Frozen in time
Today in the Seattle Times, Geoff Baker has a helpful overview of the team’s ownership structure. It includes a list of the 17 participants in the ownership group and identifies those who sit on the board of directors (not completely clear is whether the board has any members without an ownership stake, or “independent directors” in corporate parlance, but from what’s been revealed in the past I don’t believe so).
Howard Lincoln is of course the most visible of these on a regular basis, since he acts as the team CEO as well, and as you probably know already, Hiroshi Yamauchi is (via Nintendo) the controlling shareholder. They are both significant people to be aware of in understanding team decisions – witness the Johjima extension a few years ago, or the noises already being made about Ichiro’s next contract. But perhaps the more important aspect this article gets across is just how fundamentally corporate this ownership group is. It’s embedded in their decisionmaking, how they present themselves publicly, the affiliations and even the personalities of the individual members.
What that means is that the team is inevitably going to be run using business principles and priorities, more than to gratify personal ambitions. We can argue about whether individual or corporate team ownership is a better model for operating a baseball franchise, but at any rate these characteristics aren’t going to change significantly unless the team is sold to a different person or group. Even if they had the resources, these owners probably would never spend like the Steinbrenners, but the team is also somewhat protected from the personal vagaries of things like a really messy divorce. This is also part of what leads to awkward expressions suggesting the team values being competitive (but profitable) over winning championships.
One other point to take from the article is that the ownership group has been remarkably stable. Death has produced the same amount of turnover within the group as has the sale of individual shares. And in describing who the owners are, it’s striking how often words like “former” get used. Even Yamauchi and the other Nintendo guys are largely retired or have emeritus roles at the company (although the way Japanese companies operate, they have much more influence than, say, Chris Larson has over the Microsoft of today). Some of the owners have gone on to second acts in business, particularly those in the wireless industry, whose institutions have morphed and evolved more frequently in the years since. But overall, it’s not just that the group looks like a Microsoft/Nintendo/Boeing consortium; considering that it was formed in response to calls for local business leaders to save the team from moving out of town, that’s to be expected. In reality, it’s a Microsoft/Nintendo/Boeing consortium that’s stuck in the early 1990s (remember McCaw Cellular?).
So if you wonder why the team takes detours from its rebuilding process to indulge in things like a Griffey farewell tour, it’s not just because the fans demand it, or that he has a great relationship with Chuck Armstrong. To a significant extent, the direction in which these owners have been taking the team is still defined by the times and the environment in which they bought it. I’m not saying that they’ve completely failed to adapt; payrolls did go up as the team brought in greater revenues from Safeco Field, and bringing in Zduriencik was somewhat of a shift from the past. But to really restore the Mariners as a competitive franchise, additional strides forward are required. The ownership group has been in place for nearly two decades; it’s time that they figure out how to move everyone beyond the glories of the first decade, and support further changes if they want the team to be relevant in their third decade.
Fascinating profile. Although Mariner leadership screwed up big-time when they hired Bavasi, on the whole looking at 2012 and beyond I think we fans are better off with the current ownership than many of the alternatives. I still think Zduriencik was a good hire, and the relatively placid, slow-moving nature of Mariner ownership is conducive to patiently letting his results bear fruit. As opposed to fast-moving owners who might want to continually blow up the previous GM’s program. Some fast-moving owners have a pretty good handle on what they want to do, and can put the team on track for a championship, but even then there are often rough spots and antagonisms along the way (Mark Cuban, George Steinbrenner).
Good post. For a long time it has seemed to me that this organization is run largely by consensus. There are pros and cons to that. While there is more stability than with some teams (Orioles, Dodgers, Astros, etc.), one effect is that decision making takes more time than with other teams and we take fewer risks. It also means that once a plan is in place the M’s tend to stick with it whether it continues to make sense or not. So if they plan to spend some money on free agents, they do it (Carlos Delgado rebuffed us so we signed Sexson, Kuroda turned us down so we signed Silva, Baltimore demanded too much for Bedard but the plan was to acquire another starter so the M’s increased the offer, etc.). While Zduriencik seems to have a good handle on things, before we can be confident that things are truly headed in the right direction I think we’ll need to see what happens with Ichiro—if they extend him, it means decisions are not being made by the GM, for better or (more likely) for worse.
