Bavasi and Gillick
Reading through the multitude of comments in the Agents of Change post, it appears that I created more questions than I answered. The goal of the post was to clarify why I believe the Mariners will spend money, and a lot of it, this offseason. In backing up that belief, I made some things public that we’ve known, and hinted at, for quite some time, but hadn’t ever put into words. It appears that I didn’t clarify some things well enough, so hopefully this post can serve as an answer to most of the questions that were raised in response to that post. So, to the paraphrased questions:
Q. Doesn’t the fact that Pat Gillick was still orchastrating the team last offseason mean that you were completely off base in your criticisms of Bill Bavasi and owe him an apology?
This one came in varying forms, but was expressed by several people. Some even went so far as to claim that Bavasi deserves a clean slate, that none of the moves made from last October through April should be held against him, and that he’s the right man in charge of building the Mariners.
A: We were completely aware of the power structure of the organization last offseason when we were firing upon Bavasi and stand by what we said. Nothing I made public was a revelation to us, though I realize that many of you were not aware of just how the shift in power had affected the front office. After taking the title of general manager, Bill Bavasi became the defacto face of the front office. As such, he becomes the lightning rod for criticism of moves made under his watch. Was it a difficult situation? Absolutely. Do we give him a pass for moves like the Ibanez signing that were done essentially by the time of his hiring. Yes, we do. But as GM, Bavasi is responsible for talent acquisition, and during his first five months on the job, the organization syphoned talent like, well, a syphon. That was on his watch. Yes, you have to work with the people around you, and it was a team approach as he got acclimated to the organization, but the buck still stopped with Bavasi, and he signed off on every move the team made. You cannot give him a free pass for being the man in charge of the most disastrous offseason baseball has seen in the past ten years.
Bottom line: Bill Bavasi is using a different system of antiquated talent evaluation than Pat Gillick, but that doesn’t make it a good one. If he were removed from his position tomorrow and replaced with Chris Antonetti, it would be the best move the organization could make all offseason. It isn’t going to happen, obviously, and there is still reason to be concerned with the strategies of the current administration.
Q. When did Bavasi start to take over a majority of the decision making process from Gillick?
The beginning of December. After being hired on November 7th, he essentially spent the rest of the month carrying out the moves that were outlined by the Gillick regime at the postseason organizational meetings. The moves that were essentially out of Bavasi’s hands were the Ibanez signing, the non-tenders of Cameron and Rhodes, the re-signing of Hasegawa and Franklin, the contract extensions for Ichiro and Joel Pineiro, and the desire to trade Carlos Guillen and Greg Colbrunn. The majority of the influence in these instances belonged to Gillick, Looper, Jongewaard, and Pelekoudas.
The rest of the moves that we’ve seen are on Bavasi; the signings of Eddie Guardado, Scott Spiezio, Rich Aurilia, and Ron Villone (the reason Sherill and Madritsch didn’t have a chance from day one), along with the acquisitions of Ramon Santiago, Jolbert Cabrera, and Quinton McCracken. Regardless of how much you like Bavasi, there is no way to spin those seven moves in totality as anything but poor, both in design and result.
Q: You stated that the organizational philosophies have changed in the past year. Is this a good thing?
This is a tough one. I was one of Pat Gililck’s harshest critics during the 2002-2003 seasons, very vocal about the fact that I believe Gillick failed to evolve as a talent evaluator and was passed by those willing to adapt to new ways of thinking. However, I also agree with a lot of the basic philosophies of fiscal conservation that Gillick instilled in the organization. Long term contracts are a big risk, and Gillick’s belief that they are, more often than not, a poor value is absolutely correct. He kept the team from locking themselves into long term mistakes, allowing them to cut bait on their mistakes and minimize the effects. Flexibility is one of the great tools a team with a large budget can have, and Gillick did a fairly good job at allowing the Mariners to have some flexibility to add to the roster every offseason. I simply don’t agree with the way he spent the money, throwing a significant amount of the payroll at relievers and reserves, limiting the amount available for upper tier players. His desire to remain competitive every season is based in a lot of common sense, and I fear that this grounding left with him.
