Mariners Morsels - aka "Free Adam Moore and Rich Poythress! (George Sherrill is FREE!)"

There have been some interesting discussions around the blogs lately about how utterly bad this team has been to watch. I think it's sort of comical, really. It's brought up something, though, that has to be mentioned. I present three lessons.

Lesson #1
In 2004, a lot of us were clamoring for the departure of Bob Melvin. While the team was terrible, and really, 2004 was the start of this mess, we'd hoped the Mariners would can his butt and hire a better manager. Well, he did get fired, and certainly few of us thought Mike Hargrove could be worse. Whoops. Fast-forward to 2006, where all of us had grown tired of Hargrove, and were clamoring for him to be fired (and we practically threw a party when Churchill and others were hearing reports that he was about to be canned). Surely anyone -- anyone -- would be better than him. So, when Hargrove left on his own terms in 2007, it was sort of bittersweet.

And then we got McLaren. Now, I'm not saying that the current M's woes are his responsibility -- he's not the one up at the plate, serving meatballs and not making the fielding plays. But he's not entirely innocent either.

Lesson #2
In 2006, a lot of us were glad to see Gil Meche and Joel Pinero leave. Then, in 2007, their replacements -- Jeff Weaver & Horacio Ramirez were comically worse. Surely as bad as they were, things had to improve.

Can you believe that Jarrod Washburn and Miguel Batista have been worse, so far, than Weaver & Ramirez?

Lesson #3
A lot of people complained about Pat Gillick destroying the farm system by sacrificing draft picks to compensate for signing veteran non-superstar free agents. And at the same time, for "standing Pat" at the trade deadline (i.e. holding onto other prospects -- that in the end didn't pan out for the M's). So they were glad to see him go, and
Bavasi brought in to salvage the farm system. However, I'd argue that in spite of helping build the farm system by actually using the draft again, Bavasi has been a worse GM than Gillick.

So, if Bavasi is fired -- it can't get worse, right?

Hmmmm...

Labels: bad decisions, bad luck, lessons