I came across this quote in Jon Well's book “Shipwrecked: A Peoples' History of the Seattle Mariners” and wanted to throw the book across the room. I often want to throw his book across the room. Jon's a friend, and it's a good book, but it keeps reminding me just how much I despise the M's front office: how blithely incompetent M's CEO Howard Lincoln and president Chuck Armstrong have been over the years and yet how long they've kept their jobs; how there's just no accountability there. There's just ... waste. A vast waste of opportunity and possibility and talent and time.

In the quote, Lincoln is talking about retaining then-manager John McLaren and then-GM Billy Bavasi. I've got nothing to say about the former but the latter is surely the worst GM in M's history. I assumed it was impossible to surpass the sluggish ineptitude of Woody Woodward but Bavasi managed it with his brand of energetic ineptitude. You wished Woody would get off the golf course and work the phones. With Bavasi, you wanted him on the golf course. Put down the phone, Mr. Bavasi. Please. Don't make any more deals.

Anyway, here's the quote. It's from September 26, 2007:

“I don't like to change horses in midstream. I didn't want to do it last season and I think the decision I made last season to stick with Bill and Mike proved to be the right decision. I think the decision to remain with Bill and John will turn out to be the right decision.”

He'd made a similar quote the year before, on September 29, 2006:

...there was “no sense changing horses in midstream,” Lincoln said.

Two things:

1. “Horses in midstream” is the idiotic campaign slogan of a corrupt president in David Mamet's political satire “Wag the Dog.” It was discredited long before Lincoln kept uttering it.
2. If the end of the season is “midstream,” what isn't?

More to come.

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