Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 344: The Robinson Cano Signing and Seattle’s Dysfunctional Front Office

Episode Date: December 9, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss the Robinson Cano signing and the weekend’s big story about the Mariners’ front office.

We are two mariners, a ship's old survivors, in this belly of a whale. Its ribs are ceiling beams, its guts are carpeting, I guess we have some time to kill. Good morning and welcome to episode 344 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from BaseballPerspectives.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. Ben, how are you doing? Good. It's snowing. Is it snowing there? It's not, but it's the coldest it's ever been in my life in California. How cold? Highs in the mid-40s today.

It's a nice life. I mean, look, I know, but also highs in the mid-40s is not... No, that's pretty cold. That's pretty cold. You'll have many days this winter that get higher than the mid-40s. Yeah. Last week it was like the 60s. Yeah. Alright, so

obviously we're going to talk about the Mariners. The two biggest stories in baseball by far, I would say, are the Mariners. One is that they signed the biggest free agent on the market this year, and in a lot of ways even though there was enough build-up that it wasn't a momentary shock, you know, it's basically a bit of a shock, right?

Yeah, it was. Actually, someone in our Facebook group reminded me of the episode where we handicapped Kano's suitors. That's right. So I went back and I listened to part of that. It was episode 269. So you had a 51% probability that Cano would stay with the Yankees. I had 42%. And then if you'll recall, I had a ridiculously long tail of 1%.

Both of us gave the Mariners a 1% chance to San Cano. Interesting. Wow. So we called it. Yeah, well, and the other time, we also talked around the same time about Jack Z. I'm going to say Jack Z, keeping a podcast policy going. We talked about Jack Z when he got a extension, or I guess rather his extension from nine months earlier was made public. So we knew

he had an extension for 2014 and we're somewhat surprised by that. And that's relevant because it turns out that Jack Z is running the world's worst organization, apparently. Apparently. Can we talk about Jay-Z for a second? Just because we talked about him and I want to talk about the way that he has been portrayed over the last few days. Do you think the Z in Jay-Z stands for Zerenze? It might. So we talked about Jay-Z and whether he's going to revolutionize being a baseball agent or just be another baseball agent.

So I thought it was interesting. Very interesting. Very interesting, and kind of I thought it was going to be a bigger story. And then I think it got lost in the actual signing of Canuck. But for a while there, it was shaping up to be really interesting that it was being portrayed as if Jay-Z had ruined the negotiations. He had blown it. They had flown out to Seattle. ruined the negotiations. He had blown it. They had flown out to Seattle. They had met with the people who were the subject of the article that we're going to be talking about in a little bit.

And they had all agreed on a ballpark for the contract. And then all of a sudden, Jay-Z wanted more. And everyone was so upset. Howard Lincoln was enraged. and that was it, and it was off, and that was reported in the Daily News. And so for a while there, it was like, oh, you know, Jay-Z is a rookie agent, and he blew it by making this mistake, asking for more money, of all things. And then I thought even after it was then back on, like as soon as we started buzzing about that, we heard that it was back on and then it became an official thing that happened. But it's kind of interesting a couple of the things that have been written even after that. Like Jason – well, Jerry Krasnick did an article and he – Jerry Krasnick, by the way, was a Twitter – a fake Twitter account. Yes, that's right. He's a fake rumor.

Right, right. Yeah, so Jerry Krasnick said he said there's an industry perception now that Jay-Z was just a figurehead for the Kano management team. So he went from being the guy who was blowing it to— That's so unfair. Once he's the guy who's blowing it before the contract is signed, then the contract is signed, and he's just a figurehead. And then there's this quote from an agent, so obviously a rival here, says, if the only priority is to get paid, there's always a sucker.

And Seattle was the sucker. For everybody to say this is an A plus for Jay-Z, I just don't buy it. That would have been getting New York to pay $240 million. Getting Seattle to pay $240 million wasn't some masterstroke. All right. getting Seattle to pay 240 million wasn't some masterstroke. All right. That's actually, first of all, what you're describing is like straight up Salem witch trial stuff, right?

