Lack of learning, looming losses lead to Lincoln layoff?
Superreader msb emailed us this morning and I’ve been pondering this all day:
If we go back to Thiel’s offseason piece, and pretend Lincoln is also on the hot seat (“”The entire organization, and especially me, is on the hot seat,” he said in an interview at his stadium office. “I thought long and hard about continuing with Bill and Mike. I’m putting my neck out on the line because I believe in them. I’ve made it clear to the ownership group that, having made the decision, I’m fully responsible for it.”) who do we want to come in as CEO so that they can hire Chris Antonetti for us?
I don’t know. I’ve felt for a long time that Bavasi was the best GM Lincoln might hire (and I mean that in the nicest way to Bavasi possible), and that in a lot of ways, we’ve been lucky to get him, because the organization as a whole is a lot better off today than it was a couple years ago. But what about that question?
I’ll start with some overly broad generalizations. There are members of the M’s ownership group that are smart, tech-industry people we’d like to think would be more saavy ownership stewards, more open to a pitch for Antonetti, or Ng, or any of the half-dozen interesting GM candidates who aren’t retreads and might bring something really interesting to the team and help it build sustainable, competitive teams that are both profitable and win pennants.
There are also members of the M’s ownership group who are more retail-oriented, and we might think they’d look at the team on the field as product (we want to sell a high-quality product, so we need to have a high-quality team). Buuuut they might also do exactly what drives us, as the hardest of hard-core fans, insane: marketing over substance, a constant drive to identify, brand, and sell players to us, and the same kind of brand-over-results thinking that gets Bloomquist pointless extensions.
What about Nintendo, though? They’re the majority owners, and we can reasonably assume they’ll control any replacement for Lincoln if they finally sack him. Superreader Aditya Sood (two superreaders in one article) sent us this:
This James Surowiecki article from the New Yorker is an interesting analysis of Nintendo’s current mindset in the gaming world–and actually also speaks volumes about their philosophy to the baseball world as well.
The bottom line is what is good for the one (the Wii) is dreadful for the other (your 2004-2006 Seattle Mariners!)
What is interesting though, is that the Wii’s development and execution indicates a willingness to embrace out of the box thinking and a refreshing strategy for success which seems like it supports the Billy Beane/Moneyball model. So basically the Mariners are the GameCube in the Wii world. Or maybe it’s more like the Virtual Boy.
(Another, possibly unrelated side note. Nintendo didn’t embrace the Wii mindset until AFTER Howard Lincoln stepped down from the day to day oversight of the company–to focus on the Mariners.)
It’s a particularly interesting point. Nintendo’s Wii, at least this holiday season, beaten up on the higher-powered Xbox 360 and PS3 in both raw sales and to an even greater extent, media love, despite having far inferior technical specs. In the past, each generation of consoles has been a huge step forward in raw power, and here we see the Wii essentially opt out of it in favor of a cheaper, wackier system that attempts to appeal to an underserved demographic.
(Blantant suck-up: We would love to evaluate the relative merits of these systems here at USSM Labs. Please contact us.)
Would they, as Sood suggests, put that to work in choosing a Lincoln replacement? Someone willing to spend in strange directions that might help the team escape ever-escalating free agent competition? Or does being owned by a company whose fortunes are not directly tied to the team mean that they’re likely to act conservatively to protect the team’s profitability and value? That suggests that Lincoln would, if replaced at all, be succeeded by a different face of the same philosophy.
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Money is melting from the mints of the M’s (mis)fortunes. Somehow only Superman could save the sinking ship! Nintendo’d nix the notion of novel innovation.
I could go on and on…
You should rechristen yourself “NegativePaul” or “NatteringNabobOfNegativity”
Money is melting from the mints of the M’s (mis)fortunes. Somehow only Superman could save the sinking ship! Nintendo’d nix the notion of novel innovation.
No, I don’t think that’s necessarily so.
One, that assumes that Nintendo would control the business on a micromanagement level. Not sure they’d do that–they may give it over to one of the other owners/partners who have a better idea.
Second, it assumes a strictly corporate response by the team, and, again, I;m not sure it’s justified. You DO have to be nimble in the gaming world, or you get out; this might translate to the baseball world. Or it might not.
I suspect that the answer to your question is “the same”. The Corporate world is into profit and loss, the sports world is bizarre and foreign to that way of thinking. Lincolns replacement will come from the same interview and culture with same goals, make money and protect the franchise. (I will also confess that I do not see the current group as poorly as some. My affair with the M’s starts with seeing Diego Segeii’s first pitch and I confess to being permently scarred by the owners in between. I don’t like Bavasi, Grover or the on field direction but in my own confused state, I trust the front office guys more than the idiots who came before.)