However, I still believe the Mariners are behind the curve in organizational philosophy. They were behind the curve under Gillick’s regime and they are behind under Bavasi’s. There is a better way to analyze talent and use the payroll than the Mariners currently believe, and their refusal to adapt to new ways of thinking have left them at a competitive disadvantage. I was glad to see Pat Gillick go, as it presented an opportunity for the front office to shift gears and go in a completely different direction, bringing in someone like Chris Antonetti who would change the way the organization evaluates talent. Hiring Bill Bavasi brought some changes, but not the sweeping reform that I believe the organization will eventually have to undergo. Bavasi has different opinions than Gillicks, but I don’t believe that in this case, different will be more effective. They are just differently flawed.
Q: Can we trust Bill Bavasi to identify the right players to sign with their new found aggressiveness?
Yes and no. The Mariners and the blogosphere are basically in agreement about the prime candidates in this free agent class. We support strong efforts for Beltre and Beltran; the Mariners would love to have either one. We think Matt Clement is the best bet among free agent pitchers; the organization is very high on Clement. In those instances, I’m excited that the team will be pursuing the same players that I would like to see on the team next year. However, Bavasi’s fondness for athleticism and tools that leads him to Beltre, Beltran, and Clement also leads the team into overvaluing underachievers.
One of Gillick’s strengths was focusing on performance at the major league level, regardless of the package it came in. The Bavasi era will be personified by a chase of a certain type of player; lean, fast, strong-armed, oozing with physical skills. However, there are a tremendous number of tools-fiends who absolutely suck at baseball, and I fully expect the Mariners to fill the roster with some truly awful athletes. Gillick, for the most part, avoided overpaying for potential. I expect the Mariners to get burned repeatedly in their chase of athletes with physical potential who simply do not have the performance to justify the expectations the M’s will place upon them.
Q: What side do you take in the roster building philosophy of Gilick’s spread-the-wealth versus Bavasi’s stars-and-scrubs?
A: Ideally, the so called stars-and-scrubs way of building a roster is the optimum approach, spending most of your budget on the upper tier regulars and filling in with cheap players who can perform above the cost expended upon them. The A’s have used this philosophy to build their mini-dynasty on a small scale. They have repeatedly paid for players they felt were irreplaceable (Chavez, the Big Three), and allowed to leave those whose production could be potentially replaced by young players at little cost (Giambi, Tejada, Damon, Foulke, etc…). Baseball talent is distributed as a pyramid, and the higher up the pyramid you go, the more rare it is to find a player of that ilk, and thus the more valuable they are. Spending money on people who fall into the base of the pyramid is essentially wasting money, and this was the glaring flaw of the Gillick regime as well as the past offseason.
However, teams win championships, not a collection of stars-and-scrubs. For the roster construction method to work, you have to able to convert the “scrub”, league minimum players into useful parts. The A’s aren’t winning 90 games because Eric Chavez is a great player. They are winning because they’re getting production from Eric Byrnes, Bobby Crosby, Scott Hatteberg, Rich Harden, and others who make next to nothing. You cannot win baseball games with a few great players surrounded by terrible ones. In order to successfully build a roster using stars-and-scrubs, you have to be able to find talent where others cannot. Bill Bavasi has never shown this ability, nor are the methods he endorses successful in other organizations that use similar strategies. The problem with Bill Bavasi being in charge of a roster that spends a majority of money on several upper tier players is that I do not believe that he will fill out the roster with players of even moderate productivity.
Good role players are a key part of championship rosters. Despite what the organization and the media will tell you, Jolbert Cabrera is not a good role player at $1.5 million dollars, and his value to the team was barely above what could be expected from a replacement level, league mimimum player. Jobert Cabrera was a waste of $1.2 million and two marginal prospects, but the Mariners will hold him up as an example of exactly the kind of player they need to acquire more of. As long as the team is enamored by players of his ilk and spend talent and money to acquire that kind of role player, the stars-and-scrubs philosophy will fail.
