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Dave on KJR
I’ll be on with Groz at 4:05 pm. You know the drill by now.
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Twittah
Are they actually going to archive this one?
I’m going to be stuck on a bus for my commute home today.
Well, this is bound to be interesting. More interesting than the rest of the season, anyway.
Dave, I hope you get a chance to mention the absurdity of the Wilson pickup, and how the front office must change its philosophy in order to avoid making the same kinds of mistakes it made under the Bavasi era.
I will admit this right off the bat. This comment has nothing to do with this thread, [deleted, has nothing to do with the thread]
[ot]
Not that it’s not a cool video, but things like that should really be saved for either a game thread (where we don’t moderate much for being off-topic) or in a “daily news” sort of comment thread, not just whichever happens to be the newest.
Dave, I hope you get a chance to address the absurdity of Vidro hitting cleanup.
Also, the video is fake. It’s a Gatorade commercial they tried to make ‘viral.’
It is fake, I heard about it on the radio here in Spokane. Still was cool to see it.
it’s a cool video 5, but as should be pretty obvious, it’s fake. It’s part of a viral marketing campaign for gatorade. Gets Brent Johnson his 15 minutes of quasi-fame, I guess.
Dave, any word on the second guy the M’s acquired today, Jason Kershner? An older Jared Wells? Bullpen help for Tacoma in the mold of Scott Shoemaker?
Might the subject of team defense come up in this chat? I know you guys have been hammering on this for a while, but it’s likely that the majority of listeners still think that Yuni is a gold glove SS – I think the one actual positive/optimistic thing to discuss is that a solution to the abysmal team DER means EVERY pitcher on the staff will look a lot better.
Here goes Groz riffing on bad chemistry as a key reason for this year’s M’s record. Please tell him the team is bad because the players are bad, not because there are ‘cliques’ in the clubhouse.
Wells sent back down to make room for Felix coming off the DL. How incompetent. They brought the guy up for one effing game when the pen didn’t need him.
Okay – Davetime!
I can’t believe how long it took for the awful player at http://www.kjram.com/cc-common/ondemand/player.html?world=st to load.
I almost went to my clock radio to try to find KJR on AM…
“The best blog in my opinion.” — Groz
Great, I got a phone call and couldn’t turn it on until Dave was just hanging up.
Summary, please? Pretty please?
I missed it too, but I just heard the Groz reading DMZ’s “smoking crater” post, or the central part of it, and then opening the phone lines.
I turned away, couldn’t listen to the callers.
They talked about clubhouse chemistry, the ridiculousness of how/why/when Sexson was let go — Groz brought up Vidro being next, and Dave went on to say it was the most amazing thing in the world that he’s batting cleanup for the Mariners — and doesn’t have a single Major League skill. Dave would like to ask Jim and Lee “WTF!?” apparently 😉 haha
Dave spoke mostly on what he would do with Bedard (keep him and let the new GM decide what to do with him) since the Sabathia and Harden trade got very little in return. After Dave spoke on how fans need to be patient with Felix since he’s only 22 (younger than Clement, Vladimir, Morrow, etc) they both wished each other “Happy Felix Day” and Dave was gone…
No mention of the awful acquirement of Craig Wilson after ridding the team of Sexson.
After Dave left, Groz basically read the bullet points from this entry.
I almost forgot… Dave reiterated that as much as it may seem that there’s only negativity/sarcasm sometimes at USSM, Dave would like nothing more than to go to a parade for the Mariners after winning their first World Series.
I believe a lot of people forget that when reading this blog.
Re: chemistry. Dave basically said it’s unquantifiable and unpredictable. The M’s put more importance on it than any other team, and do it badly, so they should keep or release players based on talent, not chemistry.
Yeah, that’s a pretty common refrain (you should see the occasional drive-by comment we catch before you guys see it, hoo-boy).
But the site is negative a lot lately because of the team doing stupid things; if they start getting better (this doesn’t include getting lucky with a bad process like last year), the tone of the site will change.
18: Thanks for posting that. I’m not very good at remembering direct quotes — and that was an important one.
thanks for the summary– I was mid-haircut, and oddly enough, they don’t care to work around earphones…
It never ceases to amaze me that people accuse the people who own, operate, write for, and basically bleed for this site of being too negative. Do they honestly believe that these guys hate the Mariners and that is why they put in all this time and effort?
I think the perception is that a lot of folks here (mostly the community at large) seem to cheer for players to fail, as if it will somehow validate their opinions.
Since I don’t get a say-so in who the team signs (lucky for all of us), all I can really do is hope that they are successful, and as a fan of the team, I prefer to see every player on the roster be successful, even the ones I don’t necessarily like (Jose Guillen last year comes to mind). When Willie got his double the other day, the disappointment here was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Imagine people from other teams, or even M’s fans who come to visit the first time, only to find our own ‘fans’ (on this board) revelling in individual failures. It really turned me off to this place for a long time (still does).
Something that always perplexed me (still does) is why everyone pulled so hard for the team to release Sexson and Vidro, when there really isn’t much to be gained by them leaving. It’s not like we have some 1B protege who wasn’t getting at-bats because of Sexson. Now that he’s gone we have Miguel Cairo to take up that mantle, or Kenji? I really don’t see this as much of an improvement. Sexson was gone at the end of this year anyway, and we still have to pay his salary. Whats the point of releasing him (unless of course you were just doing him a favor)?
As bad as Vidro is, we really don’t have a DH (although we do have 3 catchers! HUZZAH!). Once he is released they will just spread those at bats amongst a bunch of platoon players who aren’t really DH material (and are only even marginal pinch hitters). Again, if were releasing him as a favor to him, so he can have an extended break and allow his knees to heal, fine, but I really don’t see how it’s going to make any significant improvement to the team by giving those at bats to anyone else (at least anyone currently on the roster).
I guess I see value in releasing someone if you have a young player to take up that role on a full time basis, to get them some consistent major league experience. The players being released are being released because they are playing poorly, while there is really no one to take their place. Releasing them doesn’t make the team better, unless of course you really believe the crap about Sexson being a negative influence in the clubhouse (I don’t – think about it, if he had 70 RBI’s and 20 HR’s, his clubhouse attitude wouldn’t be on anyone’s radar, even if it were bad).