Peabody: Life, Friends Baseball

Art Thiel, the doyenne of Puget Sound Sportswriters/columnists/personalities does a question and answer on why the Mariners spilled all over themselves in opposing Chris Hansen’s new arena for the NBA/NHL. He chats with Howard Lincoln and their attorney Bart Waldman which produced 3,414 words that can be reduced to the following:

1. We were misunderstood. Translated, we tried to make Hansen look bad and jam him up in the process, but it backfired, the fans were idiots if they did not get this.

2. Huge traffic problems, waves hands, cites their understanding of numbers, blah blah and blah. Translated, bunkum, hokum and bologna.

3. It’s a bad site, we will continue to fight. Translated, Lincoln is hard over on this and will not back off no matter what the damage to the Mariners might be in fan backlash. Translated, the fans are idiots.

4. We met with Chris Hansen three times and chatted. Translated, he’s dumb.

5. New cable deal might be like pie in the sky. Translated, please let it not be so.

Then at the end Thiel asks him if the team is for sale, to which Lincoln says balderdash or some other Dickensian jabberwocky.

I guess this is newsworthy, if a little stale. The next five or six months might be the thing to put this in the proper context.

If this is to signal a hard push by the Mariners to fight this some more will be in our face and this PR piece would be to signal fans why they’re fighting. Or if they’re really done fighting it was to signal fans that they were done fighting and it was the fan’s fault for being stupid that caused the horrific PR event for the Mariners.

If I had an audience with the Mariners and since as Howard repeats they’re a baseball club, it might have been appropriate to ask him some baseball questions, since nobody has had access to him to ask him baseball questions since 2001.

I might have led off with a very basic question with some follow ups:

1. If the Mariners are solely a baseball club, how is it that you personally are not accountable for a decade of horrific baseball?

2. Under your watch the team has released or traded hall of fame players, ran off a hall of fame manager, refused to sign tier one free agents and signed a fool of a GM and then hired a good one and tied his hands behind his back and refused to stand behind him. How can you say you think of the Mariners as solely a baseball team in the face of this? Simple lies, or big lies?

3. In Thiel’s book about the 2001 Mariners you say that winning it all is not important and you liken the running of the franchise to that of a theme park. When did you change your mind to thinking the Mariners are solely a baseball club?

Sigh…

http://mariners.sportspressnw.com/2012/10/mariners-lincoln-waldman-on-opposing-arena/

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2012 at 9:22 am 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.