the 2004 Mariners:
– spend wildly on a bad, old outfielder, other players
– spend prospects wildly on a bad, old outfielder, other players
Now, that might allow the team to tread water, win 80-85 games next year.
I say screw 85 wins. This team can win 85 games with Minaya using hundred-dollar bills to light other hundred-dollar bills while Rafael Soriano goes 16-7 with Toronto and maybe compete next year, or they can get someone smart, creative adaptable, without the press, and finally reach for the World Series this year, and the next, and the year after. It can happen. All we need is the right leadership.
Kim Ng for GM.