Change a few words here and there and you have very accurately described the Government Agency where I currently work. This makes me sad – on two fronts, simultaneously.
The Johjima extension gets overly attacked in some quarters, but looking back over the years he was one of the best catchers this organization ever had (solid bat and great arm, and at least he could catch the ball).
Johjima had a couple of bad months, and was run out of town in favor of…. Rob Johnson.
I think we know how that turned out.
It looks to me that the Johjima extension gets too much flak. Especially considering the terrible FA signings over the years.
re Johjima – I don’t think that Joh just had ‘a couple of bad months’ and was run out of town. As I recall, a number of pitchers were frustrated by his refusal/inability to frame pitches, which may have led to his decision to forgo the remainder of his contract and go back to Japan. This came to mind again just last week when I was reading Mike Fast’s study on catcher framing at BP. His chart shows Joh with 33 runs allowed due to pitch framing over 19588 called pitches (conversely, leader Jose Molina saved 73 runs in 800 fewer called pitches). At the time I thought the pitchers were full of it, but now I think they may have had something there. Fast’s research probably needs to be refined, but there may have been more to Johjima’s demise than we thought at the time.
Not that I think Rob Johnson was the answer either…
After reading Baker’s piece I wondered how many, if asked why they own the team, would say, “To win a World Series”? I appreciate that we have the team around, of course, but these guys seem like a totally dispassionate bunch.
One of the reasons he could catch the ball was his “Pudge” theory of catching. Only call the pitches and in the location where the catcher is made to look good. Johnson knew which pitches to call and where, he just couldn’t get his mitt in the right place. Sigh….
In some ways this isn’t surprising given that a Japanese company spearheads the group.
As mentioned before, every team in Japan is owned by a company, ex:
– Tokyo Yomiuri Giants (Yomiuri Newspaper)
– Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters (Nippon Ham)
– Fukuoka Softbank Hawks (Softbank Corp.)
– Chiba Lotte Marines (Lotte Co.)
– Saitama Seibu Lions (Seibu Department Stores)
and the list goes on.
All teams are used to some extent to promote the owning company.
That I think adds to the discussion of whether the ownership is running the team primarily to make money or to win (although the two are not necessarily exclusive).
As for the possibility the consortium has been slow to adapt, it is something that I’ve thought about outside of sports. Diversity is good in many ways, but in coming to a consensus I believe it may become a hindrance. This is because diversity can lead to differences of opinion – which inherently in and of itself isn’t bad, but unless the people can cut through said differences, change is slow to occur (if at all). Perhaps the consortium of people have diverse views on how to run the team, and cannot necessarily come to an agreement to run the team, and thus had led to what we had with Bavasi and the subsequent fixing by hiring Z.
Every time the assertions pop up about ‘wanting to win’ or ‘wanting to make money more than winning’, I wonder what constitutes ‘winning’ in the minds of fans. Someday I’d like to see a poll asking people to select their minimum definition for ‘winning’:
— literally winning 82 games+/year on a regular basis
— winning 90 games two or three times in a decade
— winning a division
— winning a pennant
— winning a World Series.
Interesting article here by Malcolm Gladwell on the economics of the ownership of the “Brooklyn Nets.” On the one hand, the M’s ownership hasn’t pulled any of this kind of crap; on the other, I wouldn’t mind an owner whose economic interests were exactly aligned with needing a lot of superstars with national reputations on the team.
Given the choice of making $20M and finishing 82-80 or losing $20M and getting to the World Series, it’s a no-brainer to get to the World Series. Honestly I’m not sure all of the M’s ownership feels that way.
Winning is sort of relative — you have constraints of payroll, division, and current talent base. Winning 82+ every year would be a disaster for the Red Sox or Yankees. Trying to win 82 this year would be the wrong goal for the Mariners.
Given the playoffs are essentially a crap shoot, I’d say winning boils down to exactly two things:
1) Maximizing the number of seasons in which the team is a serious playoff contender.
2) In the seasons in which the team is a contender, being willing to make moves including adding payroll to increase the chance of winning “this year”
The playoffs are far from a crap shoot. Just because you make the playoffs doesn’t necessarily mean you have any legitimate chance at advancing.
There are good playoff teams and mediocre ones. Look at the Twins. Forgetting this year, the Twins are perennial postseason attendees and almost invariably get beaten in the first round. And guess what, the fans know it and expect it, year after year. The Twins will sneak into the postseason and get swept by the Yankees.
