In this post.  In his own nutshell:

Sign OF/1B Nick Swisher to a seven year, $100 million contract.
Sign OF Melky Cabrera to a one year, $6 million (plus incentives) contract .
Sign SP Carlos Villanueva to a one year, $4 million contract.
Sign DH Travis Hafner to a one year, $3 million contract.
Re-sign SP Hisashi Iwakuma to a two year, $10 million contract.
Re-sign SP Jason Vargas to a two year, $12 million contract.
Trade 1B Mike Carp and OF Trayvon Robinson for IF Sean Rodriguez and C Chris Gimenez.
Swisher would have cost us DJ Peterson, which might mean nothing or might be a big deal in a coupla years. Swish is posting a .741 OPS/ 109 OPS+ but was 5 not 7 years, and Cabrera took 2/16 to sign and is posting a .705 OPS / 92 OPS+. 
Raul has a 116 OPS+ and Bay has a 104 (in fewer at bats than Swish and Cabrera, to be fair) while Morse has a 111, and that package is what, 10 or 15 mil cheaper?
To be fair, though, Carlos Villanueva has a 108 ERA+ and looks like a much better get than Saunders for the same-ish level contract, and Hafner has been great.  But we got Morales to DH, and he's been great.
Call it a push for the analyst side versus the worst analytical org in the league?
~G

I do think some of Wilhelmsen's struggles might be related to confidence. He talked about the series against the Yankees a few weeks ago as being akin to a playoff atmosphere. He admitted to being tense and putting an extra zing on his pitches. That's fine, but Mariano Rivera closed the middle game of the series, do you think he felt like it was a playoff experience? For him it was 3 games in May.
Wilhelmsen knows as well as anyone else, that if you flip his 4 blown saves from the last few weeks into Mariners wins, then this team is sitting a game under .500 and would be going into Anaheim and Oakland with the potential to make waves in the division. Instead, Baker is writing that this road trip will probably be the last opportunity to salvage the season before it's too late, and it's hard to argue.
Tom's curve ball isn't getting swings and misses, he knows. If he had performed his job properly, the Mariners wouldn't be in nearly the mess they are in now, he knows. Every time he steps on the mound, it's a game the Mariners need, he knows. I think his diminishing command and control are signs of flagging confidence.

There's only so much space. "Oh no, we lost Catricala, the horror..." except that he'd already been passed by Choi at first base (and now Peterson), can't play 3rd worth a lick, and Romero was stealing his OF slot (which he was also bad at).  I'm a Catricala fan, but isn't he exactly the kind of bat-first player without a position (who is swinging a mostly bad bat at the moment) that we don't want hanging around clogging up the works for half a decade? Morban might be on a corner. Wilson will sign for a corner. We added two teens for future corner duty.
*shrugs* It sucks to lose potential talents, but that's going to happen. Catricala had no trade value and was having a bad year and a half, so the hope was that maybe he'd slip through waivers.  He didn't. Them's the breaks.  Look at the 40-man.  Who's dead weight?  Medina?  Nope, he's contributing in the bigs. 
Sucre? Needed him, and Montero's on the DL.
Zunino kind of needs to be there, as does Franklin. We could have punted Liddi over Cat, but Liddi keeps turning in average performances instead of the tank job Vinnie just pulled for whatever reason. Could have cut Peguero or Thames instead, but our OF situation is dire and old so handy AAAA replacements might be needed and again, Vinnie is bad there.  As is Carp, lest anyone forget.
I expected to drop Anthony Fernandez, honestly. He's having a bad year in AA, but posted a 3.5 ERA in HIGH DESERT last year, so there are some plusses to his game.
Otherwise, who goes to keep guys like Vinnie and Carp around?
I thought Smoak should have been demoted and Carp installed at first, but we kinda ran out of time on that and Justin was hitting .400 and slugging .770 in Spring Training, IIRC, after another September of excellence last year - the year Carp lost to injury.
I get that call too.
------------------------
We will lose players in the Rule 5, and to waivers.  They will be decent prospects. That happens in a great farm system.
The alternative is to trade off the good players in handfuls for outstanding players (or throw them away on bad players if things go wrong). Who here wants to go back to the Choo and As-Cab for Broussard and Perez days? Or the "massive overpay" on Bedard?
If the right deal isn't there, we're not making the deal. That's probably a good thing, but it means that the 40-man can get a little cluttered from time to time. Such is life. If Zunino and Choi and Miller and Franklin and whomever work out, then who worries about Carp and Catricala and the other castaways during the sorting process?
Yes, there might be some junk in the 5 dollar bin that's worth 20 bucks, but we're looking for the jackpot.  Aren't we?  Maybe Carp was it, and losing him will hurt like Varitek and Choo and As-Cab and Jones forever.
Or maybe it ain't that bad after all. I hate the "you have to trust the organization" sound-byte (the FO rep here in Colorado actually said that for the Rockies when they were screwing everything up) but sometimes when it comes to talent eval, we need to trust the guy who wins awards for it and has demonstrated prowess at it here.  If big league promotions for top-shelf prospects kick some lesser 'spects off the mountain top, how bad is that really?
Net losses for Zduriencik are currently: Fister, Morrow, Morse (the first time) and... who? Pineda and Campos, because we only got Montero and Headcase for them? Carp instead of Smoak, made worse because because Smoak cost us Lee, even though parts of the Lee deal brought us Jaso who brought us Morse, so it keeps on giving?
I'm GLAD we're getting to a point where we can lose decently interesting prospects on waivers.  We haven't had a system that deep in the entire history of this team.  Ever.
When we're losing our 20th (or 30th) -ranked prospect and people are flipping about about the roster crunch and poor management, that's a good thing.  We've got 25 slots. They aren't all filled by long-term solutions now, or even by the best players in the org, but those calls are being changed as we go.  Who feels like coughing up Nick Franklin, Taijuan Walker and some relievers in order to get one player back and help fix this 40 man crunch?
Me either. And both should be helping us win games in 2014 while Jaso and Carp get part-time work in other burbs. Maybe Carp would have helped us more in 2013, but aren't the analysts telling me this has been a wasted year since the third week of April? So who cares?
~G

