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Life plays you some funny hands sometimes.
No sooner do you paste up a wild shot of Gene's hair, and make that your icon, than ... your own hair starts falling out. Or you sign on with a 'net company to write astronomy articles and --- > get shoved into the Mariners cubicle. Or you spend $0.5 billion to make a baseball stadium with a Hit It Here neon sign in right field, and your lefty basher demands a move to Cincinnati.
......
In 6th grade, Dr. D met a pretty cool kid on the basketball playground and it turned out the kid lived one street over. Played a bunch of baseball and hoops that summer, and then 7th grade, bam, seated next to each other at P.J. High. Over the next few years or decades, we formed the UW's most notorious Dungeons and Dragons campaign, married sisters, took aikido, got in horrific car wrecks coming off Stevens Pass, served as the day cooks at Sea-Tac Denny's, none of which occurred in that order.
We're still working the same shtick.
With us in our 50's now and sharing grandkids/grandnephews, family gatherings are an inside joke. Something Seahawky happens on the TV screen and everybody looks over.
Nerd 1, without looking away from screen: "5ok3th!"
Nerd 2: Cracks up.
Nerd 1: [the symbol for Boron]
Nerd 2: "Yeah." (As in, yeah, right.)
Nerds 1 & 2: Wide grins
Nerd 2's adult son: "What!"
There are advantages and disadvantages to semi-telepathic communication. It's a pretty big plus in two-on-two basketball, but a definite minus when comparing GPA's, paychecks or wives. You're able to give each other space long before an argument even begins, true, but then again when you fail to do this, the very slightest 'insult' can lead to a week-long grievance. Did somebody just say that the key to life is not to fight with your spouse?
......
Relative to every other managerial candidate, Scott Servais is Jerry DiPoto's brother-in-law. You'll get all sorts of people saying that this is a bad thing. They'll lay accusations to the effect of:
- The junior guy will show up late to work all the time, grow a Zack Galifanikis beard, and like that
- The entire org just became a "Yes Man" groupthink, or
- Alternatively, the junior guy will want to BECOME the boss
- The junior guy is only there BECAUSE he's the boss's friend
- etc
You can rest assured that such critics have never won a 2-on-2 basketball tournament. ;- )
Since the days of John F. Kennedy, it's been axiomatic that every U.S. President hire his five best boyhood friends as "advisers." He automatically becomes a President with staff he can trust, staff that will give it to him straight, staff that will have his back.
There's a corollary here: when a brand-new manager takes over a new team, he is technically junior to the Robinson Canos and Kyle Seagers who have squatted out their lockers for a year or ten. If you get a Chone Figgins type interested in gathering dissenters to his revolution, flies will gather in direct proportion to the perception of the manager's instability. In 2016, Scott Servais' managerial-instability number will be the square root of 0. So you're talking four free months.
.......
If Nerd 1 and Dr. D were running the Mariners, we would agree on 70% of everything we did before we ever opened our mouths. Then we'd agree on another 20% by the time we got to the symbol for Boron (four or five seconds in). And the other 10% of the time, one of us would go "OH YEAH GREAT IDEA WHY DIDN'T I SEE THAT BEFORE! GOOD CALL BRO!"
It's not perfect, but it beats Wakamatsu and Zduriencik.
My $0.02,
Little Cat B