Excellent post. F-500 executives are EXACTLY what they are - very comfortable in their own skin. Lincoln and Armstrong are not plagued with self doubt that their way is the right way - they darn well know it.They don't fail - the people they hire fail them and thier vision. They wouldn't have risen to the heights of their profession that they have any other way.
Absent changes to ownership, I don't think this will alter the dynamic of the M's front office at all. Lincoln and Armstrong are what they are. They are finished product, as it were, and they've been incredibly successful being who they are. They will still want that nice quarterly balance sheet. They will still be risk averse. They will still value a nice, family friendly environment in Safeco.
What it will change is the $$ totals on that quarterly balance sheet. Risk will be evaluated differently. I have to think that they will love, love, love exploiting the accounting loopholes that allow them to hide revenue from the MLB revenue sharing system with the RSN. I imagine they are taking on some serious debt to make the acquisition and they will be just as focused on retiring that debt in an orderly fashion as they were with the debt they took on to build Safeco. But the $$ available for payroll should be substantially higher. So, instead of a nice safe $90 payroll that guarantees them a moderate profit every year it might be a nice safe $130 million payroll that guarantees them a moderate profit every year. That might not be the kind of risk taking, all in mentality that we want but it's better than the status quouo. And it means that Jack can now go that extra year or that extra $20 million it takes to land the whale that he's been hunting every year.
All in all, I'll take it.
.
As Geoffy writes today (and yesterday), M'sTV will change, or should change, the landscape of Seattle sports. The blog-o-sphere, right on cue, erupts in a hail of cupcakes thrown across the tables. LOL.
Baker writes, okay, the local nine now has big time dinero. Let's see them act like it. (They already have, to some extent, with the Hamilton and Fielder offers, and the Felix contract. Things are showing signs of change.)
Another, notable blogger writes, the Mariners have always wanted to win every bit as much as anybody else ever did, so SHADDAP about it already.
Others fall in line, usually not according to logic, but usually according to how much they personally like one author or the other.
Young Frankenstein's view of the situation?
.
=== James Madison vs George Washington, Dept. ===
To a man with a screwdriver, no problem is ever a nail. We notice, good-naturedly, that Fangraphs attempts to frame every debate in terms of intelligence.
We remember after Al Gore lost the election, insert favorite joke here, James Carville and Paul Begala on TV post-mortem. Looking positively morose. They were so shellshocked that they forgot that you are not supposed to get introspective on national TV. They -- not Dr. D; Carville and Begala -- lamented, "liberals value intelligence and conservatives value character. Right now they've got the country with them."
Let's skip the debate about whether liberals are smart, whether conservatives actually do typically try to behave more according to traditional moral standards, etc. That's not the discussion. There's a gigantic life light bulb here, offered by Carville and Begala, if you want it.
On the left side of the aisle, they ask of a Presidential candidate, what is a (wo)man's education? What are her qualifications? How smart is she?
You might not have realized that on the right side of the aisle, they simply don't ask those questions as hard. They don't see George Washington as the smartest founding father, but they see him as the right one to be president. The left-side jokes about right-side Presidents being dumb, that has a certain amount of truth in it. Ronald Reagan and George Bush, while intelligent men, wouldn't have had the SAT's that Bill Clinton or Barack Obama did. Conservatives don't care about IQ as much as liberals do.
We're talking about a Zen principle here. Some men evaluate others primarily in terms of intelligence, and others evaluate primarily in terms of choices and morality. Dr. D has his own preference there too, but that is NOT the point right here. (He will slip in, gratutitously: do you admire #42 for his IQ? Or for the choices that he made?)
That's not even to say that blogger X or Y is in fact on the left or right side of the aisle. We are talking about a paradigm. Do the Mariners have a cruddy baseball team because they are stupid, or because of the priorities they set?
Maybe, as PHXTerry would be quick to point out, it is neither. Maybe it's just bad luck that Ackley, Smoak and Montero didn't (yet) turn out to be Braun, Fielder and Weeks. Or maybe it's a combination of 17 different causative factors, sliding up and down like on an equalizer.
My question, here: Do we really need to shaddap about the Mariners' spending priorities? Is that accurate, that Howard Lincoln will sacrifice as much to win as Arte Moreno will?
=== Yeah, I Passed the Bar Exam By Sucking UP, Dept. ===
Dr. D has nothing against blaming stupidity when it is in fact a low IQ that is causing the problem.
