Here is a little more background on Pelekoudas, who was the frontrunner for the position, though that may have changed:
His current job title is Vice President of Baseball Administration. He has been the economic/contract guy under Gillick’s reign. Roger Jongewaard, who most likely will not be back next year either, was the player development/evaluation guy. Pelekoudas just finished his 24th season with the Mariners, and has served in a variety of roles. He has held his current position since 1997. In essence, he has been the financial right arm of Pat Gillick. And if Pat Gillick had a weakness, it was certainly in his budgeting. Most early signs pointed to Pelekoudas as the guy, but conflicting reports put that to question.
You can cross Paul DePodesta off the list. The Mariners won’t consider him, and I doubt he would take this job if offered to him.
My number one choice is Chris Antonetti, currently the Assistant General Manager for the Cleveland Indians, having been promoted from director of major league operations last year. Antonetti will be classified with the Billy Beane/J.P. Ricciardi/Theo Epstein grouping, but there are some important differences. Antonetti never played professional baseball, instead being educated at Georgetown and then receiving his MBA at the University of Massachusets. He interned with the Montreal Expos before working his way up the ladder in Cleveland. He has a strong knowledge of statistical analysis and has been in charge of overseeing the transformation of the Indians into an organization that makes use of historical information. However, he has also worked closely with the player development side, which the Indians excel at, and is not a revolutionary who will come in and fire all the scouts. He is a well spoken man who can articulate his thoughts, avoiding the worry of a Dan Duquette-like mutiny. The Indians have built a player development machine under the Shapiro/Antonetti/Huntington regime, and it is only a matter of time before the trainees of Mark Shapiro begin to branch out much like the underlings of John Hart have made their way across baseball.
While he is my choice for the job, it is unlikely that he will be interviewed for the position. He is not a well traveled scout who has spent 20 years in the business. He is just 29 years of age, and there is little question that the M’s will hold that against him. In comparison, Pelekoudas has been with the team since Antonetti was 5. In an organization that so strongly favors loyalty, it will be difficult for someone with as little experience as Antonetti to break through. However, I believe he would implement a much-needed view of the game that this organization lacks with the current front office. Maximization of expenditures isn’t just a wise thing for low-revenue clubs. The Mariners have not done a good job at maximizing their alotted budget by making poor assessments on low-quality players. A new face is needed, one who can make the tough calls and reallocate resources wisely without stripping the farm system barren. Whether it be Antonetti or someone like Tim Purpura (Asst. GM for the Astros), let us hope the Mariners are willing to take a risk on an unexperienced but promising GM like they were with Bob Melvin.
Wheel of GM Candidates! Everyone can play! Mail us your profile request!
I’ll start with the guy I think will get the job, because he’s an organization man and Gillick gets to help choose the next GM, Lee Pelekoudas, and another guy I see in the email queue a lot, Paul DePodesta.
Lee Pelekoudas is a generic GM. I don’t know that much about him except from hearing about trades he’s tried to negotiate, which all seemed… kind of dumb, like many of the Gillick deals that got rumored, where the team (for instance) doesn’t manage to get Aaron Boone because the other guys wouldn’t give on wanting Aaron Taylor or something. He’s an organization man, when he’s talked to the press he hasn’t said anything terrible or insightful. I know that’s a lot of no-insight, but there you go. I think he’d be a generic GM.
Paul DePodesta is another name thrown around a lot, but he’s comfortable in Oakland and he and Beane know they’re a much better team than either of them would be if they had to go it alone. DePodesta’s going to wait for a dream job, and stepping into the M’s job with our ownership issues and Lincoln around is not that job. He’s a real stat dude, into drafting more college guys (which the M’s as an organization don’t like at all), and bright. No chance.
Coming up: Kim Ng, Oscar Minaya, and much, much more.
We have received word that Pat Gillick has stepped away from his post as General Manger. I will reserve my glee until I hear that he is not in charge of picking his own replacement, as is currently rumored.
The M’s fired hitting coach Lamar Johnson today. Or rather “Johnson and the Mariners reached a mutual agreement on Monday for Johnson not to return next season.”
You may recall we pointed out he sucked on this very site and wondered why he wasn’t getting any blame for the team’s offensive woes. I guess it just took a while.
Why does everyone seem to think Soriano’s a born closer, anyway? He’s got a couple pitches, he was a great starter this year in the minors, he’s been starting for a while now, he can work more than one inning… why waste him in closer situations? If you can bring him in in the 7th with the game tied and have him hold the game down for two, three innings, that’s worth more than three outs when you’re three runs up. This whole notion of closer is dumb, it’s a role grown up around a dumb stat.
