.

Okay, you came in to the boardroom, you made your PowerPoint presentation.  You wanted approval for $15,000 to buy the flatbed truck for the warehouse.  We were a little uncertain about the whole thing, on a lot of levels ... is this make of truck really as good as Hyundai?  Do we really have $15,000 to allocate to that?  Does it really better us to have our own flatbed, and moving people, as opposed to paying the contractors to move things?

No, you had the whole meeting nailed, you had your answers ready and then some, and we allocated the $15,000.  The owner even extended it to $16,800 onsite.

But do you mind explaining this memo that we got today?

OBF: Serious question... How tight of a brotherhood are the 30 GMs? Would it be possible that Tower proposed to get a too good to be true offer from JackyZ, just to have it nixed by Upton, so that he could save face when he would eventually get 50 cents on the dollar from Atlanta, and paint Upton as the villain, not himself? "Hey look, I had a sweet deal from Seattle, but Justin messed that up, so don't blame me for only getting chaff, for our best player..." JZ would never agree to help Towers out like that would he??? It would help explain why the M's were uncharacteristically loose lipped about the failed trade.

.

Good question amigo; Dr. D will have to opine a big fat hairy NO, he wouldn't help Towers out like that, and we'll tell you exactly why.

................

Gordon Gross: Our offer:

• Prospect with #1 starter potential (top 10 in the minors),
• Starting 2B/SS prospect w/ power (top 100), and
• either two power relievers, or
• the OAK arms WASH got for Morse (meaning, Jaso is now said to have been in the Upton deal - jjc).

ATL's offer: prospect with BOR potential, Figgins 3B type in final contract year, a defensive SS w/ zero power, a future middle reliever and a tin can.  If we were making that same ATL offer it would be

• Beavan,
• Guti,
• F-Mart,
• Gillheeney and Bryan Brito (Who? exactly).

Let's you spend four hours "in the box" with a used car salesman.  You're offering $15,500 and he's holding firm at $17,200.  You pick up your stuff and threaten to walk out.  Wait a minute, he says, I'll check with the manager.  

He comes back.  I can make it 17,150 if you waive the warranty.  Come on!, you say, this is ridiculous.  $16,000 or I walk.  Hold on, he says.  Write me a check for $3,000 and I'll staple it to the offer; my manager does better when he knows he has your business today.

He comes back.  Well, the manager's really proud of this truck.  He can do 17,000, if you have 7,000 today and we can offer you 9% on the rest.

It goes all day long like that and you miss your Saturday off.  Finally you agree, at 16,800.  The owner of the company signs off ... ah, problem, sir, we forgot to figure in the sales tax.  You're in a hurry and can't get that approved ... WAI, WAIT the sales guy says -- NOPE you say you've had enough, and you climb in your car and drive off.  Ah well.  Thanks for trying, sir.  Come back next week and we'll have an upgraded model for you.  Better fuel efficiency.

You come back by the lot the next day, to buy the truck at their price, and somebody else is driving the truck off the lot.  You stop him and say hello.  Mind telling me what you got it for?  18,000, 17,000?  You're hoping it's not 15,500.

Got a great deal, the other customer says.  Only $3,000!

You look back in and four salesmen, looking at you, suddenly stifle their chuckles and turn away, pretending to talk about something else.

................

Every time that salesman came back to you, asking for concessions -- waive the warranty, sir?  Put more down? -- he was well-and-truly insulting you.  Do you understand why?

Fortune 500 is about TQM, CQI, continuous quality improvement.  In other words -- things go wrong, fine.  But you'd better be able to explain why.  ... It's okay to make a mistake.  To miss the deadline, miss the budget, have the auditors throw a snit fit and, after the fact, be without a clue as to why things got so weird?  Not okay.

.

...............

1.  I don't consider Taijuan Walker the pick of the M's litter, but baseball certainly does.  The Diamondbacks got their CHOICE of the Big Three.  That's one big fat HAIRY concession.

2.  Combining a Golden Arm with a sweetener, a value prospect -- let's say Romero, or Capps, or Maurer, or Sanchez -- would have been a pretty sweet deal for the DBacks.  But giving them their pick of the second player, also?  Nick Franklin is in EVERYBODY's top 100 and he is an ML-ready player.  At a glove spot.

3.  That's not enough?  Here comes concession number THREE:  you get glamor ML bullpen arms, Stephen Pryor and his 97 mph 15-inch fastball and 10+ K's in the bigs, a kid who has been to the bigs and pitched the 8th, and/or you get John Jaso.

Any one of those three concessions would be an Owie.  With a capital O.  But all three of them?

And those are concessions, things given away after you gave the DBacks one of your glamor SP's.  Which the Braves certainly didn't.

................

I'm all for paying $1.20 on the dollar -- when I'm getting back something I know I'm going to be happy with.  Sometimes you give three properties to get Marvin Gardens, and you win the game with the yellows.  But Justin Upton wasn't our dream player.  He's a player with warts, big ones.

That's what the Mariners did with Kendrys Morales, a one-year Scott Boras client:  they gave the Angels a 2-WAR starting pitcher that the Angels can re-sign if they want.  But Vargas wasn't in our plans, so the $1.20 was fine.  Same thing with Jaso for Morse.  That's paying $1.20 in rubles for $1.00 worth of deutschmarken.  The M's overpaid a little, but it was a good overpay.

Taijuan Walker isn't rubles.  He's yen.  And we didn't get back no Giancarlo Stanton.

Granted, Justin Upton might have put the Diamondbacks in a Ken Griffey Jr. Cincinnati situation, cutting their return.  But the fact remains that Towers could have kept Upton.  If he was willing to sell Upton for a buck, we shouldn't have been haggling about $4 vs. $5.  We need to know why were so badly in the dark.

Also in Zduriencik's defense:  baseball understands about overpaying, to get a lousy franchise moving in the right direction.  The Nationals wayyy overpaid Jayson Werth, but look where they are now.  That's the way other GM's look at the Werth deal.

There's an internal pressure -- Zduriencik is telling his players, and other GM's, Seattle is going to be legit.  We are not going to settle for anything else.  That message, we are glad to see.

But overbidding Yourself ... Four. Times.

................

Dr. D has been around a few steering committees.  Not tons, but some.  And the ones he's seen, in situations like this, when the news about that Atlanta deal rolls in? ... some people who sold us that presentation have some serious explaining to do.  

Me?  I'd like to know why the M's outbid themselves FOUR (4) TIMES OVER.  This one, gentlemen, you are entitled to resent.

Would the Mariners show baseball their keisters, so as to do Kevin Towers a solid?  Um, no.

Bah humbug,

Dr D