I can't say too much on an issue like this - on the impression that Seattle is "un-analytical" in roster decisions...my job constraints limit what I can say on the subject. I do, however, believe that Cameron is not just getting his take that Seattle is un-analytical from his own frustration but from industry sources. The general impression I get is that inside the game, Seattle got noticed when they fired most of their analysts recently...and not in a good way.

I think he needs to be dropped to the bottom if the pecking order fit a couple weeks, to see if he can sorry himself out. I don't think anyone else on the roster is obviously going to take the closer role and run with it (Capps is close, but he still seems nervy often) do there's a decent chance he can get it back. If nerves are the problem, he needs to get back to not overthrowing or whatever else might be going on with him somewhere it doesn't cost the team wins.

We do forget that Cameron isn't the local blogger of old anymore and through Fangraphs, he does get a much wider perspective on how the M's are viewed from the outside. This is not a well run franchise, at any level really. We shouldn't be surprised that the guys in the M's blogosphere are injecting a national perspective into their writings.
At this point, it's almost as if folks here will reject anything that Cameron writes just because he wrote it. Sad, that.
Thanks for the perspective, Matt. The rest of the league must look at this organization and chuckle.

Over in the engineering and baseball thread, BSR made a great comment about organizational culture. I think there is a fairly understandable reason why the draft is where the org performs best - it's where the higher-ups (Lincoln/Armstrong) have the least amount of say or ability to comment on/redirect/slowdown the process. It's where a little bit of the "organizational culture" and organizational "personality" that JackZ is trying to build is allowed to flourish. And the fact that TomMac and JackZ have done well is a substantial upcheck that they know how to build an org.

.766 OPS as a mere DH. In some ways, Jack's 1b/dh heavy roster is more flexible. Everyone has at least one position, even if played poorly.
Regarding Dave's more national perspective these days (discussed in a different thread below) that helps explain a lot. A non Mariner fan will look at negative WAR of Morse and Ibanez and merely say, "There's your problem right there." And, you can't easily rebut that. But a fan who watches the games regularly will not come to the same conclusion.

Good Tom always looks like he's enjoying being on a ball field (let's play two!). Bad Tom looks tense and worried. Chicken or egg? If he can get over the regret and start throwing "with conviction" he'll be back. Where's the Tickler when we need him? Tom seems to have some of the same withdrawal characteristics as Ichiro. The bullpen needs a guy to keep them loose. Capps, Perez, Furbush, Pryor, Wilhelmsen - they all come across as pretty serious guys. Maybe we need to trade for a nut. (PC version: for a relief pitcher with sub-optimal adjustment to the essential seriousness of the endeavor).

bsr - you really need to read it.

http://www.lookoutlanding.com/2012/3/19/2884474/shipwrecked-a-reviewhttp......
"Seattle fans will enjoy this fun, often critical and always thorough history of the franchise's ups and all too many downs. Chuck Armstrong and Howard Lincoln, however, probably will not," said Jim Caple of ESPN.com.
"Wells casts a cold eye on current Mariners CEO Howard Lincoln and on Mariners president Chuck Armstrong, whom, according to Mariner ex-manger Dick Williams in his memoirs, learned baseball on the job “like a 2-year old learns not to drink from the toilet.” "

Does the book provide any new information on the inner workings of the franchise, or is it simply a rehash of what we already knew? Also, is the author's premise that the primary problem of the M's is that they haven't spent enough money?

