It’s also not at all clear that the Mariners are going to remain profitable (or as profitable) if they continue with their “not necessarily winning” strategy (if indeed that’s what it is): attendance has gone from #1 in baseball five years ago to #16 in 2007, and that plunge looks to continue. Cleveland plunged further during their rebuilding process, and remains lower, but they’re spending far less… and now they’re winning, too, which is bound to help attendance next year.

No, I’d say the M’s want to win games and the division, and their “lunchpail” fans do too, and when they don’t the fans stay away and the team spends a lot more money, both of which impact their bottom line.

http://www.cleveland.com/gameplan/index.ssf?/gameplan/more/part2.html

This if from 2003, but it is why they are where they are now.

And I agree that the team is generously bankrolled and poorly run.

So I think even the propositions that

- they manage the team PRIMARILY with an eye towards annual profit and
- they’re pretty good at this

don’t really hold up. I think it’s reasonable to take Lincoln et. al. at their word: their TWIN goals are competitiveness and profit, and they like to demonstrate the former by making sure the payroll is in the top 10, while not abandoning the latter unless dire circumstances ensue (see: 2004). They just suck at understanding what makes a team truly competitive, and have a bit better idea on how to run a balance sheet.

You have to remember the history current ownership is a successor to: 15 years under mownership that was either undercapitalized and looking towards the door pretty quickly after becoming owners (the Danny Kaye or Jeff Smulyan days) or just plain cheap and out to extract maximum profit for minimal investment in payroll (Argyros), and even during the mid-90’s, salary considerations were part of how the team was run- the Tino+Nellie trade, for instance (which, in retrospect, was a trainwreck- we traded two good players for two ones nowhere near as good- Tino actually compares decently to some guys in the HOF, though he doesn’t belong in there any more than George Kelly does).

Armstrong certainly remembers those days- he’s a holdover from the Argyros years. So I think part of what informs and guides management philsophy is remembering crowds of 7,000 in a cavernous concrete dome, and thus their desire to be “competitive” is quite sincere, from both a business and personal perspective. Baseball isn’t much fun in an empty stadium with a team where you KNOW the ownership is basically giving up on the season in April in order to make sure they get fat checks from MLB’s TV contracts and revenue sharing, and it’s rather sad when you know your boss can’t wait to cash in the good young players in trade for some more kids once they get expensive.

This also might help explain why the M’s keep guys who are “faces of the franchise” around- they had to TRADE Langston, Moore, Hendu, Owen, Cruz, and even Tino- not for talent reasons, but because they couldn’t afford them. I imagine a feeling of “Gee, we can keep guys like Edgar, Wilson, Willie and Raul around now- isn’t that nice?” underlies some things too.

“Everything you used to think you knew about October was wrong.

Wrong.

Defunct. Inapplicable. Flat out misguided.

Wrong.

Think about the three fundamental rules of October as we used to know them:

* The team with the most postseason experience usually wins.
* The manager with the most postseason experience usually wins.
* The team with the biggest payroll usually wins.”

Pretty cool stuff.

You know….I don’t think we’re disagreeing much on the broad strokes….only on the very fine details….

And it strikes me that the two strategies described, one is for corporate managers, and the other is for entrepreneurs and VCs.

It’s not a coincidence that the past two Mariner CEOs (Ellis and Lincoln) strike me as more managers than entrepreneurs….

Jerry Crasnick was out of ideas to write about on ESPN so he scavenged USSM for this storyline.

Click: HERE for vultured column.

But they say, imitation is the highest form of flattery, or something like that.