I’d love to know more about the structure of ownership; Mr Yamauchi deeded his shares back into the Nintendo pool, which (I assume) is ‘managed’ by Howard for Nintendo. If Howard did fall on his sword, who would then step into being the face of Nintendo for the ownership group?
Is “who would replace Armstrong?” the more important question?
I don’t know that there are any easy answers to this, but it’s a great question. Lack of learning seems endemic and I would wager that Howard Lincoln’s departure is a necessary prerequisite to moving forward. The question is: is Nintendo learning anything from this? They may be too far removed from day to day operations to know what the problem is.
But if they’re like any other large corporation, you’d think there would be somebody at Nintendo looking at the Mariners and surveying baseball from a general business strategy standpoint who would step forward and say ‘there’s a better way of doing this.’ Most businesses are constantly evaluating what their competitors are doing, what works, what doesn’t. Maybe in this case it requires Lincoln’s departure in order to force Ninetendo to begin that evaluation and hopefully come up with some fresh and interesting approaches.
I wonder if, more than any one person, the corporate culture itself is to blame for the M’s seeming inability to act decisively to address on field issues. It seems like there is too much consensus building going on, resulting in delays and inflexibility that hampers the baseball side. Until the method of making decisions changes, I’m skeptical that anything will change on the field. I don’t think it’s coincidence that many successful franchises seem to be benevolent dictatorships (see Walter O’Malley, the Busch family, and—we can quibble over “benevolent”—George Steinbrenner).
Hence, this is why we need to hope Nintendo sells the team to someone who gives a crap.
Without beating up Lincoln or Bavasi or even intimating a negative opinion of either…They are each unable to lead.
Leadership is a strange thing. Try to define what it takes to lead and many of us have difficulty in naming the qualities or actions that make a great leader. I have a Organizational Leadership degree and each time I write a list I can come up with a dozen exceptions to each line.
However when we see leadership in action, we all know it. Typically leadership is learned, I don’t believe it is something that is neccesarily innate but it is something that is appealed to and likely exists in a person’s humility and desire for something greater.
Some things that prevent a person from leadership, things I feel exist in the current M’s team, are: Fear of failure, inability to hear about mistakes (which means no learning from mistakes), no abiltity to take informed risks (which is what the authors of this site are huge proponents of), unable to make decisions for fear of alienation, so they make ‘popular’ decsions rather then correct decisions, a history of past fibs, deceits and outright lies that would come to light if changes in process are made (this one is particulary hard to overcome as now we are talking about all types of things that people like to hide in the closet).
For the M’s, their majority ownership being Japanese doesn’t help as the asian culture of maintaining face is very real and very powerful. I know we have many readers here who know the culture much better then I and they could easily add light to how powerful a motivator this is.
In the end, the M’s executive group will have to sacrifice some of their own to blame others, likely many, to make any real changes or the ownership group will have to change entirely so that blame can be placed there. In truth, few business leaders today have the integrity or sack to say “I was wrong, I made poor choices but here is my new plan”.
One similarity between the Wii and the Mariners this coming season is that both are likely to cause me to wave my arms around and break my television.
Steve – you gotta start using the wrist strap that comes with the Wiimote. Didn’t you read the instructions?
But do the 2007 Mariners come with a wrist strap? And what could it (or the M’s) possibly be made of that it won’t cause me to break my TV?
Bavasi’s Bad barter brings bitter baseball back
I thought this was an all alliteration thread based on the headline…my bad
14 For that to effectively work, you needed to Corco the thread and split that into two comments. As it stands, you failed miserably.
The Wii was developed because the Gamecube got it’s ass kicked by the Xbox and PS2.
The Wii essentially is a remarkable con put on the public because it CANNOT and WILL NOT change gaming software or give them any new games. It only give gamers a different control scheme. Anyone who buys the Wii thinking it is something entirely “new” is only falling into’s Nintendo’s trap.
I think Nintendo will most likely be conservative and protect the M’s as a profitable business, rather than try to turn them into a winner. In other words, it’s probably gonna take some serious losing and drastic drop off of ticket sales before they ever consider changing their baseball ways.
It only give gamers a different control scheme.
