Will To Win
One of the frequent criticisms of this organization by fans at large is that they’re not interested in winning, just in making money. In fact, the quantity of comments like that popping up here have increased dramatically over the last few weeks – we seemingly can’t have a thread about anything before someone pops in and says that the team is happy just being competitive and profitable. In this morning’s P-I, Chuck Armstrong responded to a similar question:
“I’d respond that that’s nonsense,” Armstrong said. “Look at the payroll. If you split the big city markets with two teams (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago), Seattle is the 18th-biggest market in the league. The payroll as of the All-Star break was sixth or seventh. That’s commitment of ownership.
“I keep scratching my head — what more could ownership do? If we’d made the right decisions along the way, we’d be right there. If what we were worried about was making a profit, we’d lower payroll, not raise it.”
Guess what – he’s right. The “ownership doesn’t care about winning” line isn’t based on any kind of actual evidence. The Mariners have consistently spent huge amounts of money on their payroll since moving into Safeco Field, and have had the financial edge over the rest of the division for the last decade. If winning was simply based on payroll, the M’s would be running away with the AL West for the 10th year in a row.
Simply because of population density, the Yankees, Red Sox, and Mets will always be in their own little stratosphere of payroll, with the other 27 teams lagging behind. Take them out of the picture for a second – who else has consistently outspent the Mariners in payroll?
Detroit has a $20 million higher payroll this year, but this was their go-for-broke season when they pushed it all in to try and win this year. It didn’t work, and they’ll be cutting payroll this winter.
Then, there’s a big cluster of teams all right around the $120 million payroll mark – the Angels, Dodgers, Cubs, White Sox, and Mariners. That’s the group the M’s find themselves in when it comes to spending – being dead even with the two Chicago and two LA franchises.
I’m not sure what more people want, honestly. The Mariners are supposed to outspend the Dodgers and Cubs now? Why? Quite simply, if you can’t build a winning team for $120 million, you don’t deserve any more money, or even a job. And that’s the conclusion the Mariners finally came to this year – the problem isn’t the lack of money available to sign talent, but instead, the people in charge of deciding who to give it to.
Now, I’m not a Chuck Armstrong/Howard Lincoln fanboy by any means – we have deep philosophical disagreements with them on how things should be run, and it’s clear that a good portion of the blame for how this franchise has been handled falls at their feet. But can we please put to rest this notion that somehow ownership doesn’t want to win? It’s ridiculous and unsupported by any kind of actual fact.
The Mariners want to win – they just don’t know how. Ignorance is not the same thing as apathy.
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yup. on the same theme, Larry Stone blogged that he’d been getting email complaining that the Ms weren’t trying, and he’d had to point out that they were just bad.
“Ignorance is not the same thing as apathy.”
But which is worse?
Great point Dave (and reiteration of the point by msb) – It’s not that we don’t WANT to win, it’s just that we really just aren’t going about it in the right way. Look at all the years the Red Sox had that ridiculous payroll yet just couldn’t top the Yanks (granted, that was right in the midst of their “dynasty”). Bring in some great, fresh baseball minds like Theo Epstein, and look what can happen.
I agree for the most part. The thing that still sticks with me is how they weren’t willing to add payroll at the deadline in 2001 when Lou wanted another bat. It seems to me that if they really wanted to win and weren’t only concerned with the bottom line, then they would have made a deal there.
But you certainly can’t argue with what they’ve put into the team over the last several years in order to try to win…
For me the criticism is more about whether they want to win it all, or are content to just win in a general sense. That’s based on some of their comments back when the team was winning regularly, about the focus on “being competitive.” And granting that the playoffs are somewhat of a crapshoot, I’ve never gotten that outraged about it. I certainly would never suggest that they’re happy to lose as long as they’re still making money.
I want to know one thing, though. Can we hold them to that last sentence in the quote? If they cut payroll this offseason, which I think is eminently possible, can we then conclude that making a profit is one of their major priorities?
Dave-
IIRC, I think much of this from a fan perspective goes back to the 2001 season when Lou was opening campaigning for another bat but the FO told him no. The assumption was that the team didn’t want to take on the payroll for another plus bat. Since the team didn’t win the world series that year, many decided that the team really didn’t “want” to win bad enough since it didn’t do what Lou wanted and bring in another big bat.
Your argument that the team has been in the top tier in spending for the recent past and that they are spending enough to win is true, but like all things, I think once people have the idea in their head it is hard to displace it. Hopefully people will now realize (myself included) that the team is spending enough to compete and has made that part of the commitment.
Now the team needs to fix the “If we’d made the right decisions along the way” portion of this by relegating How/uck to Emeritus positions and bringing in new blood to run the baseball side of the organization. It seems like they may finally be seeing the light that their way of running the team is not working. Bringing in a new GM and allowing that person to reorganize the player personnel side of the Mariners as he or she seems fit is the next step. Keeping the scouting/draft team together seems like it would be a good choice as they seem to be doing well in their realm. Then the team needs to add some analytical folks to suppliment the traditional scouting and figure out how to correctly value its assets, both Minor leagues and Major.
Thanks as alwasy for the great post Dave. I see that my thinking the team was not committed to winning was not necessarily correct. They are committed to spending the finanical resources to win, they just don’t know how to spend them correctly.
To be simple, but to the point, I don’t think they are greedy. They are dumb. Simple.
Winning brings in more money, so if they want money, they’d want to win.
They just don’t have any clue how to do it. They are terrible at their job.
“I keep scratching my head — what more could ownership do? If we’d made the right decisions along the way, we’d be right there.”
Is it just me, or is Chuck Armstrong grabbing the shotgun barrel and pointing it at his own head, here?
One can still hope….
I also like how they seem to take blame for once, “If we’d made the right decisions along the way, we’d be right there.”
At least it seems they’ve gotten over thier egos and have began to accept the fact that the’ve done a shitty job.
