Doyle Finds Another New Home
Dave · October 25, 2007 at 1:44 pm · Filed Under Mariners
Well, if you thought I was overly pleased with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays front office before, you ain’t seen nothing yet – they claimed Doyle on waivers from the A’s.
Go Doyle Go.
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#43: Let’s put it this way about what the experience of an M’s game should be like for a 7 year old.
I was 7 years old back in October 1995 when my dad took me to playoff games sitting in the upper deck in the Kingdome where there was 55,000 people strong, 1000 signs and banners, and so much rude behavior towards the New York Yankees it wasn’t even funny. Probably some things were yelled too that 7 year olds shouldn’t hear.
And yet, despite it all, quite honestly, that was the first time I fell in love with the game and this team.
Maybe Chuck Armstrong thinks 7 year olds are attracted to baseball by hugs from the Moose and a trip to the playfield in centerfield. WRONG!
Heck, most kids today think the pace of baseball is too slow compared to football and I’m betting there are so many kids around Seattle 7-9 years old that are growing up Seahawks fans right now than Mariners fans.
There is one reason why so many kids my age got attracted to baseball in the mid ’90’s even with the slow pace, long 12-10 games, and sorry state of the Kingdome when it wasn’t 55,000 strong. . .
All together now: We won games.
We were blessed here in the mid-90’s to follow some of the best players in baseball like Griffey, Randy, Bone, Edgar, etc.
And it’s a huge reason why many fans from that era still are interested in the game today.
Which is why I don’t understand the logic of keeping the worst GM in baseball (in terms of signing contracts) around because we are supposed to be as fans just blissfully happy with getting 88 wins with a $110 million payroll while also thinking that our GM is better than Mark Shapiro after Bavasi has made such moves as give Shapiro his 2nd baseman of the future for a Baseball Tonight Analyst.
It’s no wonder why so many young people here are turned off by the Mariners despite of what Chuck Armstrong believes about giving 7 year olds “a positive experience at the ballpark”. Because I will tell you right now, the only way kids will come back to the ballpark is if they come to the games just for. . .the games. And they learn to enjoy baseball for what it is instead of all the million things to do at the park to feed off of short year attention spans.
So I’m sorry, but if Chuck Armstrong still can’t get that concept of winning/attracting young kids who in the future will be ones that buy the tickets to the ballpark nailed down after all these years and he still honestly believes that a team that hasn’t been in the postseason for 6 years has the “best front office in baseball”, then how the hell does he deserve to have a job right now?
Sell the team (to anyone other than cowboys named Clay).
#5: Come back to the ballpark as adults I should say.
And AFA Doyle is concerned….I love the guy but those knee injuries robbed him of any and all power. The OBP is there but an OPS of .340 is positively Bloomquistian. I mentioned a few years ago that Doyle now just swings with his arms. He’s got almost no leg drive in his swing. He can whip the bat through the zone enough to slap singles but his gap power is totally gone. He’s just never going to have the sort of career we all wished he would.
I still blame it on the 3rd base coach who held him up but maybe the guy just fits the label “injury prone.”
Ugh I meant SLG of .340 not OPS….Man, I am having bad day at the keyboard……
FWIW, even if Chuck wasn’t the brainiac that we know he is, would you really expect that, when addressing “a professional group dinner” he would proved a critical analisis of his own team?
#55: He’s obviously critically analysed the team enough though to determine that in spite of trading players such as Ardursbal Cabrera, Rafael Soriano, and Carlos Guillen for garbage, he’s still good enough to keep his job.
Let’s just put it that way. . .
Chuck Armstrong is more of an idiot than I thought. The front office is the best in baseball — right — but only if you don’t count all the other 29 teams. Just like Horam was a fine pitcher if you don’t count all the games he played, etc
As for the derisive comments about the bloggers… whatever. If this team sucks again next year he’s going to think 2007 was a total freakin’ lovefest.
Chuck would serve the team well if the only marching orders he gave to his GM were, “Don’t blow up the budget and don’t hire any criminals.” and he stayed out of things beyond that. But there’s the problem: he meddles with the team construction, as if he has some sort of idea of who exactly can make the team better, and that just isn’t the case.
Hiring a GM who makes better baseball decisions with the team’s money and talent acquisition would certainly help, though.
As for Doyle, good for him, though at this point I have to wonder if he can realistically expect his knee to stay healthy for any extended period at this point, even as a part timer. If I were Doyle, I’d look into the MLB-legality of one of those bionic knee braces like the wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin used to wear. It would slow him down, but given Doyle’s mentality and how it facilitates wear and tear, he probably does need to slow down in general.
you know, he didn’t say what the front office was best at. They might be best at Boggle, how do we know?
51: Great rant, Tom. It’s amazing how at Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium, they still manage to attract hordes of kids despite all the rowdiness that takes place in the stands during the games. Hmmm…wonder if it might have a little something to do with there being a quality product on the field which wins consistently?