Pretty much. So I think that last point is actually pretty interesting. And I thought about writing about this in the transaction analysis, but it wasn't really that relevant. But we had that whole show about whether Jay-Z was going to revolutionize agent work or just be an agent. And the answer seems to be that he was just an agent in this case. Seattle is... There's nothing Jay-Z-ish about it. Seattle is a terrible place for Robinson Cano's brand. My guess is that Boris could

have gotten Seattle to pay exactly as much as Jay-Z, and Jay-Z got him to pay as much as Boris would have done. The results turned out to be the same. Basically, what ended up happening is that Jay-Z showed how easy it is to be an agent, more or less, or whatever it says. But this is kind of odd. And in a way, it's almost like it made me think that instead of Robinson Cano benefiting from having Jay-Z as his agent, it really seems that Jay-Z has benefited from Robinson Cano being his client, that this actually benefited him in a big way. It gave him credibility. It turns him in a big way. It gave him credibility.

It turns him into a big sports star. But it didn't really do anything for Cano. I imagine that any agent more or less could have gotten Seattle. I mean, Seattle wanted to do this, right? And the fact that the idea that Boris might have, or a better agent, might have been a little bit more patient and might have strung this out a little bit longer until there was a market. I mean, one of the things that Boris is so good at is creating markets where you don't even think there are markets. I mean, the mystery team, for all the joke that it is, it seems to be part of a pretty effective strategy of getting two teams to bid when only one team seems to want to bid.

And in this case, if you really think that it's conceivable that in January the Yankees might have paid, or even in late December the Yankees might have paid, and that maybe Jay-Z shouldn't have taken, or Robinson Cano I should say, shouldn't have taken the first big offer that he had, then maybe that's right. I think that's actually not unreasonable. I don't think there's enough, there's certainly not enough evidence to say that we have a read on what Jay-Z's style as an agent is or anything like that, and he got the guy paid.

But yeah, that seems like a fair reading of it perhaps yeah i have a problem with that reading of it uh no i i mean i i don't know it it seems like uh sort of a some kind of petty tone to it well it's petty it's petty partly because of you know that like you just get this sense that no matter what happened it was going to be turned on jay-z that there was a feeling that people didn't want jay-z to be successful i was i heard uh uh on friday morning as i was driving back from dropping my daughter off i heard uh Mike Kruko on KNBR doing his regular baseball talk with their morning show

and he was going on about how Jay-Z, from what he had read, Jay-Z had really messed up and he actually ends his segment by going, as far as I can tell, Jay-Z peed the bed here and immediately after that the host of the show goes, so I'm

just seeing now a tweet from John Heyman. It was pretty awesome. Yeah. And there's just a lot of sketchy quotes. an anonymous front office official who said, you know, the fact that Cano was traveling around with Jay-Z makes you wonder whether he wants to be a rap star or a baseball player, which is just so crazy. Craziest thing, yeah. As you said, if he was traveling around with Jay-Z in April, that would make you wonder whether he wanted to be a rap star or a baseball player. But in December, not so much.

So, yeah, there's a lot of that. And then there's also Jason Stark did a winter meetings preview. And in that one, he's talking about whether Shinsu Chu will sign. And he's saying there's one agency or one industry perspective that after Ellsbury signed early, Boris is going to wait a while on Chu. And then to quote, but there's another group that believes Boris is trying to show his newest Darth Vader rival, Jay-Z, and the rest of the industry how decisive he could be. So he's going to accept an offer for Chu to show Jay-Z that he can be decisive.

Yeah. So he's just whatever you want him to be, I guess. When you're writing an article, he's this figurehead or he is a guy who's influencing the other super agents or he's the guy who's screwing up the negotiations or he's the guy who's bringing them home. It's just sort of changes from minute to minute yeah so do you uh do you think that jay-z will have uh more clients by say this time next month uh is this going to be like uh yeah i mean our our players going to start jumping from their agents to him now that he's got this momentum? Sure, I could see that happening.