BP/#6 & Mike Snow/#7
That’s what I was trying to remember. The general feeling is that the team wants to win and be competitive because it knows that if it does not win and is not competitive that it will be very difficult to make money in the long term.
The question is whether the team wants to win enough to make money or win champships. While the two are not mutually exclusive, there have been comments in the past that made fans (myself included) believe it was more the former than the latter.
I think we all hope that they get a new GM (a la BigB’s comment about Theo’s impact on the Red Sox) and win enough to make runs at winning championships and make money so can be a successful franchise in the long run.
of course, Lou always wants another bat.
IIRC, wasn’t the 2001 potential trade that didn’t get made Pineiro for Juan Encarnacion?
I agree with Dave wholeheartedly that the Mariners just don’t know how to win.
On the other hand, there was the infamous Howard Lincoln quote (I believe from 2001 or just after) that where he said something to the effect of our fans (read: families) are more interested in having a good, wholesome time than winning.
Hence, no “Yankees Suck” shirts, and political cover for retaining bland, local favorites like Dan Wilson and Willie Bloomquist.
I think what people saw in this was that the Mariner brass lacked the killer instincts shown by the A’s and the Yankees to win–at all costs regardless of the “family friendly” qualities of the players hired.
This of course was roundly disproven with the acquisition of Carl Everett, whereupon the M’s brass made Dave’s point showing that they have absolutely no idea how to win.
I agree with you, Dave, that the Mariner brass probably wants to win.
I’ll say this, though – with the lease deal the M’s have (the best in baseball), and the basically free stadium they received from the taxpayers, the M’s continue to be – even with a relatively high payroll – one of the most profitable teams in baseball. And that doesn’t include the HUGE profits the owners will make when they sell the team. Meanwhile, there seems to be as much attention paid to the marketability of players as to their baseball ability. Add it all up and the impression is that, while the owners may want to win, they might not be motivated *enough* to win, because they continue to make money hand over fist regardless of the outcome on the field.
Seems like a straw man argument to me. It’s like Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, about how his daughter got a dog from lobbyists and “I’m not going to ask my daughter to give back Checkers the dog.”
Armstrong’s just bringing up some imaginary argument to make him look like he’s the victim.
Imaginary argument?? People accuse them of not wanting to win so often that even the major media is occasionally moved to ask the question.
I agree completely with the main point; the Mariners spend money, they just spend it badly.
Armstrong’s manipulating of the market rankings doesn’t work so well, though. He’s evidently using the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area population rankings, which is fair enough, and Seattle ranks 15th, which would indeed put them 18th if you count New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles twice. The problem is, San Francisco/Oakland is also one SMSA, and dividing that one between the two teams puts each of them well below Seattle in market size. And the Riverside/San Bernardino SMSA, ranked 14th, has no baseball team. So if you rank all the baseball teams by market size, splitting the markets with more than one team as Armstrong does, the Mariners still come out 15th.
Are the M’s really in the 18th biggest market? I don’t have any hard data, but it seems like the team brings in a disproportionate amount of money (relative to the number of people in the geographic market) from residual ‘95 era fandom, Japanese interest, an elite stadium, and higher per capita income. Are their TV and radio deals at the level one would expect for the 18th largest MLB market?
Not disagreeing with the point of the post, and I could be way off base…
…and they still have the seventh or eighth highest payroll, so clearly spending enough money is not the problem, regardless of whether you rank their market 15th or 18th. The precise rank of the market is pretty much hair-splitting. The main point is still: it isn’t about the amount of money.
The question is about how it gets spent.
“[The Ownership of Team X] doesn’t care about winning. They only care about profits” is an irksome cliché as any in baseball. Of course owners care about winning. Winning increases the profit margin and makes it that much easier to generate future revenue. Winning and profits aren’t two mutually exclusive concepts. In fact, by and large, they go hand-in-hand.
Now, if somebody were to say that the ownership doesn’t care to know what it takes to win, that’d be a bit more justifiable. I don’t think the Mariners particularly care in that regard. Like any incompetent business, the plan seems to be open the checkbook and throw money and resources (i.e. prospects) at the problem until it goes away. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of differentiation between spending and competing. Armstrong’s comments don’t really go far in assuaging that feeling either.
actually I don’t remember that quote.
Looking at just the census figures is ridiculous. Seattle’s media market, which is a lot closer to what you’re looking for, is in the top ten at least. We’re richer than a lot of those other cities, and MLB has granted the M’s a truly vast market covering the entire northwest corner of the US and Canada as well. I can’t remember where I saw it, but one analysis a decade or so ago put the M’s baseball market at about sixth to eighth overall. It’s a FANTASTIC market.
Not to mention that just a few years ago they were GIVEN FREE OF CHARGE a wonderful and expensive facility, something that few other businesses could even dream of getting. You think Nordstrom wouldn’t like a free $500 mil store?
Chuck needs to shut the *&^% up about how hard his row is to hoe and think about WHY his team sucks so bad. It’s not the goddamn market. It’s not for the lack of trying either; but WHO CARES? I don’t want them to try HARDER, I want them to try SMARTER.
The goddamn market didn’t tell you to blow $60 mil on Washburn, HoRam, Batista, and Silva, fool.
Yeah, this is a uninformed criticism. You would only say this if you just weren’t paying attention to the situation. Maybe it makes more sense to us Mariners fans because it used to be true, say back in the ’90’s, but it is hard to see how the ownership could do much more. Yeah, I guess they could spend even more money. But that’s not the point – the point is, they are spending as much money on payroll as you need to in order to win championships. You don’t need to spend at the Yankees/Red Sox level to do it.
Of course, most fans don’t know what the ownership doesn’t know, so they can’t exactly accuse them of being ignorant. All they know is that they keep on not winning.
As for the market size argument, don’t you need to add Spokane, Montana, Alaska, Portland, etc. to the population in Seattle for the M’s market? As well as a non-zero fraction of the population in Japan?