Q: When you said the names at the top of the list were Beltre, Beltran, and Clement, did you mean to infer that the Mariners might sign all three?
A: Rereading the post, I can see how that came across, but no, I don’t believe the team will sign all three. It would take some kind of minor miracle to get two of those three. I do believe that one of them will be a Mariner next spring, however.
Q: You’re making all this up, you no talent hack. Prove it or I won’t believe you.
A: Thanks for the kind words. I have no interest in trying to convince anyone that I’m telling the truth, so feel free to remove ussmariner.com from your bookmarks and cease reading. We won’t miss you.
Hope this clarifies most of the new questions I created.
Fall League Mariners
There are six Mariners playing in the Arizona Fall League:
Hitters:
Greg Dobbs, who we’ve seen and has missed almost all of 2003 with a tendon injury
Michael Morse, who lost a huge chunk of time this year to suspension
Shin-Soo Choo, who hit .315/.382/.462 in San Antonio in 132 games
And pitchers:
Brett Evert, the waiver claim worth watching (though his line in Tacoma wouldn’t show it)
Jared Thomas, got 60 innings of relief work in San Antonio, decent numbers
Jon Huber, Inland Empire. On the year, he got almost 140 innings in a good year in the Cal League… I’m not sure why he’s headed to the AFL.
AFL ball is good for purposes of getting players, particularly those who’ve missed playing time for one reason (injury) or another (cough), time on a field against decent competition. However, it’s not good for trying to make evaluations based on time there. The list of bad players who had great stats against AFL competition is long and undistinguished. The talent is not there to make this a good test.
Broadcasting
We had a really interesting discussion on managers and what we wanted to see out of them, and I wanted to open up a similar one.
We carp about how bad the non-Niehaus portion of the M’s broadcast crew is, but where do we go from here?
I wrote a column at BP about this (in fact, I even said “I’ve complained a lot about broadcasts, but what do I actually want?” which I quoted there for the sake of repetitiveness).
Take, for example, Mike Curto, who does the announcing for the Rainiers. We’ve touted him over and over for a major league job. Huge amount of prep work, he’s insanely prepared and up on the game, he’ll say dumb stuff in the course of three hours (and I would too, if I had to talk for three hours broadcasting a game) but often realizes it and goes back. We love Pat Dillon, who does the broadcasts for the Everett Aquasox, another guy who’s interested in learning everything he can so he can do his job better — in the Northwest League!
What do you look for in your broadcast crew? Is it the voice? Why do teams remake their rosters when they stink, but are unwilling to replace even the worst announcers with clearly superior talent?
Nature of argumentation
or, why comments are a headache
The U.S.S. Mariner’s been a long discussion between Dave, Jason, me, and our readers. It happened first through email and now continues also in the comments sections. It’s the discussion of a sports team, and baseball in general, but really, it’s been a long and (I think) productive argument about difference facets of the team.
This is going to sound overly simple, but argumentation is about making claims.
“Rich Aurilia for Guillen is, on balance, a slight upgrade.”
Then you advance arguments for this claim.
“… it seems likely that he’ll offer a little more offense than Guillen, while still playing decent defense. The reason I’m worried, though…”
I have enjoyed little more than some of the discussions USSM has had on some of these topics. They often range into the unconsidered and provide a naunced background to the debate.
That’s what I’m interested in. I don’t care if you think I’m smart, or stupid, or if you think we’re tools of the establishment or the forces of enlightenment. Further, I don’t care if you think someone else posting on the site is so dim it makes you want to scream.
I write this because response to some of our stuff has sparked a particular kind of discussion that I’m not interested in. When I post to say “More Gillick-administration figures depart, the remaking of the team’s front office to Bavasi’s specs continues.” That’s a claim, and so:
“That’s not true, some turnover is normal in a front office, especially after a season like this” is an interesting counter-argument.
“Comment #2 is dumb because that person previously argued this other thing” is not.
Here would be my gold standard for comments, and I first admit that I have not, in responding to others, failed to meet it:
Would someone only interested in the claim and counter-claims find this enlightening?