Why is that a bad thing? I’m certainly willing to accept that there is a certain segment of the market that doesn’t care whatsoever about extreme graphics, would rather not pay $600-$700 for a gaming console, and doesn’t need revolutionary new games to make themselves happy. Additionally, as more casual gamers, these people might feel that a more intuitive control system will reduce the occasionally painful learning curve involved with playing new games. Like Derek said:
Rather than being “conned,” it’s quite possible that people buying the Wii are getting exactly what they want.
#17 – To be fair, I don’t know how “intuitive” the Wii control scheme is with some games. I bought one about 2 weeks ago and I found the control scheme can be just as cumbersome with some games as the Xbox 360. Wii Sports (which comes packed into the console) is pretty straightforward. Call of Duty 3, however, is not quite as easy as one might think. That’ll teach me for straying from my keyboard and mouse first person shooter roots.
To be fair, I don’t know how “intuitive” the Wii control scheme is with some games.
Fair enough, I certainly haven’t had access to one myself. The relevant issue (to me) isn’t so much whether Nintendo actually succeeds in the execution of its controller, just that the idea to to appeal to a different part of the market is there. A lot of people are willing to settle for a different control scheme, which at least might be better for some games, if getting the next best option means spending an additional $300-$400.
Complaining that the Wii doesn’t revolutionize video gaming seems like complaining that Frank Thomas, 2006, didn’t play great defense. He didn’t need to play great defense to justify his price tag to the A’s.
The only thing I’ve been certain about with this team for the past five years is that there is a cancer in the Front Office, and I assume that cancer is Lincoln. I strongly doubt that the ownership group dictates to Lincoln what his management philosophy should be. My impression is that he is a conservative businessman who has never really understood baseball or baseball fans. No predictions, but I certainly hope that whoever does the hiring of the next CEO hires someone who has baseball in his or her heart. That might sound hokey but I honestly think that passion is at the root of success. And Lincoln does not have passion for baseball.
Passion? You think Lincoln lacks PASSION? Who cares? How about the ability to tell good players from bad ones? Passion, pah. Gimme basic competence anytime. I want CLUE RECOGNITION SKILLS.
Mat, a console is only as good as the games that are on it. The Wii’s controller will have little to no effect on the games that come out for it. Trying to dupe the public into thinking that the Wii will somehow be new is indeed a con.
a control system has little to no effect on a game? There is no way someone who has ever played a video game could believe that.
And its not lincolns job to evaluate baseball players. His job is to evaluate the employees in the orginization. that is what he is doing a terrible job of.
Mat, a console is only as good as the games that are on it.
Sure, but you have exactly zero evidence to back up your claim that the games won’t be any good. Or more specifically, you have no evidence that consumers who buy the Wii won’t enjoy the games written for the Wii. Anyway, like I was trying to point out in my second comment above, the whole issue of the quality of the Wii is completely secondary (practically irrelevant, really) to the bigger point about trying to exploit market inefficiencies.
I say get an Xbox 360 and a Wii so that you can have the best of both worlds. Not sure what the M’s acquisition equivalent to that would be, however.
Mat, a console is only as good as the games that are on it. The Wii’s controller will have little to no effect on the games that come out for it.
Squidbilly, Betamax. Betamax, Squidbilly.
There’s one thing the Wii is doing I’ve never seen the XBox or PS series do: Pull in non-gamers. The physical controls on Wii Sports are a bit awkward, but they’re natural enough that families can run across the room playing tennis and flinging their controllers. This is the first video game system my wife has ever been interested in playing (when I told her you have a sword and shield in Zelda, she was “When do I get to play?”)
Do not discount the participatory nature of the Wii. It’s cheap and family-friendly. The PS3, OTOH, is a true gamer’s box suited for the 18-35 crowd with a lot of cash.
And as for the Wii == M’s new game plan issue, there’s one problem:
It’s not Nintendo as much as it is Sony.
Sony has completely blown it with the PS3, spending way too long in development, waiting on Blu-Ray, setting a ridiculously high price point, releasing too few systems, and just generally being the incompetent boobs they’ve been the last five years.
Yes, the controller is innovative, but what’s selling the Wii is the low price point — and having less of a shortage during the [SEA-TAC AIRPORT HAS REMOVED THE NAME OF THIS HOLIDAY TO AVOID A LAWSUIT] season.
Maybe you can translate that into “Billy Beane learned to find useable pieces amongst the scraps left over by the big teams.” But I’d rather see it as “Nintendo got lucky when Sony crapped out for the umpteenth time this year.”
You know this ownership of this team is s#$* and not right for this team when we have to talk about how the Nintendo Wii and Sony PS3 affects how the day-to-day operations of a Major League Baseball team are run.