Based on a tread over at Fantasy Cafe (by Chicago RedSox on 9/11/06, there is no link button for me right now to use to link in the post), I looked up the most recent MLB team revenue estimates and team spending. According to Forbes.com’s most recent MLB franchise valuations, the M’s had revenues of $194M last year, tied for ninth in MLB. According to the MLB Team Payrolls on foxsports.com, the M’s have a team payroll of $100,773,982 — good for 11th in MLB.
This puts the M’s 13th in MLB for % of Revenue spent on player salary at 52%.
Team Revenue ($M) Payroll ($) Payroll %
Detroit Tigers 173 125 72%
New York Yankees 327 234 72%
Chicago White Sox 193 136 70%
Los Angeles Dodgers 224 147 66%
Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim 200 130 65%
Milwaukee Brewers 158 99 63%
Chicago Cubs 214 129 60%
New York Mets 235 139 59%
Toronto Blue Jays 160 88 55%
Philadelphia Phillies 192 103 54%
St Louis Cardinals 194 104 54%
Arizona Diamondbacks 165 88 53%
Seattle Mariners 194 101 52%
Houston Astros 193 98 51%
Atlanta Braves 199 96 48%
Boston Red Sox 263 124 47%
Kansas City Royals 131 59 45%
Colorado Rockies 169 73 43%
Baltimore Orioles 166 65 39%
Texas Rangers 172 64 37%
San Francisco Giants 197 68 35%
Minnesota Twins 149 50 34%
Cincinnati Reds 161 54 34%
Tampa Bay Rays 138 45 33%
Oakland Athletics 154 49 32%
San Diego Padres 167 53 32%
Cleveland Indians 181 55 30%
Pittsburgh Pirates 139 41 29%
Florida Marlins 128 36 28%
Washington Nationals 153 40 26%
Sorry, that looked aweful…. Mods, could you please delete the data off the end of my last post? It looks like WordPress is deleting out all the spaces….
are you thinking of this column referenced in DMZ’s 2005 blog entry about the business side of the Ms?
If you’re going to do that, you’d need to add New England to the Boston market. As well as a non-zero fraction of the population of the United States. Etc.
He was answering a direct question.
Look, you can cavil about the details all you want, but the fact of the matter is, the M’s are spending more than enough to win–and in fact, could win it all while spending far, far less if they had good people running it, while as things currently stand, they’d have to be willing to bleed red ink out every orifice to compete with the AL East. Sure, they should have told Bavasi to spend whatever it took to sign Vlad away from the Angels, though it’s just as well they didn’t do so when it came to Tejada; but aside from Guerrero, I have a hard time pointing to an instance in which ownership’s unwillingness to spend set us back any. If anything, I wish they’d been stingier at a few points (Sexson, Washburn, Silva . . .).
Do the Mariners want to win badly enough that they’re willing to change the way they do business away from what doesn’t work … and what, year after year after year, has proven itself to be a failure? To reevaluate their basic business philosophies? To study what works elsewhere and adapt it as their own?
There’s no evidence that the answer to any of those questions is “yes” … and that, I believe is why many people fairly question the Mariners’ “will to win.”
19: “Now, if somebody were to say that the ownership doesn’t care to know what it takes to win, that’d be a bit more justifiable. I don’t think the Mariners particularly care in that regard. Like any incompetent business, the plan seems to be open the checkbook and throw money and resources (i.e. prospects) at the problem until it goes away. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of differentiation between spending and competing. Armstrong’s comments don’t really go far in assuaging that feeling either.”
I think that describes it quite well. Armstrong’s quote, “If what we were worried about was making a profit, we’d lower payroll, not raise it” is a straw man, because if the M’s did e.g. slash their payroll to Marlin-esque levels, the fans would stop coming (unless by some miracle the M’s fielded a competitive team with that tiny payroll).
The M’s do care about profits, but slashing payroll isn’t the way to do it, and they know it.
The M’s could get even more profit than they currently do if they fielded a winning team, but they don’t know how to do that. So it’s exactly as TomG says: “they’re content to throw money and resources at the problem” instead of taking the steps to truly improve the team.” And that is the sense in which the M’s don’t care about winning, or more accurately as TomG puts it, don’t care to know what it takes to win.
Jim, that’s not a matter of them lacking the will to win, it’s a matter of them lacking the wit. I think the assumption that you, and MKT, and others are making is that what we understand, they understand, or easily could. The fact of the matter is, reprogramming your thinking just isn’t that easy.
Starting to reprogram your thinking is as easy as being willing to do so. And I still haven’t heard M’s executives willing to make that leap. And that IS a question of will.
If 46-80 doesn’t persuade them to at least start on the road to new thinking, then what will? I just can’t buy that it’s 0% will and 100% stupidity. I think there’s a few more shades of willful gray in there somewhere.
My usual perspective on ‘wanting to win’ in this sort of circumstance is that there’s a difference between ‘wanting’ to win and ‘trying’ to win. The former is what I see in a lot of mediocrities; they’d love it if success fell into their laps, but they don’t want it badly enough to actually study their methods and adopt new techniques and new perspectives. They ‘want’ to win, but they want to stay within their comfort zone more. The latter group wants to win in a wholly different way; they’re willing to take a critical look at their assumptions and themselves, and see losing as a sign that something has gone horribly wrong.
Man, it’s simple guys. They are bad at their job and should be fired. They are idiots when it comes to running a pro baseball team.
Well, actually, I think that’s not true either, because slashing payroll to that level could actually increase the profit, despite the drastic drop in revenue (remember what the post comparing Cleveland and Seattle and their different approaches to returning to winning—the upshot was that Cleveland was more profitable over a four year span, despite spending less).
Being willing to do so is as difficult as acknowledging that you need to do so. I don’t think it’s a question of will; I think it’s a question of personal self-examination. Most people fail that test; most people will do things that don’t work over and over. Most of the people we know, most of the people we work with, most of us, period. The Mariners are simply doing so on a public stage.