Agents of Change
I wasn’t planning on writing this post until Gillick’s official exit had been announced, but you guys have asked enough and I’m tired of hinting. There’s a few things I’m not going to reveal that would hurt the team if they became public (remember, I’m a fan, not a journalist, and I feel no moral obligation to make the M’s less likely to accomplish some of their goals), but beyond a few specific details, here’s the gist of the evolution of the M’s organization in the past year. We’ll do it in timeline fashion.
July 31, 2003. Trading deadline last year. Pat Gillick was not in Seattle, and the fans were told he was in Toronto “moving”. The consensus in the organization begins to form that this is his last season.
September 30, 2003. Pat Gillick “steps down as general manager” and moves into a consulting role. The executives decide the best course of action is to continue the status quo as much as possible, and ask Gillick to stay with the club as a consultant. He is given the majority of the power in selecting his own replacement.
October 20, 2003. It becomes apparent that Gillick’s retirement is a near-total sham. The structure of the organization has changed little in the twenty days since he stepped down and he’s been given enough control after selecting his successor that he’s essentially going to be the new GM’s boss. USSM gets pretty negative for a few weeks.
November 7, 2003. Bill Bavasi is named General Manager. He’s basically told that the offseason plan is already in place and the team is prepared to make several moves almost immediately.
November 19, 2003. The Mariners sign Raul Ibanez to a contract. Bill Bavasi had about as much to do with this signing as I did.
December 6, 2003. The organization reshuffles positions, with Bavasi bringing in his friend Bob Fontaine as scouting director, and moving several Gillick hires into less prominant roles.
Decemeber 7, 2003. The Mariners non-tender Mike Cameron, Arthur Rhodes, and re-sign Shigetoshi Hasegawa to a 2 year, $6.3 million contract. These moves were all “heavily suggested” by Gillick and his loyalists. Bavasi appears in public with strings attached to his mouth and Pat Gillick’s hand inserted in his back.
December 11, 2003. The first appearance of “Gillvasi” on the blog, as the new term describing the Mariners front office is coined.
January 8, 2004. The Mariners wrap up the offseason of doom with the Carlos Guillen-Ramon Santiago swap. Bavasi describes Santiago as a player who “can pick it up and throw it”. The old regime contributes to the debacle by essentially demanding that Guillen be moved, and Bavasi “contributes” by deciding on the “talent” to acquire.
April 4, 2004. Bavasi makes his first trade without heavy consultation from Gillick and company, acquiring Jolbert Cabrera.
April through September, 2004. Team sucks.
Sometime in October, 2004. Pat Gillick leaves organization.
Over the past year, the club has transitioned in stages. First we had run by Gillick, followed by Gillick telling Bavasi what to do, then Bavasi begins to make bad moves of his own accord, and finally Gillick and loyal subjects leave organization. As the transition has occurred, there has been a noticable change in my conversations with organizational folks. The company line is towed far less often. Dissension was pretty clear starting in about April. By June, you could call the organization a house divided, and it didn’t stand long.
So, we’re almost to a Gillick-free era. What organizational philosophies are leaving with him?
1. The lack of importance of “star players”. This one gets thrown on Lincoln quite a bit, but Gillick was one of the main proponants of the no-barcaloungers-in-the-clubhouse philosophy that avoided anyone who didn’t buy into a 25-as-1 philosophy. Instead of spending large amounts on one individual, Gillick believed in spreading the wealth and acquiring a balanced team, spending less on the top tier and more on the reserves.
2. First round picks are paid out of line with their actual value and should be actively avoided. The organization viewed the loss of their first round pick as compensation for signing Raul Ibanez early a bonus, not a deterrant. Gillick preferred a strategy that leaned on overdrafting in later rounds for hard-sign guys who fell to compensate for not having an early pick. Despite some logical basis, this theory has been hammered by every actual study done on draft performance.
3. Veteran leadership is the most undervalued aspect in the game, and a team full of players with experience will beat a team full of similarly talented players lacking experience.