I mean, players are always switching around, so inevitably some of them will go to him if he wants them. Yeah, I mean, though, like in the next month. I mean, like Cano wasn't just switching around. Cano went to Jay-Z, right? He left his guy not because he was unhappy with Boris, but because he went to Jay-Z. So I He left his guy, not because he was unhappy with Boris, but because he went to Jay-Z. So I'm wondering if you think, and that's how it's been with all of his clients. They'd go to Jay-Z because that's the move they're making. So do you think that Puig goes to Jay-Z, for instance, or does Bryce Harper go to Jay-Z? I don't think so. I don't know. I'd be surprised if they were a huge exodus.

I mean, doesn't it seem like Mike Trout right now is like badly under-marketed nationally? Yeah, sort of. Yeah. I don't even wonder if he wants to be a rap star. All right. So I guess we talked about Canoe. Did we talk about Canoe? What do you think of the deal?

It's really hard to say. As you were writing your reaction, I said to you that I don't know whether anyone knows what to make of a decade-long contract. of a decade-long contract. And, you know, I thought you liked the deal and you made a pretty good case, I think. You know, when I read what you wrote, I said, yeah, that makes sense to me. And then, you know, you read three other articles that talk about how it's just so irresponsible

and why would they do this and they're not even contending, you know. But I think he, I don't know, I wrote in my annual comment for him that if you have to dip into the long-term contract market, then he seems like a decent guy to do that with. or MVP level player and he hasn't shown any sign of decline and he's been extremely durable and he does more than one thing well so he's not a bad long-term bet and the Mariners had you know really almost no long-term commitments aside from Felix so you know clearly they can afford it and clearly he's a really good player. And you can kind of imagine it coming together. And a lot of the young players they have maturing.

And he'll still be around and productive for a few years. So, I don't know. I don't hate it. I don't love it. It's really, I've become like a transaction nihilist or something. I don't even like, this is what, this is what, this is what Ben wrote after editing the piece. I had him read it and I was a little nervous or whatever.

And Ben goes, I don't think anyone understands long term contracts. You just have to say something that doesn't sound stupid and it doesn't. It's yeah. I don't know. Like, I think it was yeah i mean i don't know like i think it was as i was writing about carlos belch on this weekend and maybe it was just because it was the end of a crazy crazy week and i had written and edited so many things but there i found that i i had nothing to say about his contract, really. It was a bigger contract than I think you and I had predicted he would get and pretty much anyone had predicted would get. No one really called a three-year contract. But at this point, I think MLB Trade Rumors did a post on the amount of

money that's been spent this winter compared to last winter. And I think Chad Qualls, I think, is now the 56th free agent to sign. And last year there were, I think, 112. So we're exactly at the halfway point in terms of free agent signing. Now, probably a lot of the bigger names have signed, you know, disproportionately. So the per player numbers might come down as the winter goes on. But before quals, they had the amount of money that had been spent this winter as 85% of the amount that was spent last winter on twice as many players. So, you know, it seems like the market is just kind of crazy

right now. And if teams are, we don't really know what teams are spending per win. We won't really know for sure until the offseason is over, at least. And as Russell Carlton said to me as I was writing that, you know, if it ends up being close to $7 million per win, which seems not crazy at this point, then you can almost make a case for any contract making sense. Like Beltran projects to be a two-win player, a little bit better than a two-win player, and he's making $15 million and, you know, $7 million times 2..2 and the math sort of works out if you do it that way so i've i've almost especially if you especially if you start looking at all of these long-term deals as being um you know completely uh movable and reasonable with inflation i mean if it goes