Even most of the organizations that are better than the Mariners do things over and over that don’t work; they just don’t do as many of them. At any rate, it is very unlikely that Lincoln and Armstrong are capable of learning the lessons they need to learn, whether or not they have the will, however we define it. They need to be replaced. Most owners faced with a record of failure will act, whether they understand the causes of the failure or not. Ownership needs to act.
Do I hear an “amen”?!
Amen! After 8 years I am giving up my four season tickets. The only reason to have season tickets at all is if the team has some shot of going to the playoffs. I signed on for 2008 because I thought that with better starting pitching and JJ in the pen, this could be a great year. That thought was gone by the end of April.
The front office and ownership group need a big shakeup. A dip in revenue from season ticket holders and the luxury suites should give them some incentive to roll-up their sleeves and start working overtime. Somewhere in mlb front offices, they are chuckling about the bumbling and inept management of the mariners from the GM to the scouts.
I love baseball and I’ll go to games just to see the other team, but I’m not going to give them my money to hold and invest in this dismal franchise. And of course they want to win. Some people are just willing to work harder, are smarter and have better luck. Let’s get those people.
So what I’m hearing is that it’s not that the M’s lack the will to win, it’s that they lack the will to look within and change from their non-winning ways.
I’m not disputing Dave’s premise. I’m simply saying I can see how intelligent people would think the M’s do in fact lack the will to win … if the difference as outlined above is indeed that thin and fine.
“Jim, that’s not a matter of them lacking the will to win, it’s a matter of them lacking the wit.”
Well, since Nintendo still has some relationship with the M’s, at least they do not lack the Wii.
it is understood that Guerrero went to the Angels because of the location, because of Moreno, because of the make-up of the team & because of the selling job done by his mentor Alfredo Griffin, and not because of the money– he turned down more from Baltimore.
really? because you could give them to me. I’d go to games.
I’m with Jim Thompsen on this. The M’s are willing to spend money to win, but they aren’t willing to move their corporate culture out of their comfort zone in order to win. At least, they haven’t been up til now.
They aren’t idiots. They aren’t nitwits. They know what they’ve been trying hasn’t worked, and they aren’t really dim enough to think it just has to work next time, like a gambler doubling down on Red at the roulette table. But the idea of changing their philosophy is too scary for them. So they tell themselves stories about how they were waylaid by bad luck, or how they just got the wrong guy, and maintain their belief in the underlying broken strategy.
They aren’t apathetic. They do have some will to win. But not enough. In a certain sense, spending money is easy for these guys – they have lots of it. Saying “we screwed up and were wrong” seems a lot, lot harder. The most encouraging thing is the “If we’d made the right decisions along the way, we’d be right there.” quote. But it still feels like he’s looking at it as a surface problem. I’d rather hear his say something like “we keep making bad decisions, and we need to figure out why. What’s wrong with the process we use for making decisions that keeps us from making good ones.”
Until they start saying that, they don’t have enough will to win.
I wish it were that cut and dried, folks, but it isn’t. It is a lot like playing poker. It is hard to get better at poker because there is a lot of luck designed into the game. From time to time you can make a killing through bad choices, even though over the long haul, bad choices will make you lose. And you can get creamed making good choices, even though over the long haul you will win. But because the results can vary so widely, it isn’t always easy going back and determining which precise choices were good and which were bad. If you can’t tell the difference, you can change how you play, but you still won’t get any better. If you can’t tell WHY a certain move you made in the past was bad, then you can’t avoid repeating the mistake.
Eventually, of course, the hope is that ownership will look at the long-term track record and hire better decision-makers. But why should ownership do that if the franchise is currently profitable? Perhaps it could be made more profitable, but why take the risk if the return is currently good?
I think you mean Thomsen.
And I agree with him too.
You don’t need season tickets to go to games. You can buy tickets at the box office. That way, you don’t have to pay up front, and you don’t have to worry about conflicts coming up six months from now meaning you can’t use your $120 worth of seats.
On the other hand, if the team goes to the playoffs, season tickets makes it a lot easier to get playoff tickets at reasonable rates.
Season tickets are a big investment. If all you want to do is go to games once in a while, it makes a lot more sense just to buy individual games.
Oh, Grizz is right. Thomsen.
I might agree with Thompsen too, but I don’t know what he thinks yet.
While Armstrong’s premise is right — you can’t argue the team isn’t spending money — I never cease to be amazed at his ability to distort numbers to his liking, or just be unable to do simple math. As noted, Seattle is 15th in SMSA if you double count LA, Chicago, and New York who have two teams and are more than twice the size you get 18th. But the Bay Area is the same size and shares 2 teams (-2), Inland Empire doesn’t have a team (-1) and then Toronto is much larger (+1), which makes Seattle 16th.
16th vs 18th is basically an “oops” though sloppy, but if you talk about TV/radio/fan market (incuding the whole state, Idaho, Oregon, and parts North), Seattle might just be a top 5 market behind NY x2, Cubs, and Dodgers. Claiming the team is “middle of the league” is somewhere between disingenuous and dishonest. As the chart above shows, they’re middle of the pack in spending relative to revenue. Plus that overstates their “spending effort” as revenue potential far exceeds actual revenue at this time due to the product they put on the field over the last 5 years.
speaking of wrong-headedness, McLaren was on talking to Softy on KJR, and apparently still firmly convinced that had they just re-signed Guillen all would have been well in Marinerland.
Cause they’re not stupid enough to think that the team will STAY profitable. Any business person looks a few years in the future. Any GOOD business person will take the risk to improve the return–and make no mistake about it, even the dumbest businessman can look at the Mariners and see that return could be improved.
