Now that the Mariners have ceased and desisted, I am left with two thoughts in my head.
First, it could be worse. I could be a Mets fan.
Second, the reason for the special failure of this season is last season's accidental pennant run. It fooled the front office into acting like they were fine-tuning a contending team, not building one.
The Erik Bedard deal is hard to criticize. Aces are the rarest commodity in baseball. If you can get one, you get one, even if it costs you Adam Jones (and George Sherrill, which turned out to be a big loss). Of course, Bedard is not an ace. He's weak sauce. But I don't blame Bavasi for that. A smart team would have made that deal, too.
Carlos Silva is another matter. If the M's were 200 innings away from the pennant, Silva makes sense. (Overpaying for him like the M's did doesn't make sense, ever.) But a rebuilding team doesn't sign a league average contact pitcher to a multiyear deal. That's what the M's are, and that's what Silva is, and now we're stuck with him until the Palin administration. We signed him because we thought we were winners. He makes us losers.
(Keep in mind that Jaime Moyer is going to the playoffs after a 16-7, sub-4.00 ERA season with the Phillies. Two years ago, we traded away a pillar of the community, a good clubhouse guy, and a damn good pitcher for two bodies named Andrew Barb and Andy Baldwin because we were rebuilding. Then last year we signed Silva, who's worse, for more money and more years, because he was the final piece of the puzzle.)
The other reason we're losers because we thought we were winners is that we handled our young guys irresponsibly. A winning team doesn't let Morrow learn how to be a starter on the job, so we kept him in the pen. Now he's a year behind in his development. A winning team doesn't give Balentin and Clement a chance to play every day, at least not until they're 100 percent ready. So we called them up and sent them down in spasms. Now they're behind in their development, and their confidence is in the toilet.
Note: By the time we failed to make any deadline deals this year, we knew we were a bad team, so my theory can't explain that particular shit show.
But overall, if the M's had just admitted how bad they were, they wouldn't be as bad as they are.
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One way to recoup at least part of Carlos Silva's salary would be to start charging players for the clubhouse buffet at rates disproportional to their weight. For example, Ichiro is charged $100 per pound of food he eats and Silva is charged $10,000 per pound. The fat turd eats at least 300 pounds of food to keep his weight up. That's $3 million a year!
Did anyone notice that former clubhouse pariah Jose Guillen put up nice numbers in the Witness Protection Program, aka Kansas City Royals: .264/20/97. Not as big a loss as Moyer, but a guy who could have been useful.
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