from five and a half to seven million in one off season uh then you know who's to say what it'll be next offseason right and it depends you have to you have to figure out whether this is a bubble or not right right it it can't keep going up at that rate indefinitely i wouldn't think but have you seen what a what a dollar is worth in zimbabwe man no um but yeah so i've i've gotten to the point where when I write one of these transaction analysis articles, I'm just sort of writing about the player and just almost skipping over the money because I don't know what to say about the money. Yeah, you should actually go look up hyperinflation in Zimbabwe. It's one of the most interesting things. So I think one of the things that was interesting

to me about the Canoe deal, and I don't actually know if this is real because we don't know what teams think of themselves, but I don't personally think that the Mariners are in a great position for this year. I think they're in a pretty bad position for this year. But their window is going to be sometime in the next five years

or so. I mean, it has to be otherwise. They're awful. They're or so. I mean, it has to be. Otherwise, they're awful. They're the worst. So I'm interested in this idea that the new waste year is the first one, that it's not the last one or the last two or three, but that if you're kind of a rebuilding team or a team that has a window coming up, that you have to waste the first one

to make sure that you have the guy when you're ready because because imagine the mariners you know imagine the mariners were in position to be an 88 win team next year um you know 2015 and and then or say an 84 win team and then everybody goes all right now's the time to go get your canoe well there's no canoe out there and even if there is a canoe out there you know you know, you've got, you know, maybe you've got four other teams bidding for him and you're not necessarily going to get him and then you waste your window. And so it was fortuitous for me, because I doubt myself, that like an hour after the

Cano thing, and I kind of posited this idea about the Cano thing that the waste year is now the first year, Russell Carlton, you know, more or less said the same thing about Scott Feldman signing with Houston, where that's kind of a waste year. And I wondered whether there was something of that in getting Dexter Fowler now instead of waiting a year as well. And I feel like these sorts of moves are kind of happening throughout baseball to some degree. And we never know. We don't know if the Royals really thought that 2013 was their year or if they really thought 2014 was their year. And 2013 was kind of a half measure.

But if you look at 2014 as the year where they really thought things were going to come together and they were going to build a few pieces together for that, then the James Shields deal makes sense in that in that scenario so um i don't know i i wonder whether we're gonna see a lot and and the way that that's interesting is that if you start seeing um uh bad teams signing players because they think they're going to be good teams someday which you know they will be and they probably maybe should and the fewer players there are, the more incentive there is to do that the way that I'm describing. Well, now you've got even more pressure on the market.

You've got more teams bidding for players all the time, and it is that thing. What is that thing? A feedback loop or something. Yeah. So, do you think it's a product of all the extensions and consequently the fact that there aren't as many good free agents available from year to year, whereas in the past teams could have been confident

that when they were ready to contend, the guy they wanted would be out there, and now they can't count on that? I think it's a little bit of everything that we've talked about in the past. You know, with more teams seeing themselves as contenders, there's more buyers, and with more teams locking up free agents, there's fewer players, and also with more teams making the playoffs, there's a little bit more incentive if you're the Mariners,

and even if you think that you're going to be lucky to win 82 next year, well, if you can be lucky to win 82, you're in it. You're basically as good as the Orioles were a couple of years ago, and you might as well invest a little something. I mean, there's an incentive to really never throw away a season unless you're really, really bad. So all these things kind of make a lot more sense for the Mariners to get Cano now. I mean, the idea, what I saw a lot of was people saying, hey, Cano's a great player, the money's not so bad, but the Mariners aren't good enough yet. But what, when, I mean, you know, what are they supposed to do? Like literally wait until the night that they know that they're good before they sign Robinson Cano.

Like he's just going to be chilling. And they're not that far off. And it's not like they signed Cano for one year and $70 million. They signed him for 10 years. Now, granted, you want to be good when he's good and worth the money. But that's still five or six years. You really look at this as five or six years of a good move. These things always cross over around halfway. They have five or six years, which is their window in almost every way you look at it. That's

why I support it. Now, that's where it gets interesting with the David Price moves. Because there's like I get this feeling now that there's a sense that now that they've got Canoe, they have to get Price. Once you're in it, once you've decided you're a contender, you can't go halfway. And I think that it works the opposite because by signing Canoe, you basically create more or less a five-year window. And Price is a two-year window. And you're probably not going to be that good this year anyway, even with Price. Maybe you will be, but probably not.

