The most tragic part of that is that the one advantage the Mariners have w/r/t their location (and remember, they don’t hesitate to tell you about the disadvantages) is that there is a huge pool of people in Seattle who are tech savvy and would be great at setting up the databases and mining the data. Maybe only the Bay area has a better pool of talent in this regard.

It’s even more tragic than you know. Two of the minority owners were key people in the early days of Microsoft Access; one of them was the development lead — and one of the first “real” uses he tested it on, when it was still in alpha, was to run a fantasy baseball league that he played with a bunch of other Microsoft people. So M’s ownership, even before they were owners, were taking advantage of information technology to play at being smarter GMs. (I know some people will be tempted to make cracks at Access, but keep in mind this was 1988 or so, and ultimately it was just a front end to SQL Sever anyway). That they were so far ahead of the curve twenty years ago in fantasy and so far behind now in real life is almost Shakespearean.

I for one am not going to stick around for another 3-5 years of bumbling that necessitates blathering letters explaining why they think they’re moving in the right direction even though it’s not showing “on the field”.

Want to show me you’re not going to tolerate failure? Basically the FO had better swing dramatically toward a saber philosophy. It’s more than my personal belief that old school is dead. It’s also about signaling that the upper levels are also affected by the organisational enema……

Blow that one and most of the rest doesn’t really matter.

This is the crux of it. The organization is way behind in a lot of areas and the new GM will have to strike a balance between keeping his employer happy and addressing deficiencies that are his employer’s creation.

Other franchises have done amazing jobs putting together useful data stores that help them make scouting decisions, build great scouting reports, and support the work of all the other departments. The M’s need to catch up as fast as they can.

this is interesting, too, as they have taken advantage of Carl Hamilton’s early work with video in scouting and training — but perhaps the visual is more tangible to a FO than the “theoretics” of data.

Edit: Thanks for answering!

Well, the Mariners’ also have great databases. I mean, you can’t get any better than scouting off the back of baseball cards can you?