Jim, if you’re saying that, for the Mariners, all they need is the will to completely change their paradigms of baseball analysis and management and their entire corporate culture, then perhaps they do lack the will, but the will that they lack is one that is exceedingly difficult to acquire. This kind of change comes once in a lifetime. In any case, even if they had the will, I’m not sure that would help. They still wouldn’t know what the *correct* methods of baseball analysis are. They know that something is wrong. But *what*? When you are in a crisis like they are, it is not that easy to tell which thing it is that is so fouled up.
We act like the dominant sabermetric methods are self-evident or something but they aren’t. When Chuck Armstrong talks about his understanding of statistics, he isn’t lying. He’s not stupid. He just doesn’t understand the right things. You can have a Ph.D. in stats and not be a good baseball analyst if you haven’t studied and engaged the current research. Even if you have, you might not end up agreeing with all of it, even some of the most important parts. Einstein wasn’t dumb but quantum mechanics creeped him out. He was too much of a Spinozist, too much of a believer in determinism, for the non-deterministic elements of quantum mechanics to even make sense to him. “God does not play dice,” he said. So I don’t see how merely realizing that they have completely screwed up their approach is going to fix things. Somehow, someone needs to convince them to adopt the right ideas, not just new ideas. But I don’t see it happening until Howard and Chuck retire.
msb – yep, the only reason to have season tickets is if there is a chance of post season playoffs and you want to be there at the safe. I just have better things to do with $13,000.00+ than give it to the mariners. I did that for 8 years. I can’t even imagine how exciting it is to have paid for the privilege of sitting in the Diamond Club and watch this year’s debacle unfold.
My point is that ownership needs an incentive to change and a drop in attendance should serve as warning. When people start to balk at the idea of ponying up their cash since they can walk-up to any game they want and get a seat, maybe, just maybe, someone with some power to do something will act.
Market size is very tough to judge these days. MLBAM, MLBI, XM, MLB Extra Innings, and FOX all impact market size becasue they help provide equal footing for each member club, regardless of the market size of each DMA.
In addition, many clubs reach a regional audience: Seattle has Portland, several states, plus Vancouver, BC and all of Canada (via 50ish games on SportsNet). Other teams also have substantial Canadian distribution, and large territories in the US. I’m going to guess that the financial impact of these extra territories is unique to each team, and that it would be nearly impossible to guage their impacts without “looking at the books” of every team.
I agree entirely with the original post.
For those that insist on using words like “stupid”, I offer to you . . . Major League Baseball is a tough business. Nearly every team has found a formula for success for a short period of time, but I cannot think of one that has maintained such success for the long term since the fundamentals of the business starting changing (yet again) in the 1990’s.
I think notangrygradstudent has a good point. To us, the current season is the logical outcome of years of bad poker. But to management, hitting an inside straight last year wasn’t luck, it was good play. Even if they agree that they lost their shirt this year through bad decisions, they believe they were on the cusp last year. The failure this year is just a failure this year; a blown opportunity. They don’t understand that the opportunity wasn’t really there.
The vagaries of luck, and minimum talent levels in the major leagues, plus a fair amount of money to throw around, can let management think they’re on the right track any time the team improves. And you know what? They’re going to improve next year, almost inevitably, and management’s going to think they’re on the right track again.
They won’t start thinking they need to reappraise their whole approach unless they lose and lose and lose and just never win. And that’s not going to happen.
@50: it’s not as hard as you make it out. Other teams are doing it. The Mariners are now at the very bottom of the pack in terms of understanding how baseball works. If you don’t understand your own business, why are you in it? The market is telling Lincoln and Armstrong something: GO AWAY.
If the Mariners could only keep one of the following two assets – Felix Hernandez or the Mariner Moose – which asset do you think they would keep?
I agree that everybody involved wants to win. But I think there are a couple of significant caveats.
I do not think it is as simple as saying “we spend X” so clearly winning is more important that profit. I think they overlap, but that profit is their primary goal. (And isn’t their a famous quote from Armstrong or Lincoln in Forbes to that effect?)
Here, I think, is one huge way where the profit>winning has shown up: a complete unwillingness to start over. They scoffed at a rebuild, terrified of what that would do their annual balance – so they rolled the dice. And lost. And again. And lost. And again. And lost.
That is one of the worst things about corporations (or government agencies)… almost everything is based on one year intervals. It really can cripple long-term success. The depressing thing is that Nintendo, of all people, know better.
They run this team like an annual business, not a long-term investment, and it hurts the team.
So… yes, I think they want to win. No, I don’t believe they fixate on how to win a world series when they sit in that boardroom. They fixate on dollars.
(I also think they want to win, but only on their terms. They do not want to win enough to undermine themselves.)
What evidence do you have that it won’t? For all I know, Chuck Armstrong is a flipping genious when it comes to international marketing. That won’t help the M’s on-field performance, but it could well be a great reason for Chuck to keep his job. They may well have good reason to believe that the M’s will turn a profit regardless of their record. Do we have any real evidence that W-L records correlate well with profitability?
I disagree. I was thinking about Dave’s final comment in the original post:
How did Billy Beane come to be the prototype for sabrmetric GMS? Did he get a Phd in Statistics from an Ivy League school? No, he was a pro ballplayer, drafted out of high school. He rode beat up busses from one podunk town to the next in the minors, and he sat in the dugout with the Bash Brothers in Oakland, probably spitting rivers of chaw juice. He played for Davey Johnson, Tome Kelly, Sparky Anderson and Tony LaRussa. He “grew up” old-school. When he took over the A’s, he didn’t know how to run the team in a completely different manner than anyone had run a MLB club before. But he knew if he ran his club like everyone else ran theirs, he’d lose. He needed a different way of doing things, and he wanted to win badly enough to figure it out. Looking at the list of managers he played for, I bet what he learned from them wasn’t any particular way of playing baseball, but a way of translating desire into useful action.
Beane is special because he pioneered it, but since then other GMs have figured it out too. Lot’s of people want to do something but don’t know how to do it. At first. But successful people figure it out.