And so to me, when you get a guy, when you trade a prospect like Walker for Price, you shorten the window. Unless you, I mean, maybe you sign price to an extension immediately after the deal or before the deal goes down. If they do that, sure. And if they get some sort of discount on it, then sure, that changes things completely. So if they do that, that's a different situation. But if they just sign price for two years and then he walked after two years, then I would say that that might actually make more sense before you sign Cano than after. And I certainly wouldn't do it after. Yeah.

All right. Well, then to transition to the next Mariners topic, how much less confident were you in your evaluation of that signing after you read Jeff Baker's article in the Seattle Times about the dysfunction in the Mariners front office? Because we're attributing actual motives to signing, you know, actual reasons considered, rational reasons. signing, Kano, actual reasons considered, rational reasons. Whereas if you read this article, you would conclude that the signing came down to Jack Z looking at Kano's RBI total and liking it, and Lincoln and Armstrong maybe not wanting to watch Nick Franklin because he's a young player. maybe not wanting to watch Nick Franklin because he's a young player. So that's the conclusion you could come to from this article, which is just a takedown of the sort that we don't normally see.

Because, I mean, often people in baseball don't often go on the record about other people in baseball while they're still in the game and in some cases still working for the same team. So this is, I don't know if it's unique or unprecedented, but it's not the sort of story that we see every day. It's not. Do you think that, and one of the reasons we see it in in this case is because jeff baker is a really good reporter he's i mean he's really good like i i think that i don't know that there are i don't know that there are six teams or or much more than that maybe there are six but i don't know that i don't know that there are more than a dozen teams say who could in any circumstances have this article written about them by a local guy because they don't have a good enough local guy.

And you do see, I mean, baseball reporting is a constant drumbeat of conflict. It's just you never see it put together. You might hear that this guy has a clash with this guy. I mean, you heard about DiPoto and Socia's tension, and you heard about Scott's service and Socia's tension, and you hear about, I'm trying to think of other ones that I can say about Socia, but I mean, you hear drips and drips here and there. Yeah, it's all one-day stories. It's all – because most sports writing is 260 words. And so this was a true enterprise piece that – basically whether I thought there was any point to baseball reporting because I had made a comment about how I would prefer to just hear about all transactions via team press release and not even have to read about rumors or have someone break them on Twitter first.

So clearly, yes, there is a place for reporters and for reporting, and this is a good example of that. This is not the sort of story that you would get via team press release. No, and one of the signs that this is really great reporting and that Baker completely owned the topic is that everybody is talking about this today. It might be the most read baseball article of the year. And nobody has followed it up with any additional information. It's not like anybody was sitting on two-thirds of this and just didn't want to run it or had it off the record.

It's like he had all of it and nobody else has any of it. Except for Tony Blantino going on mlb network radio earlier today and saying that that article is just the tip of the iceberg on what has gone on in seattle but uh yeah well and nobody has the rest of the iceberg like that's my point right so uh anyway um so what do we want to talk about here what did you ask me uh oh well i i asked whether whether it made you any less confident in your evaluation of the the kano signing or liking the kano signing i um i i i'm of too much i i don't know i've been going back and forth on this, on whether I think that this is a fairly common story that is just uncommonly told. of all men. That's one thing. It's all men for the most part in these front offices. And they are often sort of jock types. They're also almost by definition people who have succeeded in their field well beyond the typical person. And so they come into these front offices.