Some teams just do not operate on the same level. Teams like the Yankees and Red Sox are basically playing in another dimension from everyone else.
But you know what, I’d rather have the M’s play competitive baseball and make it to the postseason often, rather than try to make one big season and then have ten years of suck.
See, for me it’s not necessarily just a matter of winning the World Series.
In an ideal world, I would want a team that that would be sustainable in competing for World Series each year. It doesn’t have to be winning all the time like the Yankees because only the Yankees can do that and they have resources most teams would dream of having (depending on who’s at the helm, but that’s another story). But if I could feel like year in and year out that my team had a chance to win it all, isn’t that all one could ask?
Compare that to teams that have sold it all to win a WS. Florida for instance has won 2 WS, but sold off thereafter and struggle to pull in fans.
Now given, Florida has at least won a WS while the M’s haven’t even gotten there. But to have to sit and wait several years before your team comes together to compete again in a boom-bust cycle is tough for fans. If a team could somehow find a way to be playoff competitive each year, it would draw fans and build a base of success.
Perhaps a team to look at would have been the Braves of the late 90’s-early 00’s. Yes, the Braves only won one WS in that time, but they won the division 11 straight years, and went to the WS 3 of those 11.
History has shown that at times winning it all is a crap shoot. Teams win that had no business of winning. All you can do is build a good team, get them to the playoffs and hope things fall your way. To have a record of sustainable success getting to the playoffs like the Braves is all that one could really ask of a team.
Pretty easy to say that when it’s not your $20MM….
The thing with making or losing money over the course of a single season is that it shouldn’t be looked at in isolation. Several well-established phenomena come into play, and the owners should be well aware of them. One is that the revenue boost a team typically gets from winning mostly plays out in the seasons after the winning starts to happen. The Mariners are currently draining the final dregs from the reservoir of fan support they built up in 2001.
Another matter is that annual profit and loss is not really the place to look for your return on investment as a franchise owner. The money gets made primarily in appreciated value when you sell, plus some incidental tax benefits from writing off costs during your ownership. The fact that the Mariners’ ownership group has in the past supplied additional capital to cover losses, then allowed surpluses to be reinvested in the team once it turned profitable, shows that they understand this well enough.
Some fast-moving owners have a pretty good handle on what they want to do, and can put the team on track for a championship, but even then there are often rough spots and antagonisms along the way (Mark Cuban, George Steinbrenner)
And yet the Yankees and the Mavericks both have better records of success than the Mariners do.
The problem is that while you can make the case that Zduriencik is better than Bavasi, “better than a horrible GM” is not the same as “good enough to win in a division with Jon Daniels and a Texas team that is now backed with plenty of cash and attendance, the Angels outspending you by 30 million, and Billy Beane able to scrap to 75-85 wins with mediocre talent and good GM skills without much budget”.
So ownership has more to do here then just go “let’s forget about contending for a few years while the kids get good”. It’s not like the competition’s going to stand still.
The last statement is true, but not the first one. Some playoff teams have better chances than others, but in a 7-game series anything can (and has) happened due to the large chance element — in other words, a crap shoot.
Yes, let’s take a look. World Series champions in 1987 and 1991. In 1987 they won a whopping 85 games in the regular season.
And how many of us expected the Giants to win last year? Or the Cardinals in 2006, with their 83 wins?
The important thing about the playoffs is getting there. Once there, yeah it’s great to have the stronger team with a better chance of winning, but you can ask fans of the 2001 Mariners how far an uber-strong roster gets you.
It’s a great outcome to aim for, but incredibly hard to achieve, even the Yankees have not had such a run of consistent success for decades. I still don’t know how the Braves did it, that was one of the most remarkable front-office performances in history.
More realistic I think for the Mariners to aim for is the classic cycle of build-contend-win(hopefully)-rebuild. By this I don’t mean the extreme carpetbagging model of the Marlins, where they bought a championship and then immediately tore it down. But the M’s don’t have to be continually selling off their superstars the way the A’s do either. They can hang on to, for several years at least, the Juniors, Felixes and Ichiros, and with a few years of wise drafts and trades have a team that can contend for several years before having to rebuild. That’s the way it should work; it hasn’t worked out that way yet.
