One good thing about college sports, compared to pro sports, is that universities don’t up and leave town.

I remember when Seattle University basketball — a school with an NCAA finals appearance, that boasted Elgin Baylor as an alumnus — left Division I in the late 1970s; that pretty much amounted to leaving, period.

Case in point, the Cubs

s/Mariners/Dodgers/

Good possible analogies, both of them, but the really scary analogy is with the Ghosts of Mariners past; i.e. to take the worst case scenario that DMZ envisioned, but even more so: a vicious circle of reduced fan interest, reduced payroll, and reduced wins, returning the Ms to the bad old decades of the 1970s and 1980s and early 1990s. There was a time when Seattle wasn’t very interested in baseball, at least not bad baseball.

And then the spiral culminates as Sure described, with the M’s becoming the Oklahoma Wind or whatever.

The M’s have a couple of assets now that they didn’t have then. They have Safeco rather than the Kingdome. And they have the legacy and memories of 1995 and of Edgar and of Junior and etc., i.e. several tens or probably hundreds of thousands of people with memories that watching the Ms play can be a fun thing.

But that might be about it. They currently have an ownership that’s willing to spend money, but ownership can change (just ask Sonics fans), players can leave, etc. so the only truly reliable assets that they have are those two. Which hopefully will be enough to leave the M’s at worst at Dodgers or Cubs level rather than 1980s M’s level (and the Cubs level of 2008 isn’t a bad place to be).

But as a Sonics fan I can’t help but look at the future M’s years with just a touch of dread: far-fetched though the worst-case scenario may be, the departure of the Sonics was also far-fetched at one time.

One good thing about college sports, compared to pro sports, is that universities don’t up and leave town. But with the way the UW’s been playing … well here’s looking forward to the MLS!

This is an example of a post where I couldn’t agree with the sentiment more. In terms of ability to assemble a competitive baseball team, I am far more in agreement with the assessment of the blog authors than not. For a long time, I’ve been hesitant to pounce on Bavasi specifically because there simply has not been the type of winning culture demanded here from the top that would facilitate improvement in on-field activities. I still withhold judgement on Bavasi somewhat because I suspect that he never had a completely free hand. I suspect there was more meddling that we don’t officially know about and the Washburn situation only serves to reinforce that.

As much as I like to be contrarian and post only when I disagree, I can’t do that in this case. Perhaps we can hope that the L/A regime ends sooner rather than later so our sentence can be shorter.

Armstrong believes himself a sabermetrician, good enough to justify his team’s horrible ignorance of new statistical methods, and he’s not.

I find this somewhat funny because even if you use older methods as crude as OPS and ERA+, you could still do better than Armstrong at using results to predict future production.

Uh, folks, this is a GOOD thing. Being profitable in down years allows you to ride out the bad years without damaging the team too much.

Case in point, the Cubs — who always seem to draw at least enough profit out of their crap years to be able to finance their better ones.

Yes, they do. They turn a nice profit every year and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, thanks to enough of a fan base who values the Safeco Experience and cuddly players more than actual performance.

Uh, folks, this is a GOOD thing. Being profitable in down years allows you to ride out the bad years without damaging the team too much.

It’s just that these jokers have no clue on how to build a good team. And they’d do even WORSE damage if they were under the gun and weren’t profitable in bad years.

So which member of the M’s coaching staff is most likely to pull up to a Wendy’s drive thru naked?

Do Chuck Armstrong and Howard Lincoln even have a leg to stand on anymore after basically leading this team to 100 losses TWICE in 5 years?

Yes, they do. They turn a nice profit every year and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, thanks to enough of a fan base who values the Safeco Experience and cuddly players more than actual performance.

Seattle, the Cincinnati Bengals of major league baseball…

Or, even the Detroit Lions, for that matter.

- For better or (mostly) worse, the Mariners have been active in free agency. While most of their spending was misguided, that L/A put their faith and wallets in Bavasi for as long as they did is a sign that this team 1. doesn’t care enough about their product as long as it generates revenue or 2. acknowledges they’re not competent enough to micromanage personnel decisions. Either way, it suggests a GM carries a good deal of authority in personnel decisions.

- They’ve been hesitant to drastically trim salary. Whether this was due to a faulty belief that they were near contenders or cognizant that most teams need to spend to win, it’s also an encouraging sign that, at the basic level, the front office cares about winning.

- They’ve fostered and maintained their strong international pipeline.

- They haven’t been scared to shell out money for high-risk high-reward prospects, whether international or through the amateur draft.

Consider how depressing that is: the maximum effectiveness of any GM candidate is likely to be determined by the baseball incompetence of Chuck Armstrong. Or: they can’t be smarter in running the team than Chuck is dumb in approving or overriding their decisions.

And there’s the rub: we’re putting our faith in Armstrong being able to make a qualified decision, which is a remarkable leap of faith. My optimism is buried in the belief that the Bavasi era has proved that you can’t get by on personality and lineage alone: you need to be more progressive and aggressive in the modern baseball world.