The DS (Disastrous Scheduling) games for this week:
Tuesday: Twins @ Yankees, 10:06 am, Marlins @ Giants, 1:06pm, Cubs @ Braves, 5:18pm
Wednesday: Marlins @ Giants, 1:06pm, Cubs @ Braves, 4:06pm, Red Sox @ Athletics, 7:06 pm
Thursday: Red Sox @ Athletcis, 1:06pm, Twins @ Yakees, 5:18 pm
Friday: Giants @ Marlins, 1:06pm, Braves @ Chicago
Saturday: Yankees @ Twins, Athletics @ Red Sox, TBD
Yeah, that’s uh…. uneven. Note the Twins-Yankees go 1-off-2, while the Red Sox and A’s play two games in 24 hours. Crazy.
I was impressed today by the ovations given Edgar (and, to a lesser extent, Moyer, Cameron, and McLemore). I think as fans Seattle is still acting stupid over Rodriguez, but this comes from the fact that if you’re a Mariner, and you play hard, do well, and you’re a good guy, we love you. People in the stands were crying when Edgar came off the field (not me, I had something in my eye).
Screw up, that’s not a huge deal, but keep doing it and seem like you don’t care (like TTF) and we’ll boo you until you’re run out of town. You don’t even have to be good (Dan) if you were okay once, as long as you’re still busting your butt.
This is why people still boo Alex, I think — there was a time when the fans swooned for Alex, Griffey, and Edgar, and awed to watch Randy. Of those, Alex was the only one to leave clearly and primarily for money, and many fans still feel like their wife left them for a richer man (and not a more successful one, like some slob who won the lotto or something).
It’s still immature, though. But I know (generally) where many of the M’s starters live, because everyone in Seattle could ask around and turn up one pretty quick — but like today, there was a fan who lived near Ichiro, and when her friend asked her why she hadn’t gotten an autograph, the woman said “Oh, we don’t want to bother him.”
Ichiro. An Ichiro autographed baseball card half-eaten by a dog runs $50. And his neighbors want to make sure he has his privacy.
Another great moment of today’s game: they had one of those ‘Junior Mariner’ things where the kids go out and take positions, then the M’s go out, say hi, sign a ball, and the kids head back.
So the honorary left fielder stood out there talking to Raaaandy Winn, who sort of crouched down to talk to her, and she pointed to the left field stands, and Randy turned, and she pointed to the center field stands, and he looked, and they talk about something or other. All the other kids head in (Ichiro takes a while to sign his ball and a security guy gets his kid). Randy points off to where the girl’s supposed to go, stands, pats her on the shoulder, and starts to jog to his position in left field proper. Except the kid looked around and didn’t move. Randy spotted it, and turned around to go back for the kid.
Randy Winn was unwilling to leave the confused kid unattended in front of 40,000 fans in what is, probably, the safest place to be in Seattle, and willing to delay the game farther to make sure someone came out for them to walk them back in.
That’s pretty cool.
Take that, Oakland! Muwahahahahahaha!
Oh, it doesn’t help…
When you wade through the critiques of Box Melvin’s strategy, Pat Gillick’s acquisitions, Seattle’s strange love fest with Dan Wilson, and the front offices’ ability to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, you will still find one truth about the three of us who write here: We love baseball, and especially the Mariners. And now, for the next six months, we wait, we scheme, we plot, and we hope to improve next year. But this is never a fun day. The season isn’t supposed to end in September.
Only 140 days until pitchers and catchers report…
It looks to me like that’s telling us that AL hitters hit about .262/.331/.420 this season. I’ll bet we didn’t need any fancy stats to figure that one out. 🙂
And people were worried we weren’t going to have enough to write about. Pah!
Baseball Prospectus has a cool junk report, ‘Starting Pitchers’ Quality of Batters Faced‘. It’s the composite lines of all the hitters pro-rated yadda yadda yadda…
Gil Meche’s average dude faces is a .262/.333/.423 hitter
TTF, .263/.331/.422
Franklin, .263/.332/.419
Moyer, .262/.330/.419
Pineiro, .261/.331/.417
How’s that for amazingly useless information? Next time someone tells rags on Meche, you tell them “Hey, Meche faced batters who hit for SEVEN MORE POINTS of OPS, so you lay off on poor Gil. We’re lucky he won any games at all, facing mashers like that.”
It only has any use in demonstrating the differences between divisions. The Diamondbacks pitchers, for instance, are all hanging around the bottom of the list, along with the Rockies guys, and the Giants… all of who got to face the punchless Dodgers over and over (and then the punchless Rockies).