The thing is, though, that he (and some of you) have actually worked in Fortune 500, as bloggers X and Y self-evidently have not. He knows for a fact that Howard Lincoln does not have a low IQ.
No Nintendo executive, third level and above, does. Failing the opportunity to introduce you to a true F-500 powerbroker, Dr. D will just have to ask you to take his word for it. If you ever do run into a fifth level Nintendo executive, be prepared for him to be smarter than you are. That applies whatever your SATs were.
That experience in Fortune 500, in dealing with high-level executives, is why Dr. D finds it so hopelessly naïve for people to charge the Mariners with stupidity. It is an outrage for people to insinuate that people like Howard Lincoln, Chuck Armstrong, and Jack Zduriencik are stupid.
Even on a relative basis! I'll bet you my blog that Howard Lincoln's SAT's were higher than Arte Moreno's. Have you not noticed that --- > nobody has taken over baseball by hiring Paul DePodesta. Why not? Because he wasn't smarter than Bill Stoneman.
The Red Sox have Bill Blinkin' James, and their own RSN, and they haven't taken over baseball. You can't bludgeon MLB to death with IQ horsepower any more. There is no way to do it. There is no way, any more, to be so SAT-smart that --- > You Win. Hire Steven Hawking. You still won't win.
Nor are the Mariners' baseball people smart people making stupid decisions. There was nothing smart about choosing Prince Fielder, Rickie Weeks and Ryan Braun that is now stupid about selecting Dustin Ackley, Jesus Montero and Justin Smoak.
It's true that Dr. D is prone to evaluate situations in terms of priorities, rather than in terms of intelligence. But it is also true that priorities are the main issue at hand, in this specific case.
=== McDonald's vs Starbucks ===
All restaurants want to serve good food. Denny's PRIORITIZES that differently than does Ruth's Chris Steak House. Denny's really does want to put good food out on the table. But I worked there. If the eggs aren't right, you hope the customer doesn't complain. At Ruth's, if the food isn't right, it doesn't go to the table.
Chevy would like high customer satisfaction. So would Lexus. They PRIORITIZE that differently.
You want to talk about "not believing that crud," I've got some for you to stop believing. That's the idea that every big company --- > ratios its priorities in exactly the same ways. McDonald's doesn't care as much about your coffee as Starbucks does. There's a reason they don't.
...............
Howard Lincoln would love nothing more than to ride down the street in a ticker-tape parade. He and Armstrong would love to hob-nob at games as execs running the best team in baseball. The thing is, they also love great-looking end-of-quarter financial presentations.
Every huge business organization has a long list of missions and priorities. Are you saying that every sports team in the world RATIOS its yearly W's, and yearly cash-flow, in exactly the same way?
Are you saying that Arsenal is NOT more interested in reducing its stadium debt than is Manchester City? Wake up and smell the coffee. To Arsenal, 4th place is the trophy. They get to go to the Champions League. To Manchester City, 1st place is the trophy.
The Champions' League then becomes a given, as packed stadiums have become a given for many of MLB's contenders. The irony is that if the M's would have fought for the pennant, that they'd have achieved many of their goals en passant.
Are you saying that Howard Lincoln is no more risk-averse than is Arte Moreno? That given a judgment call about investing $$ into the roster, with risk attached, that both men will always make exactly the same call?
.
=== MsTV and Risk Avoidance ===
The M's CEO's have legal backgrounds. They are more risk-averse than many other execs in their positions. This has affected their payroll decisions in many ways -- not just in terms of payroll levels, but also in terms of Stars & Scrubs, and in terms of the willingness to INVEST so that revenue can later increase.
M'sTV will give the Mariners a very, very secure source of cash for a long time. The guess here is that this will embolden the Mariners to start playing the same Josh Hamilton and Prince Fielder game that others play -- at least to some extent. MsTV, in the character of the revenue source it provides, should address a lot of what has been holding the Mariners back.
Everybody wants to win. Some owners will take risks to get there. MsTV may allow the M's to get there without that risk.
My $0.02,
Jeff
Comments
Amen to your point about bloggers/commenters whose knee jerk reaction to M's management is to acuse these smart, seasoned executives of stupidity. It says more about the bloggers/commenters than it does about the M's senior managers.