Just please, start beating the drum now. Starting screaming your lungs out for the Mariners to sell to someone who cares.
I don’t care if their Japanese or their from Calcutta, I just want an owner that will be honest to the fans, hire smart people, spend free agent money in a appropriate and smart way and make sure the best players possible will come here to Seattle every year (regardless of if they cost $350K or $25 million a year), and commit themselves to winning every single year.
I’m not saying we have to be the Yankees and spend $200 million on payroll every year or fill the stadium with lots of bells, whistles, and fireworks nights, like Arte Moreno somewhat did in Anaheim, but my god, we can do so much better than $8 mil. a year for Miguel Batista. Whether it’s making aggressive bits for Barry Zito or Daisuke Matsuzaka, or filling your rotation with cheap starters such as Rodrigo Lopez and John Thomson, you can just do so much better than sit back and let Bavasi sign Miguel Batista for $8 mil a year.
Ah yes Corco, thanks for the advice.
I see the beauty now, the separation one gets from two comments, makes them distinct.
So much doom and gloom. So much sackcloth and ashes. So many tears, so many jeers.
No matter.
The M’s win the division in ought 7.
Felix contends for the Cy Young, Putz wins Rolaids Reliever of the Year. Lopez earns the MVP, but Ichiro wins it in a close race over Beltre. Washburn wins 17 games, leading the league in highest LOB%. I don’t know the names of the rest of the rotation, yet. But I do by the end of the season, and for all the right reasons. Better yet, not a single player misses a start, although WFB makes the all-star team after going 4/4 with three homeruns while playing all 9 positions in single game.
It could happen.
People, I’m a Mariner’s fan and everything, but you are taking this way to far; why pay so much attention and spend so much of your free time on people who make millions for playing a game, and dont give a damn about you? They dont really even care about the “community.” they’re basically mercenaries. And dont pay attention to what the people who run this site say, if they knew so much about baseball they’d actually be working for the mariners.
What gets me about a team that puts any thing over winning is this: winning draws the most interest and the most money. Teams can have the best marketing in the world, but if they aren’t winners and they aren’t the Cubs, people will not buy the tickets. On the other hand, you could have a bare bones marketing staff, but if you win you’re going to do very well.
Nintendo didn’t buy the Ms as a shrewd capital budgeting decision. Gorton, Ellis, et all asked for help to keep the team in town. Nintendo responded on a corporate brand, local community basis.
While the asset may have some significance to Nintendo as corporation, annual revenues are non-material. What we have as ownership is benign neglect.
In a very Japanese way, Nintendo promoted Howie out of the way of the next generation of corporate leadership by making him Mariners president. His job is burnish Nintendo’s reputation in the local community while avoiding tarnishing Nintendo’s corporate brand. The former includes providing a decent rate of return to the minority investors, who are the focus of Nintendo’s interest in “the local community.”
Howard proceeds extremely logically from this foundation. Financially, the Ms return to minority investors a decent return. Better than decent, really. Publicly, the Ms host family-centric entertainment in “the best ballpark in baseball” that is a credit to Nintendo’s local image. Competitively, the Ms have provided some real excitement and Howard can certainly tout Nintendo’s stewardship in comparison to any previous.
And that’s it. That’s what very competent benign neglect gets you. Howard or no Howard, what is the case for Nintendo as majority owner to change its goals vis-a-vis the Ms?
The only bright spot in all this placid stasis is that Mr. Yamauchi seems to enjoy presenting Japanese baseball talent in the US via the Ms. Would that he desire to demonstrate that a Japanese franchise president, or GM or coach or group of players could win it all. Would indeed.
And dont pay attention to what the people who run this site say, if they knew so much about baseball they’d actually be working for the mariners.
1. I don’t have to be a chicken to smell a rotten egg
2. When I was at BP we did consulting for major league teams, and I did some of that, so kiss off either way.
Why do you come around here if you don’t want to read reasoned discussion of the organization?
DMZ–
1. You sir, are a baboon
2. When I was…”Was” being the operative word; getting coffee for the boss doesnt count as “consulting.”
3. Talking about “taking care” of Willie Bloomquist doesnt sound like “reasoned discussion” to me.
Good morning all!
1. JeffMantoFan s/b renamed HatedA’sSubversive
2. Nintento: We need to at least give them love for keeping the M’s in Seattle…without which, we all may not be having this conversation.
