Rumoring and spending
Gammons, most prominently, is pushing the line that Richie Sexson is all but a done deal. He also mentioned that the Montreal Expos (Washington Unnamed Team?) may be shopping Vidro and Nick Johnson, to which I would say: man, I’d love to have Nick Johnson. Oh, sure, there’s the health issue, but what crazy potential, and he’d be a better defensive 1B than Ibanez or Bucky. Or you could DH him if you were really worried about health…
Anyway, to a larger point, beyond the long-term deals to younger, star free agents like Beltre/Beltran, should the Mariners spend on short-term, expensive fixes? What if they bring in Delgado and Glaus on two, three-year deals that are really rich?
I say go for it. As along as they don’t block the development path of legitimate, ready prospects, there’s no reason not to spend a ton of money. I like seeing the team win, and if the Mariners don’t spend that money they just pocket it (see: previous years) so why not spend it on random passer-by that make waiting for the team to rebuild more bearable?
And sometimes, if you’re smart about it, you can luck into the playoffs with a team like that.
Quick note
There’s a note in the latest Peter Gammons column that I want to clarify:
In Wally Backman, we’ve had the first embarrassment for the new Arizona ownership. Next, Richie Sexson is expected to move to Seattle.
No mention of who expects Sexson to move to Seattle, but I’ll tell you that it isn’t the M’s front office. He’s not even their top choice at first base, and they’re very unlikely to guarantee him all three years of the contract he’s seeking. Things could fall into place that would lead to Sexson being a Mariner next spring, but to say that it should be “expected” is a vast overstatement.
The Year in U.S.S. Mariner
I’m not sure if we’re going to do Official Endorsements this year or not, (probably, if they can be funny enough), but I wanted to talk a little about where we are and what’s ahead.
This year, we remodeled and moved to new digs. This meant new functionality and a huge upgrade in reliability over blogger, both on your side on ours. It also means I get a lot more frustrated when it doesn’t work, but it’s worth recognizing that the state of things is far better than it was.
Which brings us to another point. I don’t do a lot of trumpeting our traffic statistics, but we’re reaching a huge number of people for being a modest, three-person, team-specific site that doesn’t pay for bandwith or hosting with ad or subscription revenues. Our traffic’s a rounding error compared to, say, ESPN, but every year twice as many people visit us daily. I frequently think we’ve reached the ceiling, and then a week later more people keep coming.
I’m not sure how we reach out to people who haven’t seen us, but I’d love to know. I want the Mariners fan base to be the most informed and active in all of baseball, and if that means I have to go door-to-door, well, I’m too lazy to do that. But I had you go going there for a second.
It’s my hope that if we continue to try our best to provide quality commentary and analysis, and to above all strive to get things right, even if it means we turn out to be wrong, we’ll keep winning readers and everything will work itself out.
This year we turned on comments, and I’ve been constantly impressed with the quality and civility of discussion at large. I like to think that this is due largely to the quality of our readership, which is amazingly cool, and a little to do with me banning the morons quickly.
It’s been a bad year to be a Mariner fan. There were nights I would wait for my bus to Safeco Field and think “Do I really want to go through with this tonight?” But it’s been a great year to write for the U.S.S. Mariner, and I hope it’s been a good year to be a reader.
So thanks, everybody. You’ve been a great crowd.
A closing anecdote:
During this season, I was driving into Seattle in the middle of the day, listening to a sports talk show, and I heard a caller read — almost word for word — something I had posted the night before as if it was some insight they’d just had. The host said it was an excellent point, and went on… but I started to laugh despite myself.
We’ve been pilfered before in order to make someone seem funny. That was the first time I’d ever heard someone use the U.S.S. Mariner to make themselves seem smart.
That’s pretty cool, when you think about it.