We have to remember that Lincoln just doesn't have the money to spend on the Mariners the way we want him to. Our owners are comparatively poor. Nintendo, which owns 51 percent of the Mariners, is an extremely volatile for-profit company. Its fortunes rise and fall on the fickle minds of gamers and techno geeks, who hop from one latest thing to the next. No one knows if Nintendo is going to exist in ten years. How is the new Wii doing? Google says its tanking so far.
Nintendo hires Mr. Lincoln to run the Mariners. He is just a rank and file Nintendo employee, rather than being an independently wealthy businessman. You don't hear of any higher Nintendo employees involved, because Nintendo does not care about the Mariners the way Arte Moreno or Mike Illich care about their ball clubs. I think that Lincoln only has two ground rules in his job: 1. Keep the Mariners profitable, 2. If there are problems, don't bother the home office with them.
Can you imagine Lincoln calling back to Japan and telling them he needs a $100 million for Prince Fielder? He is liable to hear from his bosses: "Who's Prince Fielder?" and, "We only have $350 million worth of stock in this team, do you really want to spend it on one overweight player?"
That said, this buying the RSN deal seems like Lincoln's answer to all of us naysayers who wanted a tyrannical billionaire ring demanding owner and got a salaried corporate lawyer. As MTGrizzly noted, if Lincoln could do anything to show us he cared about winning, and wasn't just "Ho'ard" ing the money, this would be it. He found a great way to make more money, which means that he has authority to spend more money.
A Mariners fan first: Heres to Howard.
There's a difference between lacking intelligence and lacking vision (or suffering from blind spots). Smart men can make BIG mistakes. Even in the case of high level business executives they sometimes can and do fail to maximize their resources and their advantages, and as you so aptly point out it is often a case of priorities that are either mixed up or incomplete.
The sentence I like best from your article is this:
"The irony is that if the M's would have fought for the pennant, that they'd have achieved many of their goals en passant."
Howard Lincoln clearly has enough business savvy to get where he's got. But if I was calling him on the carpet for the last few years I would be holding him accountable for failing to leverage, failing to maximize the extremely strong position he had early last decade. He could have achieved AND FAR EXCEEDED his long term goals and his actual achievements. But his blind devotion to his priority of tidy year-to-year finances undercut the potential of his organization. It still sits pretty, much prettier after this latest news, but what it COULD HAVE BEEN with a little vision, we'll never know.
He has some brand repair to do, both with regards to the Mariners and, if he stays on as the principal, with regards to himself. He could have entered this new period from a position of great strength in this regard. A little winning will go a long way to curing things. But to me your line that I quoted says it all.
Watching superficially from a distance, it was amusing to see people writing about Morse during Spring training as such a great thing to get him back. I do remember him leaving with very few seeing any promise in him at all. Baseball is a hard sport and can make anyone look very dumb very fast.
Doc I have to thank you once again for weighing in on the side of common sense and real world...reality. Please keep the great business-side-of-baseball posts coming, in the M's commentariat we spend a bit too much time arguing about the placement of the deck chairs instead of thinking about the ship (USSM pun not intended...lol).
I think you characterize the "Fangraphs" way of seeing everything through the lens of intelligence perfectly...put another way it is an abdication of true responsibility, because sometimes the problem is big picture not little picture. Sometimes we have to face the (very uncomfortable) reality that the "system" is flawed. Who cares if the M's have the best one-armed swordsman GM in baseball, if his opponents get a free hand or a shield in addition? :) A lot of people emotionally want to put their head down and believe theory is reality (in my job I have noticed that very smart IT dept people are quite susceptible to this). For sports bloggers, the equivalent is to assume a priori that all GMs have equal opportunity and it's just a matter of out-spreadsheeting and out-pondering the enemy. True leaders diagnose systemic issues and fight to change them. Baker is one of these, I don't know if people appreciate how much courage he has to call the M's to task constantly in a "nice" town like Seattle where he presumably has very little "air cover" from any powerful backers.
All that said, GREAT news about the new revenue streams (...assuming the M's got a good price on the deal and won't be telling us all about their burdensome TV debt in 10 years). I suspect you are right, this is a rising tide that will lift the payroll to more competitive levels while not fundamentally changing the nature of ownership and management priorities. At that point we just have to hope Jay-Z or his successor have the smarts and luck to get us to the top!
To Jacoby Ellsbury and Matt Garza this season, if nothing else.