3. I think one of the philosophies of the M’s organization is to maintain stability as an organization which has it’s benefits and drawbacks. I appreciate that they don’t have a “hair trigger” mentality and give people plenty of space to prove their competence or lack thereof. But there is a fine line between patience and stupidity and they’re standing on that line right now.
4. I think there are times when it’s sound fiscal reasoning to run a baseball team like a business (which in the M’s case was 7 or 8 years ago) and there are times like this when a team needs to be run like a baseball team.
On a ‘gut feeling’ I suspect we’ll see the M’s organisational philosophy lean further into the analytical side of things before too long, if only to keep up with the rest of MLB. The comparison between the console market and baseball is pretty interesting. Nintendo seems to have realised that the competition isn’t really XBox-PS-Wii (a secondary process), it’s playing video games vs. doing other stuff, and their strategy to make video games more alluring to the non hardcore types seems effective so far. I agree that if M’s brass applied this sort of thought process we’d have a much more interesting and successful team.
On another note…
JeffMantoFan-
1) As long as you don’t pull stuff out of nowhere and make stupid comments, I’ve always found DMZ to be a helpful, nice guy. I haven’t checked for the infamous baboon cheekpads, though, and I really don’t think I want to.
2) Do you have any idea what Baseball Prospectus actually does? At all? Granted, I wouldn’t call them the best around anymore, but ‘getting coffee for the boss’? Wow. Plus, there’s some severe semicolon misuse going on in this statement: ‘”Was” being the operative word; getting coffee for the boss doesnt [sic] count as “consulting.”‘ As far as I’m aware (note that Cantabridgian Engineers don’t actually have to take humanities courses, and it’s been a while since AP English), semicolons are used in complex sentences to tie in a subjunctive clause, not to attempt to link two completely unrelated statements.
3) I can have a reasoned discussion whilst amusing myself (and possibly others around me, if my sense of humour doesn’t fly over their collective heads). It’s called multitasking, and it’s a valuable tool in life. Besides which, USSM’s problem with Bloomquist has always been about his usage rather than as a player, and I think everyone with an IQ not less than two standard deviations under norm took the quote from the Sportsline (they didn’t even write it!) as was intended – a joke. Eeesh.
JeffMantoFan is just trolling; don’t waste time on him. He doesn’t care about anything he’s saying, he just wants to rile people up. Don’t give him the satisfaction.
Worst. Thread. Ever.
There’s really no way that’s true – there have been much, much worse threads.
yup
getting back to the original notion, if Lincoln did step away (was asked to step away) anyone know what the Nintendo corporate culture is like? would they send along a new representative to sit with the ownership group at meetings, and would they expect that person to wield Lincoln’s power, or would they be ok with the new CEO coming from within or outside the group?
getting back to the original notion, if Lincoln did step away (was asked to step away) anyone know what the Nintendo corporate culture is like? would they send along a new representative to sit with the ownership group at meetings, and would they expect that person to wield Lincoln’s power, or would they be ok with the new CEO coming from within or outside the group?
I don’t think they’d send anyone one else in there; while they are majority owners, there ARE other people in the ownership group who’d have a say and the group would probably send one of their own into the seat.
On the other hand, I’m not sure who’d that person be. The people who’d be REALLY interesting (the Raikes, the Stantons, etc.) are working entrepreneurs. Chris Larson, perhaps. Carl Stork, more likely.
On the third hand, an outside person may indeed get the nod, but with ownership oversight. And any change in management style may only be minimal.
This may not be the worst thread ever but it’s certainly a peek into Baseball Hell: dark figures stumbling across dry grass on the field of an empty stadium, arguing wordlessly in endless existential angst beneath lowering wintery skies while the bats and gloves of spring lie forgotten under an icey wind. It’s the 10th Circle. It’s the Off Season.
There’s really no way that’s true – there have been much, much worse threads.
Absolutely. Couldn’t possibly be the worst thread without Corco on a bender making 88% of the posts.
Anyway, about M’s Mgmt and running the club like a business or like a baseball team, for me, it’s kind of like, well, I think a game last August sums it up. Down 3-2 in the sixth, Viva Pinata had men on 2nd and 3rd with one out. Hargrove walked the next batter and then brought in Mateo because he needed a groundball to get out of the inning. Mateo’s first pitch was a bases-clearing double.
Hargrove really thought that Mateo was his best option for getting a GDIP, but as Dave pointed out, Mateo was probably the least likely pitcher in the league to get a groundball. He had induced one groundball in his last 17 batters faced.
