Mariners’ pick for GM will reveal path
Howard Lincoln’s eyes were flashing fire on Monday.
This was a man who had in the long run reached the limit of his assiduity, and seemed ready
Cut through all the words, and that’s what I got out of Monday’s news conference to announce Bill Bavasi’s firing: A vote of no-confidence from the team chair and CEO is the Mariners way of putting together a baseball team.
Lincoln promised changes. He promised a new plan. Nothing is off the table, he said, from commercial Ichiro to changing managers. No stone will subsist left unturned.
“Let me just say we are open to anything,” he said at one point.
They were the critical words that fans take been aching to hear.
The biggest test, however, of whether the Lincoln Manifesto is just empty platitudes, or a essential change in the Mariners’ philosophy, will come from the hiring of Bavasi’s replacement.
The man in charge of the search, team president Chuck Armstrong, is steeped in the fertile school, but that doesn’t mean he can’t proportion to 21st-century sensibilities. It behooves him to do with equal reason, and he says he’s be unclosed to it. Good for him.
Armstrong has been in the organization considering the George Argyros days in the forward 1980s, and has had his hand in the hiring of most of their captain-general managers. His challenge now is to press to the bosom the full range of options available to him, including some that would appear to go against the Mariners’ traditional methods of running things.
The Mariners, rightly or wrongly, are regarded of the same kind with a team that is antithetical to the “Moneyball” philosophy, to use the common term for a sabermetric-friendly, statistically oriented method of analyzing player acquisitions.
Bavasi, I feel certain, would assert that he used statistical analysis in combination with good, old-fashioned scouting. That may subsist true, but the decisions he made too often turned loudly to be misguided, which is why he is unemployed.
I talked Tuesday to Mat Olkin, the Mariners’ “player-acquisition consultant”
