Baker and I are talking past each other at precisely one point:  why do we say that "the Mariners" didn't know about Leuke?

Looks obvious to me that:

1. From Zduriencik down, they knew who Josh Lueke was, and didn't especially care. 
2. Armstrong and Lincoln didn't, at the moment of the trade, know who Lueke was.
3. After Z and co. found out how much Armstrong and Lincoln did care about the personal background, only then did Z's spin machine kick in -- with the intent of repairing interoffice relationships.
4. Which you opposed (the spin machine, that is) with the intent of establishing the truth, and with the inadvertent result of preventing the repair of their work relationships.

We asked Geoff to tell us where we're going wrong with that understanding.

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Is Baker saying that Armstrong and Lincoln should have known who Leuke was before okay'ing the deal? 

Or is Baker saying that Jack Zduriencik and his staff didn't know what the charges were at the time of trade?

Geoff's reply to the above was:

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For Doc,

All of the above. Lincoln and Armstrong trusted Zduriencik to know what was going on with Lueke. But with that trust came the expectation he would be honest and forthright with them if they asked the question beforehand.

If Zduriencik really did not know what happened beforehand, that's a very serious problem. But it's equally serious if he did know beforehand -- as Adair and Daniels suggested -- and deliberately misled his team president and CEO. You can't do that.

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=== Simplify, Dept. ===

The quotes that were published in Baker's articles were full information.

So this part was as SSI pictured from the beginning.  Zduriencik did, of course, know about Lueke.  Rick Adair stated that everybody, much less Zduriencik, knew about Lueke: "it was common knowledge" what Lueke had done -- of course it was.  Baseball isn't a very big community from the inside.  Lueke's case would have been a visible one.

Let's not muddy the water with confusion over whether Zduriencik and his staff were blindsided about Lueke.  He wasn't (although to repair his relationship with Armstrong, he obviously had to represent this as the case).  As bloggers, we reduce the question to a much clearer and more understandable one: 

How big a deal is it to "deliberately mislead his team president and CEO.  You can't do that" ?

It is precisely here, in this barren wilderness, that we find our compass as to (the implied) Right and Wrong of this matter, as it were.

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