Art Thiel the graying enfant terrible of the Seattle sports press weighed in this morning and savaged the Mariners for their horrific performance over the last eleven seasons. He is forever droll and leads off with this statement, “The park has been an extreme pitcher’s park by design. What has changed is baseball, and what hasn’t changed is the club’s top management.”

All in 1,322 words all over the map in a kid gloved slap at un-named executive managers Howard Lincoln and Chuck Armstrong. Those two were his sources for his book about the Mariner’s 2001 season. Professional courtesy.

Apparently, in reaction to that Lincstrong called up David Boardman of the Times and Jerry Brewer was instructed to run a poll on which General Manager in Seattle should be fired. As a PR strategy it is an exercise that is designed to keep the light off of Armstrong and Lincoln.

Larry Stone writes something, 884 words that is a recounting of previous hitting coaches, the substantive piece being Chris Chambliss was fired today.

Geoff Baker did the subject in 584 words and actually touched on some of the issues which led to Chambliss being removed.

Baker also writes about the team progress in 1,239 words and as he is and continues to advocate an approach that worked twenty years ago in Toronto and is serially critical of the Zduriencik effort and is hardly objective.

Dave Cameron of the USS Mariner, Fangraphs, WSJ and World Peace jumps in this morning to assert that the Mariners should spend, spend and spend some more. Details later of course. That there being few quality free agent bats that would make their signing anything more than a further impediment to developing players is not discussed. He runs out Ryan Doumit’s name a guy that the Mariners did not sign but the Twins did. The Twins just fired everybody except Ron Gardenhire and actually John Jaso was quite a bit better than Doumit, if only Wedge had played him more often.

If there is an influx of talent into the team, I suspect it will be via trade. More pitching out. The last few trades characterized by pitching out, players in such as Doug Fister out Wells and Furbush in, Steve Delabar out Eric Thames in do not give you great confidence in the leverage in a potential deal, I forgot Pineda for big Jesus Montero….I don’t think the deal is made unless its Felix or Vargas+.

Anyway good old Art does not like the fence thing as the only thing to make the team better for next year and rips the unmentionable management.

I don’t think Baker, Thiel understand the improvement that will come from the existing group next year, but Cameron does and I am here to tell you, dumpster diving for fringe adds is not what will get the team better in any significant way.

So get ready for 1,000s of words about buying free agent talent. Get ready for statements about how how building a team on draftees doesn’t work. That the Ms built a team that mostly had a six year run, before absolute wretches of executives dumped a bunch of hall of fame players is to suggest that signing a bunch of over priced second and third tier free agents mis-evaluated by front office rejects as existed under Bill Bavasi.

http://mariners.sportspressnw.com/2012/10/thiel-fixing-fences-is-lame-patch-for-mariners/

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2012 at 9:01 pm by terrybenish and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.