Since the book has been around for a while, I would say it's what we already know - because what we know comes from the book. I read it recently and found most of the information and opinion I'd already heard - but now I knew where it came from. It really is a detailed examination of how the Ms have operated. And no, it's not a criticism of budgets (while it was being written payroll was at its high) but more how the decision-making works, and why GMs and managers haven't been successful (or in Sweet Lou's case, as successful as he thought he ought to have been).
Since bsr's comments were basically on why people have this view of Lincoln and Armstrong, although they rarely appear or speak in public, I thought that rather than my trying to regurgitate what I've read (that I believe to be accurate), I'd let him read it for himself and form his own conclusions. Since in directing him to the USSM/analysts article he had seized on exactly the ideas that had struck me in the article, it seemed like a useful exercise.

The author is the guy that has published and edited "Grand Salami" magazine - the one you get outside the ballpark. Think of him as a professional blogger before the digital age. The book is basically a history of the M's, witnessed from his perspective. There is nothing really new in the book. It's value is seeing the same exact pattern under the LincStrong regime repeated over and over and over. All of the quotes in the book were made in public forums - newspapers and radio, mostly. But seeing them in one location, in context and expressed over time is really head shaking. Time after time, the budget is set before the season based on a % of projected revenues and it stays there, come hell or high water.
The author's premise, if there is one, is that Lincoln and Armstrong know next to nothing about baseball. They run the club like a corporate lawyer and an accountant would. When Gillick and Pinella are begging them for some $$ at the trade deadline for a relief pitcher, back end starter or a left fielder, the answer is no every year. They aren't even asking for the $$ for a premium player - just a guy that can plug a sucking chest wound and stop the bleeding. A $1-$2 million player. But no. The budget was set in March and that's where it stayed, come hell or high water. The formulaic nature of it, regardless of circumstance, is obviously maddening to guys like Pinella and Gillick. Those post-95 clubs were completely deflated over and over again as their rivals bust moves at the deadline while the M's sat on their hands.
Again, nothing new - except seeing it laid bare season after season. The pattern is really depressing.

"(The book's) value is seeing the same exact pattern under the LincStrong regime repeated over and over and over. All of the quotes in the book were made in public forums - newspapers and radio, mostly. But seeing them in one location, in context and expressed over time is really head shaking. Time after time, the budget is set before the season based on a % of projected revenues and it stays there, come hell or high water."
I'm amazed how few knowledgeable M's fans seem to have read this book. Is it a book full of revelations of earthshaking hitherto unkown information? No.
Is it a bunch of hyped up undeserved criticism of the M's and the payroll? No.
Like Griz said, most of it consists of the patient development of a pattern of behavior and public statements by the M's organization. Once you see the pattern, you recognize it over and over, and quite frankly despite the change in tack with Jack Zduriencik I don't see any change in the overall culture of the organization.
I hope Jack is able to overcome and eventually change that.

My hope is for John Stanton and Chris Larson to somehow convince Arakawa/Nintendo/Yamauchi to give them a turn at running it. As long as it is a trusteeship, it ain't gonna change. We still seem to end up drinking from that terlet.

Actually, both Lincoln and Armstrong are lawyers. Lincoln was a corporate lawyer who became general counsel to Nintendo. Armstrong was a real estate lawyer who worked for Argyros.
The book basically discusses the structure of what I call the trusteeship - that Yamauchi bought it to keep the franchise in Seattle based on the urgings of Arakawa, then Nintendo US head, who is his son-in-law. He then let Ellis (who was NOT a Nintendo employee) run it. Ellis brought back Armstrong, whom Smulyan had let go when he bought the club from Argyros, to be the club President, since he didn't know anything about running a ball club. Many felt Armstrong didn't either - he had simply been Argyros's front man. Anyway, most of it from there is about the decision-making process and Lincoln using his Nintendo position to take over from Ellis, and the attempts of various GMs and mangers to get the trusteeship to run the franchise as a baseball club competing for championships.
The fact that Yamauchi previously allowed a minority owner to be in charge (Ellis, a Puget Power exec, owned a small percentage) is what gives me hope - that as Lincoln and Armstrong, both in their 70s, slow down, Yamauchi might let Larson or Stanton, who have far larger stakes than Ellis did, take a turn, even as the majority shares are in trust to Nintendo. Again, nothing in MLB rules says the majority owner has to do anything but write and collect checks when necessary. If the franchise is on solid ground and a committee sets the budgets, it seems Nintendo could enjoy the profits just as it does now with a (n.b.) FORMER employee running it.
The Kindle edition is $9.99 - get it on your phone and have it read it to you during commutes. As the others have said - there's probably nothing in it you haven't heard before, but the guy that wrote it is also a lawyer as well as a writer, and it seems to be scrupulously researched and the analysis to me is spot-on.
Another review:http://crosscut.com/2012/03/30/seattle-mariners/22142/A-Mariners-book-Wa...
And two interesting articles about how Ellis was put in charge:http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19920616&slug=1......

it seems to me Yamauchi has little regard for the baseball fortunes of the franchise. He gave it to Seattle as a "gift," and I wouldn't be surprised if he finds and heat directed towards him as bewildering, wondering why anyone who received such a generous gift could possibly be so ungrateful as to complain about the team's performance.

And I also suspect Lincoln portrays it that way in reports.