These were three tenets of the Gillick regime that Bavasi simply does not agree with. He covets a star player, a “face of the organization” type. He believes strongly in the draft and brought Bob Fontaine in to ressucitate the Mariners performance in the amateur draft. Rather than valuing veterans nearly every time, Bavasi values athleticism higher than almost anyone outside of Tampa Bay, which few older players possess.
Many of the theories that we have seen the organization stick to under Gillick will not exist under Bavasi. The M’s are going to be the major player in the upcoming offseason. When discussing parts of the plan headed towards free agency, the names at the top of the wish list are Beltre, Beltran, and Clement. Bavasi is hoping to change over nearly 40 percent of the roster by January. Is it going to work? We’ll see. I have some reservations about how successful the club will be if Plan A fails. Plan B and C aren’t especially inviting, to me, even though they involve spending a lot of money.
Fans should understand, however, that Gillick’s departure from power means the removal of most of the negative stereotypes about the organization. I’m not endorsing Bill Bavasi as a better talent evaluator or GM than Gillick, but there’s absolutely no question that he’s different. The M’s may screw this offseason up, but they won’t screw it up the same way they have the past several years. They aren’t going to get burned by Rich Aurilia types this fall. If they screw up, it’s going to be on a grand scale.
The M’s are going to spend a lot of money this winter. I can’t guarantee they are going to spend it all well, but I can tell you that several of the players we would like to see in Seattle will be forced into deciding to take less money from another organization to turn down the Mariners offer. And, with very few exceptions, the high bidder almost always gets the player in free agency.
The Mariners are no longer Pat Gillick’s team. For better or worse, the 25 man roster that reports to camp next spring will be Bill Bavasi’s team. The old regime believed in a conservative, risk-free, no commitment approach to player acquisition, allowing them to get out from under any errors quickly and relatively cheap. The 2005 Mariners are going to be nearly the opposite; lots of potential, even more risk. If the M’s hit a home run during free agency, they’ll be contending for the division next year. If they swing and miss, the Bavasi regime is going to be a very short-lived one that will leave a humungous mess to clean up. I’m both excited by the potential and scared of the risk. I’m not convinced that the new way is better than the old way, or that we have the right people in charge. I am, however, glad that November won’t be a boring month to be a Mariner fan for the first time in years.
Lowering expectations
The Mariners are into this already, using Pocket Lint to spread the word that they don’t actually have that much money after all, so we shouldn’t expect a couple of impact signings.
We’ve complained about this in the past here, so I’ll spare everyone the full fury of my anger, but the M’s do this every season. Oh, we’re spending (actual number+crazy wacky number=claimed number) in salary, oh, it’s so hard for us, what with making more money than 26 other teams in baseball and raking in so much at the stadium we actually don’t even bother to haul bills under 20 out at the end of each game. They constantly exaggerate the amount they’re spending relative to other teams, and every year they try and make it seem like they’ve really gone the extra mile to
Like last year. The routine was:
We’re going to spend $90m. Maybe $92. That’s how generous we are.
Now with Sasaki out, we have more money to spend mid-season.
Actually, not. Hee hee.
And by the way, the money we budgeted for payroll that we didn’t spend? It goes away at the end of the year.
That they’re starting this early, though — wow. That’s depressing. I was hopeful they really were going to step up, sign Beltre, sign Clement/Pavano/someone, really make a run at shoring up the foundation of the team. They’re already trying to talk me down from my optimism. That sorta sucks.
Organizational shakeup
As the Times noted today, the organizational shakeup that I mentioned was coming Sunday night is beginning to become public. The “retirement” of Roger Jongewaard and the resignation of Charley Kerfeld continue to bring about the evolution of the Mariners from the Gillick regime to Bavasi’s crew. As I mentioned, Gillick himself is likely the next to officially leave the organization.
We’ve gotten some questions as to what the effects of these resignations will be and what it all means. I’ll try to answer those questions here.
