from the management team that led the M's for the first dozen years of the millenium. Friends and co-workers used to boggle at how bad the M's were at trades, and they weren't exactly hardcore fans. They'd catch a game per week, maybe one every other week, but that didn't invalidate their opinions.
It looked *to me* like if the M's had made *zero* trades from 2001-2012 (when I stopped paying super close attention to the roster moves) that the organization would have been markedly better off. And it seemed *to me* that if they had pulled the trigger on the handful of trades involving eventually busted prospects (like Jeremy Reed) *in addition* to all the other bad trades they did happen to make in that timeframe, they would have been better off.
It's entirely possible that this was purely hindsight based on speculation, but it genuinely seems to me that the team has nowhere to go but 'up' in terms of its front office performance. And, thankfully, it appears that's the direction things are headed.