There's certainly going to be egos. There's going to be clashes. There's going to be into these front offices, there's certainly going to be egos, there's going to be clashes, there's going to be politicking, there's going to be power struggles. There's a ton of money at stake. And so I would imagine that there's probably a lot of conflict. And, you know, there's also a lot of, it feels to me that, I might be wrong about this, but it feels to me that baseball has a lot more job turnover, you know, guys moving from one team to another, than you would see in another industry, in another field. I might be wrong about that, but anytime somebody leaves a job, even if they leave on good terms, there's bad feelings usually in some degree. Almost everybody who's quoted in this piece was either fired or you know let go or seems like they were going to be let go um bob angle is not

quoted in this story but he's the one guy who left and left on his own and that's pretty telling because bob angle is like you know a total he's a he's a total legend in scouting and he's a great scout. And the Dodgers sold that move as them being aggressive to beef up their organization and like this was a huge part of their push to have long-term credibility. But if it turns out it's mainly just Engel wanted to get there that's pretty that's pretty telling and that's pretty damning um but anyway what i was saying is that it's hard to know whether this is really outside um the norm or not and it certainly doesn't seem good i mean even if this is the norm it still doesn't seem good i mean if it's just no if it's just no

if it's just people sniping at each other and dysfunctional and people you know terrified to uh you know to stand up to their boss then that's pretty pretty bad although it doesn't actually seem like anybody was terrified to stand up to their boss here except for in this story jack z uh yeah it's not clear whether he's afraid to stand up to to the owners or whether he's actually siding with them because he agrees with them um my favorite part in the whole piece was the um was the part where the owners wanted felix hernandez to pitch batting practice yeah and because we did an email show on that one time. Yes. Whether they should.

And it's so telling that what the average major league owner wants is the dumb email questions that we dumbly answer. Like not just dumb email questions because they're awesome email questions, but they're sort of intentionally dumb. Yeah, right. And that's what that's what an owner actually wants to do i think my favorite part was probably probably blengino preparing to jacksie's resume to make him sound like a dual threat

stat guy scout guy and coming in with all these spreadsheets and everything that if the story is accurate, he wouldn't have been able to explain even. That was interesting. Yeah, well, we had talked. One of the things that seemed so weird about the Seattle front office was they seemed to be the first team that had destatted itself, that had basically gone into a stat mode and then detoxed.

That just seemed so odd. It seemed kind of... Even if you just change the words you use, it seems sort of pointless to kick this discipline out of your front office. It's sort of interesting that it now seems like like we weren't sure if that's the case or if it was just that they changed their people, right? But it seems from this article, if you can, you know, as much as this article is the final word, it seems that they have, that they have kind of taken the stats out of the front office.

And it makes you wonder about the stats out of the front office. And it makes you wonder about the stats. You wonder if it's possible that, in fact, a lot of, if the Mariners might have actually had a bad process for using stats. Because, you know, as much as this article makes Jack Z look bad and makes the organization look bad and all that, I still basically believe that Jack Z probably knows a lot about baseball, knows more or less what he's doing, is probably, if not one of the five best GMs in the world and not one of the 30 best, he's probably one of the 300 best at least.

He's probably pretty good at this stuff. And he made a rational decision that he didn't want the stats in his front office. And, you know, he had wanted them. He used them. He had the signs of it were all over the moves that he was making for a couple of years and he decided that it wasn't working. So the question is, was his process in evaluating it bad and he just overreacted? Or is there something about it that maybe we'll see a little bit of pulling back from it for some

reason or another. I don't know. Yeah. There was an article at Lookout Landing about a month ago by Colin O'Keefe where he, it was called A Glimpse Inside the Seattle Mariners Analytics Department. Did you see that? And he sort of, he went and sat down with uh one of their their baseball operations analysts jesse smith and they they kind of you know talked about how they have all these stat guys and they look at this

and they look at that and they didn't get into any specifics but you know it was they sounded like every team sounds like when they talk about how they use stats and, you know, like every progressive organization saying, Oh, we, we take stats and scouts into account and we use all this new data and all these interesting things. And without getting into any specifics, it,

