Judith Eve Lipton
Spare-time analyst Derek Zumsteg, who writes for the Baseball Prospectus think tank, at Safeco Field.
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Mariner Blogosphere
U.S.S. Mariner (www.ussmariner.blogspot.com) should be any thinking fan's first stop. Derek Zumsteg, Jason Barker, and David Cameron offer a daily diet of rational analysis that transcends the usual reactionary blather on sites such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Mariner blog (blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/baseball). The site also features "The Future 40" rankings of top M's prospects, "The Big Board" organizational depth chart, and a comprehensive list of links to recommended sites.
The next best Mariner blogs are Peter White's Mariner Musings (www.all-baseball.com/marinermusings) and Stephen Nelson's Mariners Wheelhouse (www.noslenblog.blogspot.com), both of which are updated daily and provide witty, accessible, erudite perspective on Mariners matters most of us don't mull. Don't miss White's hilarious player haikus (Quinton McCracken: "On-base percentage/Keep your two-seventy-six/far from batter's box").
Also worth an occasional spin are The Safest Blog (www.thesafe.blogspot.com), San Shin (www.jeffshaw.blogspot.com), and Mariner Optimist (www.marineroptimist.blogspot.com).
Most of these provide links to the others of the 20-plus members of the Mariner "blogosphere." The blogs are of varying quality, but most are earnest in intent and often funny as hell.
Perspective is more than intellectual, it's geographical; as such, some of the best views on the M's come from far from Puget Sound. Begin by bookmarking the top two baseball think tanks, Baseball Prospectus (www.baseballprospectus.com) and Baseball Primer (www.baseballprimer.com). Some of the content on Baseball Prospectus is premium and available only for a $39.95 annual subscription, but it might be the Web's best one-stop site for daily game and transaction analysis. Both sites offer well-written, in-depth features (if insufferably snarky in tone from time to time) but often assume a degree of knowledge in their readers beyond that of most casual fans. (Quick test: Can you define VORP, EqSLG, BRARP, RAA2, or UEqR?) Aware of that, however, Baseball Prospectus is running a great "basics" introduction to the deeper layers of performance analysis.
J.T.
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Stephen Nelson, a 52-year-old self-employed environmental consultant who runs the Mariners Wheelhouse site (www.noslenblog.blogspot.com), posits the problem of the Oakland-Seattle rivalry in terms the business-minded Mariners might appreciate: "Suppose this were the real world, and a business one day discovered that one of its competitors had figured out how to provide an equivalent product or service for half the cost. That business would turn itself inside out remaking itself to meet the competitive threat. Company culture would never stand in the way of change, because it would be a survival issue. Baseball clubs, though, are monopolies in their operating areas. The various teams compete on the field, but not financially. The fact that the A's are outperforming the Mariners on one-half the cost does not cause revenues to flow from the Mariners to the A's. So the competition function that would ordinarily cause organizations to adapt is not present."
And forced adaptation to the new school of baseball thinking, or, at least, integrating it into an old-school foundation, Zumsteg believes, is the Mariners' only chance. Despite his fervent fandom—"Nobody loves the game more than those who want to understand it," he says—Zumsteg thinks it would "almost" be bad for Seattle if the team were to win the pennant with the club's current composition, under current operating culture. "I have to admit that I'm often torn," Zumsteg says, "in that I love the Mariners and cheer for them as much as anybody, but I get so frustrated at times with what they do and why they do it that I want them to fail, and fail badly, so that they finally realize that there's a better way." If they continue to be moderately successful, he predicts that "in three years, they'll be playing .400 ball, will be losing money, and won't know what hit them: 'We have such a great bunch of veteran guys! How could this happen?'" What won't happen, the bloggers believe, is the dawning of enlightenment— at least not as long as Lincoln is running the show. Because the Howard Lincoln painted in Out of Left Field knows everything he needs to know already about how to successfully run a business—Hello! Nintendo!—so why does he need new knowledge? And that, the bloggers believe, will continue to be the Mariner stumbling block. As no less than Bill James put it last year to Slate: "There will always be people who are ahead of the curve and people who are behind the curve. But it is knowledge that moves the curve."
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