More realistic I think for the Mariners to aim for is the classic cycle of build-contend-win(hopefully)-rebuild. By this I don’t mean the extreme carpetbagging model of the Marlins, where they bought a championship and then immediately tore it down. But the M’s don’t have to be continually selling off their superstars the way the A’s do either. They can hang on to, for several years at least, the Juniors, Felixes and Ichiros, and with a few years of wise drafts and trades have a team that can contend for several years before having to rebuild. That’s the way it should work; it hasn’t worked out that way yet.
Bunk.
Go look at St. Louis. They’ve never gone into freefall the way the M’s have, and they’re not the Yankees: they’ve never been a high payroll team. Even the last couple of years, which were a little off, they’ve won 86 and now 88-90 games.
There is no reason this team shouldn’t contend year-in, year-out with superior field management, good talent assessment, reasonable financial resources (if not the Yankees), and overall organizational excellence. The fact that they aren’t, and aren’t even close to this in 2011, after three seasons under a GM who’s had plenty of time and every opportunity to turn over the roster and bring in “his own guys”, tells me they don’t have these elements in place yet. At some point soon, it’s going to be pencils down, time’s up.
eponymous coward, I know we’ve butted heads about this, but I do not believe that 3 years is enough to rate Z’s performance given where we were. Yes, we know that almost all of Bavasi’s players are gone, and the players in the farm system are Z’s, but you cannot expect those players who were drafted in years after Ackley to be up the same time as him. You have to give time for those players to come up through the system as not every player is an Ackley, or Strasburg or Posey. We can’t just snap our fingers and magically have them be major-league ready.
And he couldn’t go out and buy the players he needs to either given he was tied up with other obligations which are finally going to expire next year.
If we were to look at those same Braves organization that MKT said whose success would be hard to achieve – their downturn started in 2006, and they got back to the playoffs in 2010. And they weren’t as bare as we were.
So if it took the vaunted Braves 4 years of struggling before getting back to the playoffs, how can you expect the M’s to turn it around in less time?
I think I’d be a bit more charitable if there weren’t obvious unforced errors, like bringing Griffey back in 2010, or the fact that going from Wakamatsu to Wedge doesn’t strike me as any sort of real improvement in the organization- Wedge isn’t a good manager, he’s a Generic Cliche Manager from Central Casting, neither good nor horrible (though the focus on “aggressiveness” is irritating), and nothing I’ve seen of him makes me confident we’ve got the second coming of Earl Weaver. And let’s not forget a big reason for that firing is a sulky Chone Figgins, who is Zduriencik’s signing- and while, yes, there was a reasonable case for the signing at the time, he’s still a financial millstone on the roster now.
Also, as an exercise, go through the careers of GMs, from Branch Rickey to Billy Beane, and find me one who lost 90+ three years in a row early in his career and then went on to win a lot of pennants. I dare say you won’t find a lot of them (Billy Beane’s count will STILL be at zero 90 loss years, even after this year). Jack’s up to two bad years in a row. I tend to think if 2012 is another crappy year, the odds of him actually being as good as his believers think are very slim. At some point, superior process either leads to superior results… or you need to rethink your assumption that you have superior process.
The problem is that because the consortium that owns the M’s is so secret, we don’t absolutely know for instance who was behind the decision to bring Griffey back. If it was the consortium, then perhaps it goes back to the article itself and their inability to adapt, or difference in goals (feelings vs. winning – though they again don’t have to be mutually exclusive). If it was Z, then the blame is solely on him, no questions asked.
Looking back at Figgins, if the reasoning at the time we acquired him made sense, I don’t believe we can then go back in hindsight and say that it was a terrible signing. You can only go with the information you have at the time. And if the information that they have, and the information we have as fans say it was reasonable, then we chalk it up to unfortunate circumstances.
I don’t have the time right now to go back through GM’s to see if anyone has had these problems (accounting end-of-month), but I would also challenge to see how the team has changed since Z has taken over and where everyone has progressed since then. The fact that we’ve had to trade for or acquire talent via the draft for the minors means that we need time for them to develop into major-league ready players.
I think the final line between us is what you define as a “crappy year”. It’s no secret that you believe the M’s should contend for the AL West in year 4 (2012). It’s my belief that if the M’s can be around 0.500 with more improvements/solidification of our younger talent, we would be in position to break out in 2013 when we can use money to fill in holes.