you know, it sort of portrayed them as if they were as cutting edge as any other team. And it may be the case that people within that front office are that way. But if this story portrays things as they actually are, then it doesn't really matter if there are a few analysts or stat guys in that department who are doing cutting-edge things, because if this is the case, then they're not going to get heard anyway. So we often judge teams by how big their analytics department is and what they say in interviews about what sort of stats they use, and maybe that's not such an accurate reflection of, of what they're

actually doing in many cases, even if they have smart people doing cutting edge stuff, if the person at the top is not listening or, or the owners who are, you know, really at the top are not listening, then all that stuff is sort of in vain. I wonder if there's a way to start looking at organizations and their roster turnover as, I don't know, somehow measurable. Because I don't know if it's a bad thing or not that guys within a front office hate each other. I don't know if front office chemistry matters. Maybe it does. It seems like it could, and it seems like it might not be a huge deal.

There's different departments that are all going to have their parochial interests like in a lot of companies. But if Engel leaves, that's bad. Maybe if Blangino leaves, maybe that's bad. Maybe if Fusco leaves, maybe that's bad. If you're losing guys who you don't otherwise want to lose because they hate working for you, that's a pretty bad— It's not good. It's not good. I guess that I would say that to the extent that they're not able to keep smart people around, that would make me feel down about the Mariners front office. I don't know though. It's really

hard to say. The thing about it is that even getting past the sinister way that you say this is just the tip of the iceberg, this figuratively is just the tip of the iceberg. This literally is, well, it's not literally, this figuratively is just the tip of the iceberg of their front office. There are so many things we still don't know about their front office, good and bad. For starters, there are scores of people who didn't quit and who aren't talking. And even if they are talking, they're all just individual perspectives. They have skewed visions of how things work, and nobody has a 100% omniscient vision of how things are going. And so, like, we actually don't know that much about the Mariners' front office, even right now.

So it's hard to draw conclusions or say much. I mean, we know that some people hated some other people. It seems to have cost them some talented guys. Jack Z might not be as smart. some people hated some other people it seems to have cost them some talented guys uh jack z might not be as smart well i yeah i mean we'd already basically had had come to the conclusion that uh that he wasn't the elite general manager that for two months we thought he was and the mariners might be uh more of the phillies type of front office than the Cardinals or Indians front office. Yeah.

That's about what we know, right? Right. Yeah, not all of this is new information in this article. I mean, we knew about sort of the Josh Luckey situation and the idea that they didn't know about his background before they traded with him, which never seemed all that credible. And Blengino in the article talks about how Zrencik became, I said it, became obsessed with power hitters last winter and began ignoring everything else, which is something that we talked about on the podcast, how that sort of seemed to be the case. that we talked about on the podcast, how that sort of seemed to be the case. So it's not all new and fresh and surprising, but it was surprising to hear it stated out in the open as much as it was.

More than anything, the story is that people spoke on the record. That's pretty much what we're reacting to this had all been off the record stuff yeah it wouldn't hit that hard yeah because i wonder i wonder what the perception is of the people who are talking in this article if if another front office is reading this article as of course they all did uh would they be less willing to hire these people who went on the record and criticized their boss, even if they believe that the criticisms are fair? You know, they wouldn't want to be the subject of this sort of article themselves someday. Yeah, I mean, certainly. I would guess that probably it's not a big deal for Eric Wedge.

Managers kind of are allowed to talk a lot, but for the other guys, you would think so. Yeah. I was reading, after I read this article, I was reading the Sabre Research Journal, and there was an article about the Federal League, the third rival major league, like in 1914, 15 or so. And there was this quote by a guy named Robert Ward, who was a, a federally vice president. And, uh, he was, he was a baker, uh, and he came from a long line of bakers and he got into baseball and everyone questioned what he knew about baseball and how he would be able to, to help run a team knowing nothing but bread.

And so he said, quote, I never knew there was any black art about baseball. Judging from some of the men I have met in the profession and the success they have made, I would not say that intelligence of the first order was necessary to a rather complete mastery of the game. So I guess that maybe is my takeaway from this whole situation. Yeah, it's a different kind of intelligence. Okay, all right.

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