Wierd how the edit feature sometimes doesn’t work. Beane played for Tom Kelly, not Tome Kelly. I’m doing great at adding extra letters to people’s names today.
And I couldn’t get the “o” out of “genious”, either, which makes me look particularly bright. Bleah.
Business 101.
C’mon, they’re NOT stupid. And they most certainly aren’t stupid on BUSINESS topics.
They can read the attendence declines as well as anyone else. And they can see how ratings are going. And how the rights are not fetching as much as they did. And….
Sure, the Mariner brass would like to win but they’re not losing any sleep over it as long as the team remains highly profitable. They’ll keep signing the Rauls and Ichiros with name recognition for the tourists and visitors from Spokane who watch a couple of games a year. They are in the entertainment business as their top priority. Look at the awful Chicago Cubs teams of the last half century with their occasional superstar but loyal fan base and I see the Mariners.
Luck plays a role, of course, and when a player like the “Igniter” WFB goes down it’s tough to not write off the season.
Sweet Lou put it in a nutshell for us: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/baseball/141412_mbook26.html
“I like Howard personally,” Piniella said. “I enjoyed working with him. He’s a bright guy, a charming guy. But I’ll tell you this — he’s bottom line. Howard likes total, total control. Pat wants to win. Howard just doesn’t know how.”
Neither does his man Chuck. The ownership needs new direction, and it won’t come from a GM that will have to get along with this leadership group. if they stay, don’t expect big changes for the better. They certainly haven’t made the right decisions along the way. Isn’t that what they’re paid to do? Maybe that’s why Sexton and Vidro stuck around so long- because they saw themselves in them.
Bzzztttt. Sorry, unacceptable response. Where is there real EVIDENCE (versus assumptions based on mythical coursework) that a poor W-L equates to poor profitability? Last I checked, the Royals were still in KC and Pittsburgh still had the Pirates. Both franchises suck, but the owners haven’t exactly jumped over themselves to get away from their “bad” investment.
I would love to believe that HowChuck are about to be fired, but I just don’t see any evidence that it is so. I absolutely agree that they aren’t stupid in a business sense, which is what leads me to the question in the first place. They clearly suck at putting a decent team on the field, so if they really are smart businessmen, there must not be much correlation between winning games and making money.
Which is, come to think of it, a way of both agreeing and disagreeing with Dave. Armstrong has to SAY he is interested in winning, but what he really has to be interested in is profitability. Depending on how well Arstrong thinks those two things correlate, winning may well be a secondary goal: Nice to be a winner, certainly, but perhaps it is not the primary driver.
I don’t think there is enough evidence either way, frankly.
Today’s email from Mariners.com allows you to “Jump to the front of the line in 2009 with a Mariners season ticket plan! Place a deposit today and guarantee a seat…”
Wow — that is some delusional marketing campaign!!! Again – only YOU can let the Mariners know that you aren’t a sucker. DO NOT re-up for ‘09 season tickets or packages!!
I just don’t think “want to win” is a meaningful phrase. Semantically it’s as valuable as “five is lately” or “wondering grass”. Wanting means nothing. Winning doesn’t have anything to do with wanting.
Scuse me?
Declining attendance, declining radio rights fees and stagnant broadcast fees. That’s a lot of revenue to be made up there…
Bzzt yourself. This ain’t genius level discussion here. It’s been shown in numerous economic studies in the past that revenue and attendance is correlated to winning. Why are you disputing what’s been shown in the past, with other teams and with the Mariners themselves?
Now the only OTHER way to be profitable is to cut expenses to the bone and rely on the pooled TV rights—but that’s not happening here.
But you clearly have your mind made up…
#64
“I would love to believe that HowChuck are about to be fired, but I just don’t see any evidence that it is so.”
I agree… I mentioned this in Starting Suckitude thread. Short of voluntary resignation/retirement or change in ownership these two aren’t going anywhere for awhile. Especially since there have already been firings of the GM and Manager this season.
Wait, so who is Will and what are you predicting he’ll win?
The thing about HowChuck is that they WANT to win. I think that is their goal. Anyone that says we don’t want to win should just look at our payroll. As to whether they are interested in winning or creating a family friendly enviorment, I would say both. Even though HowChuck have less of a clue on how to build a good baseball team than most people here, they are extremely smart bussiness people. They know that winning is a good way to gauruntee profits over the long term. They also know that creating a family friendly enviorment and signing fan favorites will maximize profits right now.
And let’s face it: The Seattle Mariners are a bussiness. And, like all bussineses, their goal is to make money. That’s the bottom line.
I disagree
I don’t think their goal is to make money. If it was they wouldn’t have such a high payroll plain an simple. Like the man said the people running this team want to win. They just do not have a clue how to do it…
I’ll just agree with the majority here, it’s all been said multiple times now. Great post putting the rumor to bed and showing it’s about the lack of execution than effort. They saw the profits in 01-03 far outweigh profits from 04-08. They know winning is better. Let’s just hope and pray they get a good GM and let them do what needs to be done this time.
I believe the Chuck Armstrong era is winding down. His comments to me sound a bit more candid than he’s been before. “If we’d made the right decisions along the way…” is, to me, and admission of guilt.
I think he’s gone for two unscientific reasons:
1) Rumors from all over are that Pat Gilleck is understood to become the President of the M’s next year.
2) Chuck Armstrong has a half-built beach house that he’s stopped construction on.
WE’ll see.
Dave -
If you’re basing their commitment on sheer dollars, your point is absolutely correct and no one can question that. I don’t so much question their ‘will to win,’ I moreso call into question their effort. It’s the lazy team’s way out to buy free agents in an attempt to compete.
These guys are smart businessmen, let’s not kid ourselves. Nintendo wouldn’t be the company it is without Lincoln. That said, does one think that Nintendo would turn a blind eye to Sony and Microsoft when they come out with new systems? My point is that these guys have shown an aptitude to create a superior product by analyzing the competition and building on their strengths, all the while minimizing their weaknesses.
