Doc, maybe Wedge was trying to make his point in a cutesy way that backfired. I've said that once he clarified he was good by me on that issue. I think I'm pretty clear on his intent, but he certainly botched it in delivery. He should have clearly said that Ackley needs to go up there looking to punish the first FB he sees, or some-such thing. That would have been simple. But he said what he did in a way that was bound to raise hackles on this site and in the rest of the blogosphere. And he did it at a time where his performance was already under closer scrutiny. I now get his point.....but I get the way some responded to it, too. I've been pretty good about not being all over Wedge this year, especially since the season has started. I've been a critic of some decisions (Andino's long death spiral and the too long wait to get Franklin here) but have given credit where it is due, Bay and Chavez recently, for example.
But I have said that I think Wedge will go. I still think that. I would rather it didn't happen because that would mean our fortunes have reversed themselves. We're 8 games below .500 and only a real hot streak away from that mark.....but only a real cold streak (as we've seen this season) away from disaster. I think the 2nd is more likely than the first. If it happens then Wedge will go.
But Saunders' arm and Harang's recent performance bode that the real hot streak could happen. Add a mashing 2B and who knows?
I'm not anti-Wedge. It would be unfair to say that some other manager would have done better or worse. But we've been Bleh! and I'm anti-doing nothing if Bleh! is the rule. It has been the rule for nearly 2.5 years. That seems a decently long period of time. I'm hoping we're seeing that coming to an end. If so, I'm good with the Sarge. If not, let's see if somebody else has the magic.
We're 3-1 in the Franklin era.
Where has he been?
:)
moe

The $64,000,000 Question: "The Mariners knew these were crossroads games. They didn't have it. If I were Zduriencik, considering the terrible results I've gotten, I'd have a decision to make. You think Z has the political capital to make a call? I'm not sure." I'm not sure either. I do believe that GMZ's political capital is reduced by the 2013 losing record and the "failure" of Ackley and Montero, as well as the DFA of F-Mart, the last remaining position player from the Fister trade. Conversely, if young Nick is a ripping success & E-Ram returns lights out, GMZ will gain some capital.
Another related question: Supposing Stanton became available - would GMZ have the political capital to trade 3/4 of the M's best prospects / young major leaguers?? I'm not sure that his bosses will let him trade, say, Franklin and Walker and Pryor for Stanton right now.
I do think this: the more that Eric Wedge embarrases the franchise with his public gaffes, the easier it will be for GMZ to cut him loose, assuming GMZ wants to. You and Gordon state that the most important factor for evaluating a manager is how hard the players play for him, that the manager still is respected in the club house. And, to borrow an approach from Jemanji, how would we know if Wedge lost said respect? Presumably there would be a series of low-effort, low-intensity games; perhaps some mental gaffes on the field.
Did we see such evidence in the Felix loss at Cleveland, the 2 losses to the Halos, and the 2 losses to the Padres when Safeco Joe's quality start was wasted and the offense disappeared?

Doc, I agree that Wedge has been saying for a while that hitters must be agressive on pitches in the strike zone - loooooking for strikes, stalking the pitcher, and etc... and the players must take these words and develop their own plan to achieve this goal. Fine.
However, this coaching staff has been doing more than that. This coaching staff, and I am including the past hitting coaches..., this staff has changed Ackley's stance at the plate three times in the past 14 month. They changed Montero at least three times. Smoak has changed at least 5 times when you look at the left and right sides of the plate.
The hands go up, and then a couple months later the hands come down. The stance opens up, and then later it closes. The bat is straight up, and then it goes behind the head, and then 45 degrees... the changes just go on and on.
For each of these young kids, they all started OK but not great - Ackley, Montero and Smoak - but they for the most part have gotten progressively worse as time with this coaching staff increases. Now maybe it is just bad luck, or they're thinking too much, or their approach is wrong for an at bat... but I doubt the tinkering is helping the situation.
Now that we have Franklin hitting, it will be interesting on how his swing changes as he goes through a couple inevitable slumps... and we will see if he gets better or worse as time progresses.