I’ll make this clear – I’m not one of those people who believes in revised 5-year plans. I do expect results from the management, just on a slightly longer timetable than you (1 year). And this timeline I hammer now, I’ve believed in since we hired Z. If we aren’t close to where I think we need to be by 2013, then Z does have some explaining to do (to me at least).
I’ll put it this way. Dave said (unfortunately, the link to his post is buried in the archives somewhere) at the beginning of the year that the goals for this year for the Mariners should be:
– to develop young talent, and
– be respectable while doing it, not stumbling to a bad season.
They’ve succeeded at one, and failed pretty badly at the other.
Thus I can’t consider the 2011 season a success and proof that Zduriencik’s tenure at GM the answer for the Mariners as a whole being on a strong path to future success. Just being better at Bavasi at putting together a productive farm system and making trades is a necessary condition for the Mariners to achieve excellence, but it is not sufficient for it- other aspects of the organization have to come together, too, and it’s not like Texas, Oakland and LA are going to stand still for us while we catch up. They can’t waste time on players who clearly aren’t ready like Peguero just because the managers likes aggressive hitters with monster power (and ignores how badly they judge the strike zone). They can’t both things like Griffey (and this circles back to the point Mike was making: it’s not just all about the GM). It’s getting rather old to see whatever veteran Zduriencik trades for or signs have a poor season, and seeing it excused as “well, the process was right”- as if results that ensue from a process are irrelevant, instead of going “hmm, maybe we need to figure out why our results don’t match what our methods say they should”.
So, essentially, he’s running out of mulligans. Bavasi’s junk is all off the roster now. It’s time to put a team that makes a strong push forward in 2012. If that doesn’t happen, and it’s September 2012 and we’re below .500 again, in last place, with another set of crappy veterans having been discarded or banished to the bench again, then we will have failed in developing the team AND being watchable, again. Good GMs and good organizations have to be able to walk AND chew gum at the same time (and I might note that the Braves posted ONE 90 loss season, bookended by .500ish years, so it’s not like they fell into a crevasse like the M’s have since 2003).
Is this the post you were looking for? Seems like a good time to review Dave’s five markers on how to evaluate the success of the season:
Not looking good. There are some mitigating circumstances with the various injuries, but you can’t call this a success. The platoon issues aren’t necessarily a big issue at the moment, but the “swinging through hittable fastballs” is.
Doing just fine. His glovework has been better than anybody had a right to expect, given his limited experience at the position. It doesn’t make the move-him-to-the-outfield notions people come up with less annoying, but at least now the only rationale to support those is coping with successes/failures elsewhere on the roster (Seager, Gutierrez), rather than the idea that Ackley might not be able to handle second.
I would give this one a pass. It hasn’t really developed all that much to this point, but he’s had an excellent rookie season anyway, and lefties haven’t exploited his limited repertoire as much as was feared. This is still something that needs to be worked on, of course, and the team knows it.
Fail. They weren’t able to, or if you want to say that they did, seeing as how he did end up playing eventually, then he didn’t produce like a healthy Franklin Gutierrez should. You really have to hope that getting a full offseason (at least, once he can resume activities after the oblique) and spring training of preparation is what’s needed to get him to full strength.
Sort of. I might say they got as far as build with, but not around, if that distinction makes sense. Wilhelmsen is turning out nicely, and Kelley did eventually return. Lueke had a bit rougher time but is still worth keeping in the picture. Cortes hasn’t made any progress, though. It’s enough that they shouldn’t actively look for anything fancier than the next David Pauley, but they can’t really consider it a major strength at this point.
That’s close to it. I might note:
Less than 70 wins is probably a minor disaster.
And we’re going to be at 67 or 68 pending the outcome of last night’s game, so… yeah. Minor disaster, ho!
So, all told, in good conscience, I can’t evaluate the 2011 season as a success. The Mariners needed to develop kids without being a bad team. They couldn’t do it, and now they’re looking at Ichiro’s walk year staring them in the face (with the even worse position of him coming off of a down year, so committing to a contract extension now is quite possibly locking them into Chone Figgins Mk II.)
Oh, and to add onto my point about the organization not being saved by Zduriencik not being as clueless as Bill Bavasi: starting at DH for your Seattle Mariners in Game 162? Adam freakin’ Kennedy, he of the 35 years of age and .505 second half OPS.