Mariner's Baseball! My oh my!

Good morning and welcome to episode 140 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball

Prospectus in New York, New York. I am Ben Lindbergh and in Long Beach, California as

always similar. Hello Sam. Hi Ben. We are recording during the daytime for once. Probably

you could tell already the difference in our daytime voices. So you'll be hearing from

Sam again because we're talking about the Mariners today and Sam happened to write about

the Angels and the Mariners which are back-to-back days. So Sam again and then Jeff Baker from

the Seattle Times will talk to Pete Barrett after that. Mariners. We talked about the Mariners

fairly recently after the Mike Morse trade and I guess we got into the team a little bit

aside from the trade itself. But to go a little deeper into that I guess or to revisit it,

I wrote somewhat recently about Jack Z and how I felt like maybe he was not getting a fair

shake these days or that we had either been too optimistic about him when he first took over and

kind of made over the team in his first winter or too pessimistic now and that maybe the truth

about him was actually somewhere in the middle of the whole time and he wasn't the greatest

general manager ever at that time when he kind of turned around the team in one winter and maybe

is not a terrible general manager now even though the team has not made much obvious

unfilled progress since then. So where do you stand on that? How responsible do you hold

Jack Z for the Mariners lack of progress at the major league level in the past few years?

It's hard to know how much to blame him and how much is sort of structural stuff that is out

of his control. It seems like maybe the biggest and perhaps fairest criticism of him lately is

that he hasn't really been able to execute the plan that he has wanted to. In 2009 and 2008,

you could tell that they had a plan. That plan was to suck up low cost defensive specialists

...