perfectly explained what Wedge thinks, but of course it does, it's mostly quotes. You only get so many free articles at the Times and this in one that is worth reading. Link: http://blogs.seattletimes.com/mariners/2013/05/29/wedge-amplifies-on-his...
I don't want to over-quote, but here are a few choice quotes where we can understand Wedge a little better.
"Hey, I use the numbers as much as anybody. I used the numbers in Cleveland. And Cleveland was one of the first teams to really dive into it with Mark Shapiro leading the way. So I’ve always been a big fan of using the numbers."
"What you can’t do is play this game with fear. You have to go out there and play, and when you get your first good pitch to take a whack at, you have to take a whack at it."
"What people have to see is these are human beings. They are not widgets. It’s not XYZ corporation – something out of a book. These are human beings. And that’s the thing you have to factor in the most. They have emotions. They have families. You have ups and downs and everything that goes a long with it. Things you can’t read on a piece of paper."
"The best hitters, the ones that get on base, are the ones up there hunting the baseball from pitch one, with a focus and an approach."
"People have to understand: You can’t go up there looking for a walk and expect to be a big-leaguer very long. Nobody’s stayed up here by just walking. You’ve got to hit, too."

Communication is a tricky thing, especially in public speaking situations. You can get 98% of your comments spot on but all of it can be undone by one big mistake. Wedge's mistake was the "people that haven't played the game since they were 9 years old" comment. That one comment shadowed over everything else that he said. He was undone by a comment that was completely superfluous to his message and that is a cardinal sin when it comes to communication.
Take away that one sentence and the coverage, the reaction and basically every single conversation that resulted from the interview would have been entirely different. It's tough for me to feel sorry for the guy. Standing in front of the media every day - win, lose or draw - is a key part of his job. You makes your bed and you sleeps in it.

The problem isn't that he said that some players mess up their approach. Of course that happens. The problem is that he used a cheap smear for no reason whatsoever. Bringing up players like Rickey Henderson isn't a defense, it in fact illustrates just how completely wrong Wedge was: Henderson didn't give up baseball at 9! So Wedge doesn't need to "clarify", he needs to apologize.

There is no doubt that the reaction was over the line. But if Obama makes a good speech praising an up and coming political star and adds a throw away comment like "she's the best lookin' woman in politics", guess what the lead is on the evening news and every blog in the country? Doesn't mean it's right - it just is. And everyone in a public speaking role has to be cognizant of it.
Do we have a responsibility to look beyond the gaffes and not take offense? In an enlightened sense, I suppose so. Is it easy to not take offense when someone throws a sneering comment your way? Nope. Whether he meant it to or not, that one comment insulted the most passionate fan base the M's have. He has to own that and can't be too surprised that the guys that haven't played baseball since they were 9 years old (but blog about his team relentlessly) punched back.
As far as Wedge the manager goes, I actually like him and don't think his tactical decisions are that far out of the norm. His team plays hard for him and that's about all you can really hope for. I can only imagine what the blogosphere would have had to say about Pinella's treatment of pitchers before Price came on board, his impatience with young players like Ibanez, et al. Joe Torre was "clueless Joe" before he got a team loaded with All-Stars.

No problem - he wasn't talking about me. I'm not SABR savvy at all, really. :)
I'm in a communications heavy role, professionally, so I feel fine criticizing the ham-handed communication.

Silly spat. He made a comment to annoy analysts that believe numbers tell the whole story. In the article I linked to above, he basically admits to goading that response from the Sabermetric crowd, apologizes, but then adds that to be a pro ball player, you need to have thick skin. You can't be weak minded or listen to the crowd and expect to succeed in Fenway or NYC. You can't even attend a game at Fenway as a fan if you don't have thick skin.. The fans aren't in the MLB, but Ackley was and needs to learn to drown out the background Sabermetric crowd and other background noise to succeed is my interpretation of what Wedge was trying to get across.
Rickey didn't walk because he was looking for one. He had a small strike zone and could crush the ball when it was in the zone. I bet he has the MLB record for walks to lead off a game, but he also owns the HR record to lead off a game. I think Ichiro is #2 with about one-third as many as Rickey. Rickey is the poster boy for Wedge's approach in my opinion.