I’m a small business owner myself, and I’d be living on the streets if I didn’t position myself to be better than my competition. What ownership has shown is that they have no ability to analyze their opponents and even recognize what’s working for the opposition and try to emulate that. Is it pigheadedness? Is it because they have a monopoly on the Seattle market? Who knows. That kind of stupidity is exactly why more heads need to roll. If you can’t capture that basic ability in running a business, you’re destined for failure.
You can throw all the money in the world at a problem, but if you have no clue on how to do it and don’t do what’s necessary to ensure smart investments, it’s pointless.
Their moves this offseason, and by that I mean who they hire, will dictate if it’s more of the same or turning over a new leaf.
So if Armstrong and Lincoln really do want to win, then what should the next move be? I don’t think it’s very realistic to think that either will step down on their own. Is it any more realistic to think that they might higher a younger GM that has a completely different plan for this team than they do and ask him to show them what it takes to win? If these guys are really as smart as a lot of us here believe, then they have to realize that their system just doesn’t work anymore. Does anybody think that they can put their egos aside long enough to let somebody try to show them a new direction? I’m not convinced that this will happen, but I think it’s what needs to happen.
I don’t think Armstrong & Lincoln want it as bad as other people in their same positions around the league. To me, that is not acceptable. Combine that with them making horrible decisions from top to bottom and that is how a franchise with a large payroll utterly fails for a whole damn decade.
And let’s be frank about it, too. It’s really very simple. Etc.
Yes. Unless you mean they are just a business.
No. Because they are not just a business. One of their goals is to make money. There are other goals they pursue, and some of them are more important, in fact, as you can see by the way almost every franchise is run. The only franchise I can think of that seems to be run entirely to make money with no other real goal is the Los Angeles Clippers. The people who buy sports team do so not because sports franchises are super money-generating machines, but because they think it’s neat to own a sports team. Of course they don’t want to lose money. But virtually every sports owner will sacrifice some profit for a chance at a championship.
77 -All true. But there is a big difference between owners and people who work for them.
It’s like saying a studio’s goal is to make good movies… well, kinda, insofar as it puts butts in seats. There is a lot of love and pride involved, sure. But the primary concern for people like Armstrong and Lincoln is the balance sheet.
There aren’t a ton of places where those two things don’t overlap… but where they don’t, I believe Howard and Chuck choose profit. Particularly because it’s all percentages, anyway. They are never turning down guaranteed victory.
Dave,
This is an absolutely wonderful post. You channel the discussion fully in the right direction.
My problem with a lot of the quotes is that they ascribe some intuition to the motives of the front office (’of course they want to win’, ‘they only care about profit’, ‘they don’t want to win badly enough’.) I don’t know that we can see into their souls (like Bush with Putin).
I think we have to give thanks for two things: first, an owner like Smulyan who just simply didn’t have any money; or like George Steinbrenner, who believed his baseball knowledge better than anyone in his organization. Considering both these alternatives, I think things could actually be worse.
But the key question to me is this: several times this winter Armstrong is going to sit down to interview GM candidates, and say something like, ‘well, what would you do with the baseball side of things if you were GM?’
That’s where the rubber meets the road. How does Armstrong know the right answer? How does the candidate convince him that he (the candidate) actually does have the right answer?
I give these guys full credit for understanding that what they’ve done has failed…that they need a fresh approach…and they may even be willing to change their way of thinking.
But how do they know when the ‘right’ way of thinking is presented to them?
That’s my angst.
Sorry Dave, I can’t agree, either with the premise or the development. I know you’re having a reaction against some sectors of the kneejerk fandom, which just throws crap all over everything, out of frustration, based on little or no serious baseball knowledge.
But guess what? Sometimes, the uninformed can come closer to the truth that the extremely informed.
I won’t go so far as to say the Mariners don’t want to win. That would be monumentally stupid. Of course they would love to win.
They just haven’t needed to. They’ve thrown pots of money at the team, true enough. But look at those pots of money, for chrissakes. I got absolutely flamed for a crisp on several occasions for suggesting the money was spent more for wowing (exactly) those fans who were completely uninformed… than in building a viable team.
Hey! The hoy paloy wants Power? Let’s bring in duly shined-up power… And the loyal 30,000 (but dropping) base won’t notice it’s not sterling, but plate silver…
This is the sort of thing, I think, is worth complaining about. The circus stunt, public relations, mentality attached to their acquisitions.
Win? Sure, they’d take it. Same way I’d take winning the lottery.
I would suggest that it isn’t this simple, Dave.
It’s not a we invest, we win, we don’t invest, we lose, situation.
A team invests for more reasons that to simply win. They invest to build a viable farm system. They invest to improve weak points. They invest to take advantage of their mid-season or end season position. AND they invest to maintain cash flow, in terms of what Joe-Sixpack expects from his home team.
Um… I submit that the Mariners have NOT addressed all of the above. Therefore, they have NOT invested in winning.
You really think the M’s decided to sign Carlos Silva because they thought that a fat, pitch to contact Venezuelan who spent his career in Minnesota and no casual fan had ever heard of would placate the fan base?
No – they signed Carlos Silva because they believe that he’s a groundball machine and a veteran innings eater who knew how to win. They drew bad conclusions, but those bad conclusions were based on their assessment of the player’s value on the field, not on some marketing ploy.
I think part of the disconnect here is that alot of us don’t want to believe those running the Mariners could possibly be as bad at the on-the-field part of the business as they actually are, especially given their past business positions and successes.
