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The new sheriff in town has a favorite word:

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I don't know if I'd want to be in a helicopter when its "stabilizer" failed, but I have a good sense of what it would feel like.  I watched the 2015 M's play.  And here's a related term, a fave of Dr. D's:

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"evenness of mind especially under stress"

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As it applies to major league baseball, the idea of "stabilizing" a rotation, or a bullpen, or a lineup, or a battery, would be that --- > unpredictable and horrible things aren't going to happen any more.  

Ben Zobrist and Mark McLemore help stabilize a lineup because if some player, any player, threatens to hit for a 49 OPS+, you swap out the flat tire on the fly and keep going.  Joaquin Benoit stabilizes a bullpen full of Danny Farquhars because if you lose two in a row in the late innings, and everybody's eyes are getting wide with alarm ... well, the next night you wait for that 7th-inning rally and then you bring Benoit in to pitch 1.2 innings.  It's related to the "Stoploss" concept.  You can steer around land mines that you hadn't seen coming before you were right on top of them.

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My father-in-law hated sports, all sports.  Except for NASCAR and motorcycle racing ... one time we tried to explain that football was exciting too.  He exploded, "HAH!  How would you like to see a guy wipe out on a bike doing a hundred miles an hour!"  word for word.  ... he was a good guy; we're just saying.  His view of baseball wasn't a 30,000-foot view; it was a 93,000,000-mile view.  A king may learn from a cat, LrKrBoi29.

Father-in-law once took a time-out from his hatred of sports.  He volunteered to coach Little League for his son for a one year.  (I am sure he didn't know the number of balls for a walk when he took the job.)  He insisted that his son choose between pitcher and catcher.  Therein lies a punch line.  Why, do you think, he forced my brother-in-law Jimmy to catch?

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"If you're the pitcher or catcher, you get to handle the ball every play.  The other guys only get the ball maybe once a game.  That's not playing a sport."

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To Father-in-law, baseball is really a game with two players, the pitcher and catcher.  I know one person who agreed with him:  Steve Carlton, who won 27 games in 1972.  "Played correctly, baseball should be no more than an elevated game of catch."

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Mike Zunino was Grand Central Mariner Station in 2015, your de facto team captain.  How do you think it affects things, when you're the team captain, let's say a point guard with the ball 80% of the time*, and all your teammates FEEL DESPERATELY SORRY FOR YOU?  Does that put the team in a winning frame of mind, do you think?

Lest you think Dr. D. is double-underlining the point a bit too thickly, here's another one ... Phil Jackson once addressed the media during a Lakers losing streak.  Jackson said the problem was, the Lakers didn't have a leader.  "We'd like for Shaq to be the leader, but he can't be the leader because of his free throw situation."  Shaq loves Phil Jackson, by all accounts, and he accepted this verdict.  ... the leader, by definition, is the guy who fixes things when they're going badly.  If the other team can hack-a-Shaq, and win because the leader missed his foul shots, then they're confident.  That confidence trickles down from the 4th quarter to the 1st quarter.

Casting about for a way to put Zunino's 2015 plate woes in perspective ... :: taps chin :: .. in the six weeks from the middle of May to the end of June (with a team establishing whether it is going to be a contender) ... Zunino had 12 hits.  In six weeks.  Let's see, what's 12 divided by 6?  Visualize yourself playing major league baseball under the lights and getting two (2) base hits per week.  Forever.  

And 42 strikeouts in that time.   Wait for it:  6 runs scored.   5 RBI.

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A quick reminder:  the 2015 Mariners lost a ton of games.  But the 2014 Mariners, with remarkably the same roster, won 87 games and had a run differential of nearly +100 runs.  (They tanked their RD in the last week or two.)  The job may not be to improve the roster so much as it is to stabilize it.  Given the 2014 season, there's reason to believe that.

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Chris Iannetta was Mike Scioscia's right-hand man -- that's saying a lot -- when the Angels won 98 games in 2014.  They averaged 88 wins per season under Ianetta's four years there, and more importantly, the LA Angels were a team that people respected.  Including umpires.

Not sure what we're casting about, trying to say here ... hm.  There is a difference between a legitimate pro sports team, and one that is kind of a laughingstock. You see coaches take over teams, make changes, and overnight the "air" changes.  Things become professional, hard-nosed, and nobody wants to play against them any more.

Jim Zorn was the local Seahawks hero when the franchise was born.  But Chuck Knox took over, benched Zorn, who was kind of a cheesy player.  The Seahawks became, overnight, a team nobody wanted to play.

Slick Watts was an early Sonics hero, led* the league in assists and steals and megawatt smiles.  But he was a dreadful 1-on-1 defender, a poor shooter, and other bad stuff.  Lenny Wilkens took over a 5-17 loser and instantly benched the cheesy Watts (and Dick Snyder, the J.J. Reddick of his generation) for Gus Williams and Dennis Johnson.  Two weeks later, I'm saying two weeks, nobody wanted to play the Sonics.

You watch pro sports for awhile, you sort of sense when a move is made to stop the other guys from laughing at you.  I dunno if Chris Iannetta will turn out to be that exactly, but it's a good possibility.

Enjoy,

Dr D