So, on one hand, Hargrove picked – for once – a decent strategy in going for a groundball to get out of a jam in a close game. But on the other hand, he picked the wrong player to be the means of execution (so to speak) for his strategy. Likewise the M’s. Even when they have a good idea, they seem to go about it wrong. A cheap veteran bat with some pop last year wasn’t a bad idea, but somehow that turned into Carl Everett, who was. Trading part of a surplus (relief pitching) to upgrade a weakness (starting pitching) was a good idea, but Soriano for Ramirez was terrible. Putting some local talent on the field? Where’s that Sizemore kid from again?
Viva Pinata might be the best nickname for Joel Pineiro ever created.
DMZ – was this thread intended to discuss the virtues and vices of the Wii?
Got the Wii at launch… My first console since the SNES (usually prefer PC/Mac games) and I must say I’m overwhelmed. Those who say the control mechanism doesn’t add anything just haven’t played yet. Give Raving Rabbids an hour of your time and tell me it’s not a blast unlike anything else. And the main X-Factor: My girlfriend loves the Wii and actually approaches ME asking to play. Kudos to Nintendo on this—their strategy is working if they can get her interested.
Sure, the hard-core crowd isn’t going to want a Wii over the juicier Xbox 360 and PS3, but Nintendo is obviously not targeting that crowd. After a super-fun thanksgiving day with my girlfriend, family, and 50-something parents who haven’t played video games since Galaga at the arcade, I can see where they’re going with this thing. Now, if they could only figure out how to innovate our baseball team in the same way. Sadly, I don’t see this happening anytime soon. Our moves this season look like Nintendo’s moves from the N64 generation. (Stubbornly resisting the new while alienating its long-time customers)
….Our moves this OFF-season….
Great post. I personally can’t wait for the USSM evaluation of the Nintendo Wii myself.
Oh, no — but that it’s gone in that direction into irrelevancy in no way makes it as bad as some of the other ones we’ve had to endure/shut down/delete entirely.
#48– Putting some local talent on the field? Where’s that Sizemore kid from again?
ah, wouldn’t it have been nice to have been position to take Sizemore.
I gotta tell you, baseball on the Wii is pretty fun.
And in all honesty, Nintendo got it right with the Wii. Rather than the Sony/MS path of making a console a good attempt at reproducing computer games, they made it unique and geared towards more true arcade action.
Personally, I’ll never do Sony/MS consoles: I have a computer. Rather than $600 for a new console, I can spend $400 on a new video card and blow the consoles away. With prices the way they are, people just may migrate back to PC’s.
Oh, and I have played baseball with the Wii. Next day I had elbow and shoulder pain from the pitching. Should have warmed up first.
I think it’s pretty clear what Nintendo is out to do — build a device that encourages people to interact. It’s not the graphics dynamo the Comic Book Buy type frag-geeks want. It’s not going to make you go, “Man, I played Grand Theft Auto 16: U District last night, and you should have seen how LIFELIKE it was when I drove an Abrams tank through the U Bookstore!”
The guy I know who has a Wii has a four year old daughter who plays Zelda, and she loves it. And as said upthread, this is the first time my wife has ever shown a lick of interest in a controller-console video game (vs. Civ or SimCity on the PC). They know who they’re after. If the brain games on the DS didn’t make that apparent, hearing the stories of whole families destroying living rooms playing tennis should.
Here’s my two cents worth on the Wii vs 360/PS3 vs PC debate. I have a Wii, an Xbox 360, and a decent PC (2.8 gHz Dual Core Intel, 1.5 GB RAM (DDR 2 PC 4200), ATI Radeon X800XT graphics card).
The Wii is a system that I typically play when I want to play a “lighter” game (like Wii Sports, for instance). The Xbox 360 is a system that I use to play sports games primarily (like NBA 2K7) because I personally prefer the console control scheme for sports games as opposed to a PC. I’ll also play third person shooter games (Max Payne, Grand Theft Auto, that sort) on a console simply because that’s what I am used to. I typically only use the PC to play first person shooters because I think that a keyboard and mouse configuration for those games kicks ass over any equivalent setup on a console controller (not to mention the difference in responsiveness).
So, while some might use a PC for all of their higher end gaming, I tend to do most of mine on a console. The deciding factor (for me) is more about which control scheme I am most comfortable and familiar with, rather than which one has the better graphics.
Probably one of the most thought provoking posts and it has descended into a gaming discussion.
Perhaps we see why the Mariner management thinks that they can do virtually anything and not have it roast them. Most of the people that are fans here think of the Mariners as a theme park, so lets not get too overwrought about the baseball thing…