Nowhere else can someone fail so completely at their job and continue to not only be employed, but be entrusted with a position that affects hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars a year. The “they can’t possibly be that bad, there must be something else going on” mentality is hard to shake, I know it creeps in for me at times…
I don’t think the question has ever (at least since they moved into Safeco) been whether they were willing to throw a bunch of money at free agents or not. The question has been whether they were willing to blow up a disjointed, underachieving team, build from within their farm system–a la Detroit the year they went to the World Series, Florida and Oakland in the past, Tampa Bay and Milwaukee this year–and sacrifice a year or two of high revenue for the chance to be competitive in the future. The answer is no. They filled their glaring holes with overpriced free agents because the most important thing was to keep the seats packed. Period. (And also, this last year, because Bavasi wanted to keep his job. Hence Carlos Silva. Hence Erik Bedard. Hence Brad Wilkerson. These were decisions made of pure desperation.)
The assumption there, though, is that they would agree that such a teardown project was required (when even we don’t), and that knowing that, they decided to pursue an expensive and counter-productive strategy doomed to eventual (and expensive) failure because… because they thought it would keep butts in seats?
If you grant that the M’s are led by good business people, you can’t imagine that they think that’s true: they’ve seen many examples of other teams spending fruitlessly on free agents as attendance declined.
No, they thought that they were spending better than those teams, and it would make all the difference.
That’s a far sight more plausible than the theory you’re laying out.
I agree with most of what you said, DMZ, but I would say that they ‘hoped’ it would make all the difference.
I have witnessed some horrible, mind-boggling business decisions made because of the fiscal year. It seems artificial and arbitrary to me (with the exception of tax issues and such) but to the suits I’ve known it is life and death. And I’ve seen millions wasted because of it.
And I think tat Howard and Chuck keep choosing to fix the team the way they do because to them, a tear down is a guaranteed decline, whereas the alternative could go either way. Sure, they’re surprised that it keeps going the same way, but that’s because they are perplexed by the baseball of it all.
Let me put my position this way: to me, as a fan, the future is clearly more important than the present. It was so clear that the team wasn’t capable of winning a world series that I want every decision to be about what is best for the team long term.
I believe that Howard and Chuck do not think that way. I think they think annually. Finishing 80-82 instead of 70-92 is worth absolutely nothing to me. To them, I believe it is worth millions of dollars and multiple prospects. That, to me, is putting the balance sheet ahead of winning (a championship).
But as a whole, their decisions have been so bad that neither explanation is easy to swallow.
Even before, when I would think hard about it, even though there are indications that seem otherwise, I refused to fully believe the team cared just about the profits rather than winning. For example, if a team didn’t care about winning, they take risks such as parting ways with promising talent for a supposed ace. I always felt that the team either didn’t know how to win in today’s game, since their stone age ideas of winning haven’t caught up with the smarter teams, or they simply half assed it by throwing money left and right on “proven” players rather than working hard to find bargains.
You can find evidence for this post being correct by looking at what the Mariners have done, but as much evidence can be found looking at every other team which struggles. Go on any forum for a struggling team (not just baseball, any sport from basketball to soccer) and you’ll see this accusation being thrown around that the organisation is “rotten to the core” or “doesn’t care about winning”. It’s a universal reaction from sports fans and obscures the fact that most of the teams who are winning are usually no better run – we had the exact same ownership 5-7 years ago, after all.
“But can we please put to rest this notion that somehow ownership doesn’t want to win? It’s ridiculous and unsupported by any kind of actual fact.”
I guess I’m one of those that won’t really entertain the thought of putting that to bed just yet. I have no qualms about the amount of money spent on payroll – in fact, from the looks of things I don’t necessarily think payroll factors as much into the decision for players as some of who shout about this group’s “lack of will to win” think.
I do, however, have a problem with Armstrong using the payroll numbers alone to support his position. I am heavily involved in business as well – and in many ways, there are similarities no matter what business you are in. I don’t think it’s a simple profits versus winning paradigm at work here. I don’t think Armstrong and company believe they are mutually exclusive (they obviously are not). The problem I see here is the lack of demand for excellence in the specific arena of baseball performance relative to the demand for excellence in other areas. For example, the “family-friendly, great night at the park” focus *seems* to be much more out there than the “we are in this competition for the prize”. When you listen to quotes from either Lincoln or Armstrong, specifically about on-field performance of the team, you never hear that their goal is to win the World Series or even play to get there. The most often stated goal falls short – “to be competitive”. I find myself asking why every time I hear them speak to this issue – and I listen specifically for this each time.
In my business, when we query our customers, the question is never asked “Are we a competitive service provider?”. Rather it is asked “Are we your *best* service provider?” I’ve found in my field, that is a huge difference. Our company is not in this to “be competitive” (we are), but we are in it to be the best (which we are sometimes). If all we want is to be competitive, we can probably get there, but we will never be the best unless that is the vision from the top of the company to those who deliver the service and projects in the field. Anything less than being the best is not an acceptable outcome.
Now related to the M’s, as a fan, I am not one of those who believes “World Series Champs” or “chumps”. What I do want from ownership is to be sold the product of the team trying to win championships. A nice night at the park would then be a by-product. This team needs that vision from the top down. From everything I can tell, that is absolutely not the vision for this team. It might be from the players, but without the synergy of the whole organization focused on the same thing, it is not the best recipe for success.
What the evidence indicates to me is that the M’s are perfectly willing to spend money on payroll in order to deliver to their market exactly what they envision the market need to be. In my mind, this is why the M’s lock themselves into expensive players with mediocre upsides in lieu of taking chances on the “unknown” players. Like it or not, those fans who have a passion for game and frequent blogs like this and others are not the largest share of the market in Seattle. That’s why they continue to draw so well in a season like this. The casual fan still wants to see players they know. My hunch is that the payroll number stays where it is almost as much for appearance sake as anything else. I don’t know if this is necessarily true, but it is an alternative that would be supported by the evidence Armstrong uses. If the front office is spending money, then implicitly they are ‘trying to be competitive’.
This whole response is a bunch of speculation of course. Armstrong and Lincoln could surprise me someday by saying something more than “we’re trying to be competitive within the division”, but the absence of the larger vision in their statements, to me, is very conspicuous.