As for your last point, I agree that Lincoln and Armstrong need to go. As I mentioned in a previous post, we may not always be smashing our heads against the wall in frustration if Mr. Yamauchi actually lived locally (or at least came to town on a regular basis), took in a game or two per year, and dropped by the front office every now and then just to see what’s going on. That kind of proactivity is the stuff that owners like Steinbrenner, Henry, Ted Turner, Mike Ilitch and others have been known to do — as opposed to the “ant farm by proxy” approach, with the front office running amok in their own stubborn stupidity.
Then again, on the other side of the coin, that “boss always being around” approach certainly hasn’t worked in Baltimore — where the GM pretty much has to call the overbearing Angelos every day around noon to let him know he’s going to lunch.
so, are all these 7-year-olds going to the games by themselves?
Exactly.
Of course, you don’t run your own people down in front of others—that’s kinda obvious. But it’s also obvious that you don’t have a freakin’ clue when it comes to baseball when you rag on people from five years back for stuff they couldn’t possibly have caused.
Hey, Chuck…you’re EARNING every single derisive comments you’re getting from bloggers. Stand tall and be proud of it….not every idiot can keep his job in the face of such obvious incompetence…
Yeah, but I doubt we’d have any problems with the Ms if they put a quality product on the field AND took care of rowdiness in the stands (i.e., kid friendly).
As I keep pointing out, they’re separate objectives. You can do BOTH—taking care of one has no effect on the other. Chuckie can be proud that it’s a good, family friendly proud–but he’s screwing up on the baseball end cause he thinks he knows what he’s doing.
63: Precisely — and I agree that you can do both.
Unfortunately for the fans, Chuckie keeps using that “family-friendly” talking point to gloss over all of the stuff that he’s NOT getting done on the baseball end.
I must add that perhaps Chuck has run the business side of the team well, and has the right idea in trying to market to a large audience and make the team as accessible as possible to them. On the business end, I can’t say I have any real problems with Chuck Armstrong. And there’s nothing wrong with setting a budget or demanding character accountability from the club. They have to turn a profit and manage a general product that will allow them to do so, after all.
The issue comes from the baseball end. He’s drifting outside of his field of expertise when he meddles in team construction. It’s sort of like an engineer going onto a construction site and seizing the controls of a forklift that he’s not trained to use.
That meddling is a lot of the same kind of crap that guys like Angelos do — only he OWNS the team, so I suppose he’s “within his rights” to do so.
Last I looked, Chuckie was an EMPLOYEE — not the owner.
Can’t even stay on-topic in a Doyle thread. Tsk tsk.
Anyone who listens to anything Chuck Armstrong says obviously forgets that he once called the signing of Randy Johnson in 1998 by the Diamondbacks a horrible move that they would regret for years. Chuck Armstrong went from running Seattle City Light to being President of the Mariners. He knows NOTHING about baseball.
68: Hmmm…let’s see…during the length of that contract, RJ AVERAGED 17W/305K/231IP per season, won 20 games twice and the Cy Young four times, got a WS MVP award (not to mention a ring), pitched a perfect game, and came within a start or two of shattering Nolan Ryan’s single-season strikeout record — and pretty much cemented his first-ballot HOF status.
Not bad there, Chuckie, for a guy that you and your lapdog Woody Woodpecker told the fans “had a bad back” and was subsequently washed-up.
And we’re supposed to trust your “expertise” on how to build a baseball team? >:(
Tampa on acquiring Snelly:
“We like Chris Snelling’s offensive profile quite a bit,” Rays executive vice president Andrew Friedman said. “Obviously he’s had an extensive injury history; without that we wouldn’t have been able to acquire him on a waiver claim. We’re hopeful he can be a contributor to our ’08 team.”
And, reportedly, STILL won’t admit it was a bad move. While it might be results-oriented thinking to castigate him for that, I’d have to say that if he’s still badmouthing Johnson to this date, that still doesn’t say much for his baseball acumen or player management skills.
Nahhh….that’s just of a piece of the player evaluation skills for this management team headed up by Armstrong…
The rug burns were the worst. They would actually bleed.
Yeah, I’ve never played sports on actual Astroturf, but I have played on one of its successors, Omniturf. Better padding, so it wasn’t as hard on the joints. But it was murderous to dive or slide on, for one thing they actually used sand as a cushioning agent on the surface, so sliding on it was exactly like sliding on sandpaper.
I remember the Sounders and other players in the old NASL complaining about playing on artificial turf, for awhile they experimented with putting vaseline on their legs (because even one sliding tackle could flay your leg) but needless to say that didn’t make the goalkeepers happy when they tried to catch a vaseline-lubed ball.
Field turf is much better, it’s installed over a base of crushed rock and sand (for drainage ) and the ground up tire also aids in cushioning.