The probably-temporary-retirement of Jongewaard isn’t a big surprise. He took a reduced workload for ’04, moving into more of a consulting role under Bavasi, rather than the day-to-day administrative role he held when Gillick was in charge. Even under Gillick, however, he had less to do with the state of the current farm system than most are giving him credit for. The current prospects in the system were mostly the work of Benny Looper, Frank Mattox, and to a smaller degree, Bob Fontaine and Jim Colborn. Jongewaard has a long history with the club, but he’s also a loyal guy, and he saw the writing on the wall. Bit by bit, the front office that was in place from 2000-2003 is going to be replaced, and Roger figured this was as good a time to go as any.
Kerfeld was a Gillick hire and left of his own accord. While the Mariners success in the independant leagues with Madritsch and Sherrill have made him a mini-celebrity among M’s scouts, the M’s aren’t losing the only guy on the planet capable of scouting the indy leagues, and he’s gotten a bit too much credit for having Mads/Sherrill make the show. The Mariners didn’t outscout everyone to get Madritsch; they outbid them. Eight teams made significant offers after he dominated the Northern League, but the Mariners offered more money than any other team. A $50,000 signing bonus for a player out of the Indy leagues is unheard of, but the price they paid for Madritsch reflected the fact that he was not a hidden gem. Sherrill got a recommendation from Mads, and the organization signed Sherrill more as organizational filler than an actual prospect. Sherrill’s signing looks tremendous now, but no one mentions the hoard of indy league guys the M’s brought into the organization over the past several years. Kerfeld is a good scout, but let’s not ring our hands too much over his loss. It isn’t a crippling defection.
When Gillick offiically leaves (and right now, he’s a big time favorite to get the Washington job, especially if MLB retains control of the club), expect more people to follow him out the door. There are a good number of people loyal to him in the organization, and Bavasi wouldn’t mind filling the front office with his own guys. While we certainly have been vocal critics of Bavasi’s moves since taking over, removing the factions that have existed in the front office the past year are a good thing.
PI, Times on the 2005 M’s
Lot of good stuff over at the PI.
David Andriesen constructs a lineup in what I think is the smartest and most deliberate setup so far. He moves Ichiro to center, which is interesting but (we should face this) unlikely to happen unless he assents, given his astronomical pull. Hire Beltre and Drew, puts Lopez in at short.
John Hickey’s lineup offers a counterpoint where he hires Glaus and Sexson, and plays them at 3B and 1B, respectively. Which… ennnhhhh.
Hickey also offers a good piece on what the M’s are looking for. It includes this heartening quote:
“We’re looking for people who will help us for more than one year,” general manager Bill Bavasi said. “We’re not looking for acquisitions just for the ’05 club. We’re looking for ’05, ’06 and ’07.”
Yay!
So that’s the PI: Thiel’s great column, and some good stuff. The Times offers —
Larry Stone! Woo-hoo! Today, he’s written about possible managerial candidates. He also goes out in pursuit of some of those candidates in a good piece.
Mmm… local coverage goodness on a Wednesday.
Bavasi’s Boys
Melvin speaks out on his firing in a Times piece. Essentially, the reason given to him for his canning was that players leaving the team got better, while players coming on got worse. This is an interesting argument and not one I’d have expected the team to advance. It seems good: that they’re paying attention, but also bad: there’s a lot of small sample size in this, and Safeco as a huge pitcher’s park… I don’t know what to think of this.
Bavasi also recommended Melvin for the Arizona job, which seems weird.
Jon Wells noted in the comments that remaking of the team in Bill’s image continues. This may be good, or bad, depending on your opinion of Bavasi. Not including the mid-season shake-up, the list lately includes:
Roger Jongewaard, listed on the site as “VP Special Asst to the GM” and sort of the institutional talent evaluator
Charlie Kerfeld, scout who signed Madritsch among others
Jim Slaton, the pitching coach for Tacoma who seemed to be able to turn anyone with a pea in their head and a good attitude into something worthwhile. I’m sad to see Slaton go. He did good work for the organization, and I wish him well.
As a larger issue, it’s clear that this is not Gillick’s organization anymore. I expect these are not the only changes we’re going to see, as Bavasi sorts through what he’s seen this first year and starts to perform the Heimlich maneuver on people until they spit up a resignation.
