Jack Zduriencik's Master Plan

The man pictured to the right has big plans to make the Seattle Mariners a championship-caliber ball club. SeaTown Sports broke into his office and found his master plan to turn the Seattle Mariners around. Here were the four main sections of his plan along with our own take on them.

Defense

Why were the Mariners so good in 2001? They were good at defense. Looking back, I could not think of one bad defensive player on that team except maybe for our left-fielder Al Martin.

For the Mariners to be successful they need to look at every single position and make sure they have a good defender, they can't have any holes defensively.

In my own assessment, Johjima is below-average, Lopez is below-average, and Yuni is average. Beltre, Ichiro and now Gutierrez are all above-average.

Defense is so important for the Mariners to be successful because their strength lies in their pitching. They also play half their games in a pitcher-friendly ballpark (Safeco), so having a good defense to back up their pitchers will be a key to their success.

Farm System

After Bill Bavasi emptied the goodies during his tenure as GM, Zduriencik now has to rebuild a farm system. I would like to see the Mariners build a team from within their organization.

Teams like the Rays and the Indians were able to build successful rosters with valued players that have come up from their respective farm systems. It's pointless having a minor-league system if we end up trading prospects to other teams or fail to develop our own talent.

Every team's long-term success depends upon  their minor-league system, unless of course you have unlimited amounts of cash like the Yankees.

Evaluating Talent using Advanced Statistics (Sabermetrics)
This stuff works. Trust us. People like Tom Tango are the future of baseball. Zduriencik is a smart general manager. The best thing a person can do in his situation can do is surround himself with a lot of other smarter people.

A solid front-office with people having intellectual arguments will lead to success down on the field. Mainly because mistakes like this and this won't ever happen again.

The master formula:

Defense + Farm System + Sabermetrics = Playoffs!!!!!

I'm so excited.