I don’t know if the field that I play on now is Field Turf but it sounds similar. I still get raw skin and scabs, but it’s not too bad. The little black rubber specks I guess are important for cushioning, but they annoyingly get all over your skin and clothes and in your shoes, and then end up getting scattered around the house.
The scrapes have so far healed just fine, but my one worry is the hygenic nature of the turf; with other players scraping and spitting on the surface, I hope no one picks up one of those superbug staph infections.
http://www.wnbc.com/health/14382351/detail.html
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/49872.php
I never realized just how hard that old Astroturf surface really was until I went to (of all things) a trade show that was held down on the floor/field of the old Kingdome and got to walk around on that crud for a while. It’s no wonder guys like Bone and later Junior had issues with leg-related injuries during their careers.
We’ve already had accounts of MSRA infections from field turf scrapes at the local school level. These were incidents that happened at PE class. I know of 2 kids that had extended hospital stays because of them. It’s really important to wash scrapes/burns down when they happen on turf. The MSRA’s can spread incredibly quickly and you are right in that the hygiene of these turf fields is an issue.
Anyone want to go in with me on a Zamboni type machine for field turf? Some sort of steam cleaner/disinfectant machine.
If you’re playing on a field with ground up tire in it. It’s field turf. The only other place it’s used is on the old dirt (cushion turf) fields in the summer in a hilarious attempt to keep the dust down.
I remember the old vaseline coated leg days also. It isn’t needed as much these days because of the use of compression shorts and the height of player socks.
Doyle could kick Chuck Armstrong’s ass, on grass or turf, any day of the week.
It’s really important to wash scrapes/burns down when they happen on turf.
Ooh, that’s a really good idea which I should’ve thought of. Probably alcohol wipes are the way to go? Antibiotic ointments, when there might be no infection, would only increase the population of drug resistant bacteria — plus these MSRA bugs by definition are resistant to most antibiotics.
That field turf “Zamboni” is a great idea, Metz. You could run the thing around the surface before the game and then again at the half with a disinfectant spray. If it’s a health and safety issue, it may be the way to go in the future.
58: Oh, no — you just had to go and mention Stone Cold’s “bionic” knee brace, didn’t you?…
Chris Snelling…Major League baseball player…His career barely alive…”Gentlemen, we can rebuild him…We have the technology to build the world’s first bionic outfielder…Better than he was before…Better…Stronger…Faster!” 🙂
jeezus… I hate to wish ill upon another person but can he leave baseball already so the sad faithful can get over him already? lol. Talk about rooting for a hard luck case – this guy will never, ever be anything in MLB.
If people want to root for Doyle, that’s their prerogative.
Everybody who visits this site on a regular basis knows his injury history, but that doesn’t mean we can’t hope for him to turn it around anyway.
Fuck you, lamda, and I hope you enjoy your new USSM-free existence.
sigh.
this is only fun if you like the Sawx.
and my little old laptop keeps having psychotic breaks.
uh oh.
Marcus Giles has been released.
Veteran 2nd baseman? check.
Former Padre? check.
Scrappy little dirtbag? check.
82: Tell me about it! Geez, that mismatch termed a “World Series” back in ’98 between SD-NYY wasn’t THIS bad — at least the Pads’ were actually IN a couple of those games.
so, are two series a big enough sample-sizeto say that one team having to wait a week+ to play the other team is not a goodthing?
Hey, here come the Rockies!
Actually, scott, you may be onto something….
Wow…did the Rox actually FINALLY wake up?
This is why every freakin’ Sox game is an agony. You can never feel confident until the last freakin’ out.
Actually, to answer my own question, NO!
Too bad the Red Sox took out that veteran guy with the cereal name and put in this rookie who can’t be depended on under pressure…
88: Hey, Gomez, how ’bout a $6 Million bonus for Doyle if the bionic implants are successful? 🙂
jeezus… I hate to wish ill upon another person but can he leave baseball already so the sad faithful can get over him already? lol. Talk about rooting for a hard luck case – this guy will never, ever be anything in MLB.
If you don’t want to root for the plucky little guy with talent and a string of bad luck, there are plenty of guys who’ve made way too much money and are “proven” history you can love. Hell, just get it over with and root for Bill Gates, that should satisfy you.
Hmmm…I seriously wonder if such technology in sports medicine (applied to limbs, joints, etc.) isn’t really all that far away:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bionics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Six_Million_Dollar_Man
Any ETA on when the Cardinals announce Antonetti as their new GM?
93. Sure, pay off the doctors for the surgery and then pile on incentive bonuses for every 100 ABs Doyle gives you. I wouldn’t consider that a bad investment.
Will Ho Ram find another home?
http://www.thenewstribune.com/sports/mariners/story/189769.html
He can be guaranteed to find a new home if he goes into real estate as a profession.
He’s one of the exceptions to the rule that a MLB roster spot can be found for LH pitchers…
Fine! I’ll start a new thread for news stuff.