The change away from Mattox was the most important this season: the team has had a serious of disastrous drafts. It would have been hard to have intentionally picked a less productive strategy in the draft than the team pursued without doing something like taking the Baseball America draft projections and reversing them. No, even then…
If Bavasi’s moves so far are any indication, we can expect that he’s going to stock the organization with his people, those he’s worked with and liked in previous jobs, name floaters around the league. Dan Evans is already hanging around collecting alms, so might as well get him an office.
And the more I think about it, the more I think that’s how he’s going to get his manager — it’s going to be someone he’s comfortable with, and probably he knows, or has people he trust recommend to him. Given the likely other priorities of the team (name guy, different disposition) I have no idea who that might be.
Thiel and Lincoln
Art Thiel of the PI has a pretty long interview with Howard Lincoln from yesterday. Thiel asked some pretty tough questions, so let’s give him a good amount of credit. Lincoln avoided most of them, but there are some enlightening answers. Here’s a few snippets, though you really should read the whole thing.
Q: If you were a major shareholder of a company whose main rival for three years running put out better products at half the price, do you think the CEO of that company might be vulnerable?
A: I certainly think that CEO would be subject to legitimate criticism. In any organization, the CEO is ultimately responsible for everything that goes on. I’m cognizant that our fans — and I’m one — are very, very disappointed with what happened in 2004 and, while we had winning records in 2002 and 2003, we didn’t go to the playoffs.
I’d also point out that in the five years I’ve been doing this, we’ve been to the American League Championship Series twice, and we had four years of good baseball. I think overall its fair to say we’ve brought great joy to the community and we’ve turned on an entire region to Mariners baseball.
I would hope that 2004 would be viewed as an aberration (that no one) in the organization felt was acceptable.
Nice jab there by Thiel, even though Lincoln entirely avoids the question about whether the organization has considered that perhaps the A’s have figured out some things that the M’s simply have not.
Q: There is no consensus among them to change the club’s approach?
A: The most important thing we can do is maintain a very high major league player payroll, at least in the top 10. If we can do that, that’s the most significant contribution the ownership group can make to the Mariners.
That’s precisely what we intend to do in 2005, even though in doing so we will budget for a loss. We are prepared to accept that loss in order to provide maximum financial flexibility to (general manager) Bill Bavasi and the baseball people, to give them the full opportunity to get things done right.
Thiel continues to fire upon the organizational philosophy, and Lincoln continues to doge the question. You have to love that Lincoln believes he can actually get us to believe the M’s are going to operate at a loss in 2005, don’t you? The payroll would have to be in the $130 million range for the M’s to actually lose money next year.
Q: Turning to the Bob Melvin firing, Bavasi was reluctant to share with media and fans the reasons. Even though he said it was a private, confidential conversation, the reluctance to explain came off to me and others as arrogant. Along with several other decisions, the organization has come off as arrogant or dismissive of fans’ concerns.
A: Quite frankly, I’m shocked that anyone would think we were arrogant. Confidential communications are important to the Mariners. We treat our manager, or any other employee, with dignity and respect. The point that Bill was making is that there are things NOT to be shared with anyone on the outside, fans or anyone else.
I’m with Lincoln here. I don’t understand people who think it was arrogant of Bavasi to not tell the media why he fired Bob Melvin. There is no moral obligation for him to deride Melvin publically. To claim that it was arrogant is just odd. Make no mistake, the Mariners front office contains some of the most arrogant people in the game, but this is not an example of that.
Q: How does the ownership agree to take on a loss?
A: We meet monthly. The budget for the new year (starting Nov. 1) has not been finalized. I have already advised our group that we are going to have a significant loss to accomplish the objective. I anticipate the budget will be approved.
Just so we’re clear, the organization is absolutely not going to operate at a loss next year. They will make a smaller profit, and they’ll use nifty accounting tricks to say that they’re losing money, but the team will be profitable next year, just like every other year.
Good interview, though.