Thoughts on the Seattle Mariners Management: Wow! The Emperor Really Does Have No Clothes!

I started this blog in December of 2009 in large part because I believed that the Giants and their management were headed in the right direction.  They already had Matt Cain, Tim Lincecum, Brian Wilson and Pablo Sandoval in the major leagues with Buster Posey and Madison Bumgarner on fast tracks to the big leagues.  I just thought that was a nice little core of homegrown players to build around and showed a commitment to scouting, drafting and development that had not been previously apparent from the organization.

At the time, life was unpleasant for anyone expressing confidence in what the Giants were doing.  The leading Giants blog had become a daily snarkfest of ridicule for Brian Sabean and the Giants.  I was basically run off of the sfgiants.com message board for defending what the Giants were doing as an organization and for predicting a brighter future.  At the time, I was not aware of ogc and his blog being a lone voice crying in the wilderness with basically the same message.

Then, in the spring of 2010, Fangraphs ran their yearly rankings of organizations based on current talent, future talent and front office methods/talent/savvy.  They ranked the Giants #23 and the Mariners #6.  Fangraphs was a champion of defensive metrics and the use of WAR as a tool for valuing players.  The Mariners at the time were full of good defensive players who couldn't hit a lick and somehow Dave Cameron and the Fangraphs staff concluded that their relatively new GM, Jack Zduriencik(Jack Z), was using defensive metrics and getting undervalued players as a result.  Their relative rankings of the Mariners and Giants were almost entirely based on their enthrallment with Jack Z's supposed sabermetric savvy and Brian Sabean's supposed complete ignorance of advanced baseball statistics.  They took a lot of heat for the Mariners ranking but almost none for their ridiculously low ranking of the Giants.  Pretty much every baseball oriented blog at the time believed exactly the same thing about Sabean.

Of course, history has since proven these rankings to be completely unfounded.  The Mariners have gone from bad to worse, spinning their wheels and changing philosophy as often as they have changed managers which is often.  The Giants, on the other hand went on to win not just one, but two World Series Championships.  Dave Cameron bailed out of the Jack Z bandwagon awhile back, but continues to criticize virtually every move Brian Sabean makes and generally belittle his accomplishments.

Sometimes when you have a strong belief and find yourself defending it on multiple fronts, you start to wonder if maybe there is something you are not seeing.  Maybe you are just as biased in another direction as the people you are debating.  Maybe Jack Z is on the right track and just hasn't had enough time to see it come to fruition.  After all, Sabes was GM for how many years before the Giants finally broke through and vindicated his methods?  I knew Dave Cameron and the Fangraphs staff were grossly overrating Jack Z, but I have to say even I am a bit shocked at just how bad it's starting to look.

You had to suspect some bad karma coming out of Seattle with the way 3 managers up and quit before they were fired.  The sudden change of course toward power hitters who were also terrible on defense also smacked of desperation and lack of direction.  Now comes an article in the Seattle Times by a dude named Geoff Baker, based interviews with 24 people including former manager Eric Wedge and former Special Assistant Tony Blengino.  According to Baker, based on these sources, Jack Z actually not only knows nothing at all about advanced baseball statistics, he is hostile to them!  Blengino claims that he, Blengino, actually wrote Jack Z's resume for him and cooked the information to make it look like he used a balance of scouting and sabermetrics because he knew that is what it would take to get the job.  During sabermetric presentations, Jack Z would belittle them and complain about font sizes and margins as if those were somehow important.

In addition, Wedge claims that President Chuck Armstrong and CEO Howard Lincoln were meddlers all the way down to the dugout.  He felt betrayed when after being hired to nurture a youth movement, he was verbally ripped by Armstrong and Lincoln for the poor performance of the kids despite the fact that the Mariners record was improved significantly from prior years.

All I can say is wow!  Just wow!  Shadenfreude can be so sweet!  I mean, who knew?  This goes way beyond anything I imagined, and I knew that Jack Z was being overrated.  Granted, both Wedge and Blengino have reasons to be grinding axes, but as many commentators have pointed out, this lines up just too well with a lot of observable facts over the last several years for there to not be a significant amount of truth to it.

I'll just leave you with a quote from Dave Cameron with a tip of the hat to Shankbone for digging it up and posting it over on his blog You Gotta Like These Kids:

"The term "process" has become a cliche in referring to front offices, but quite simply, there are few better examples of an organization that is blending traditional scouting with new ways of thinking than the Mariners.  The GM is one of the most respected scouts in the game, and his right hand man is an accountant who went out and hired Tom Tango as one of his first orders of business.  Teams that have blended both ways of thinking into their decision-making process have been tremendously successful, and this is the path the Marinter have set themselves upon.

The Seattle front office knows how to evaluate talent, and they know how to value talent.  Organizations that do both things well, and are given a payroll of $100 million to boot, win a lot of baseball games."

Dave Cameron  March 31, 2010.

The emperor really does not have any clothes!

BTW, Tony Blengino now works as a writer for Fangraphs.