The problem I have with Wedge is I don't think he's accurate in his facts. He says:
"But if you look at the numbers, the number of times he was 0-2 or 1-2 is somewhat astonishing. For all the sabermetrics people out there, here we are talking about it again….I use the numbers, so I guess I’m one of them, too. The difference between hitting 1-0 or 0-1, 2-0 or 0-2, go check out those numbers."
So, I did. I compared Ackley with our best hitter, Kendry Morales. Before today, Kendry had 216 PA compared to 171 for Dustin, a difference of 45 in Kendry's favor. In 0-2 counts, Dustin hit 11, Kendry 18. In 1-2 counts, Dustin hit 26, Kendry 31. Nothing astonishing here. Kendry hit 12 more times in these counts using 45 more PAs doing so. Kendry killed the ball in those opportunities, but Ackley was trying as well.
Dustin hit a .478 BA with the count full (29 PA). Does that sound like a guy hoping to get a walk? Sounds to me like the guy is looking and ready to hit, not walk. Kendry is hitting .133 BA - 18 PAs with a full count.
Dustin did his best hitting when the count was either 0-2 (.273 BA) or full. First pitch hitting, he hit a .182 BA. When the count was 1-0, he hit .200.
Kendry hit 40 first pitch or 1-0 pitches. But Ackley, with 45 fewer PAs, hit 24 of them. We already saw that Ackley was not effective when going up there swinging or being aggressive, fearless, or whatever you want to call it.
Perhaps Dustin should have been swinging at 2-0 counts more. He only hit 5 of them, and had a 0.000 average doing so. But Kendry only hit 10 of them (and killed them, with 3 of those hits being home runs). Ackley faced 33 2-0 counts, Kendry, 45. Adjusting again for their overall PAs, the difference is fairly negligible.
I just don't see where the numbers match anyone's narrative here regarding Ackley's problem. Certainly not Wedge's. Ackley's problem wasn't the refusal to swing at the early pitches as much as it was the inability to HIT those early pitches, or all those 2-0 or 2-2 or 1-2 counts. It looks to me, again, that Dustin was having an internal struggle between his approach, and Wedge's, which naturally made him unready to hit in any situation, EXCEPT when his back was against the wall (0-2) or there were no more options for waiting (3-2). In those situations, his natural inclinations took over, and Ackley, free from the option of doing things his way or Wedge's way (or Matt Carruth's or Dave Cameron's, or Dr. Detecto's, if you accept the blogger theory), went into survival instinct, natural selection, kill or be killed, mode and did quite well.

Of the 91 qualified batters in the AL, Dustin Ackley was in the 74th percentile in strike percentage and 1st percentile in swing percentage. While seeing a well above average number of strikes, he swung the bat less than any other player in the AL. Just for comparison, Justin Smoak is in the 14th percentile in strike percentage, but 22nd percentile in swing percentage. Correlation isn't proof, but his approach is a serious outlier and a serious failure to date

55 percent. That will destroy your confidence. Aggressiveness is no good if you are lousy in your aggressiveness. Confidence leads to positive aggressiveness. Better to be passive if you don't think you are going to do anything more than hit another grounder to the second baseman. The "hitter" counts didn't make any difference. If anything, they validated Dustin's passive approach. If Wedge had stopped at confidence, he'd been fine. But all that talk about counts and aggressiveness - it didn't meet Ackley's need. It's a chicken and egg thing, but I think confidence comes before aggressiveness here. Wedge is probably right in the main. I just think he's wrong in this particular application of his philosophy. What do you do to build a person's confidence? You give him simpler tasks he can be successful in. AAA was the correct move. Build confidence, and aggression will follow. The funny thing is that when it comes to selectivity at swinging, Ackley is in elite company. It's the results that follow the swings where he parts company.

I'm not so sure about that. Would Wedge say the same thing to Cameron's face? Probably. Would he say it to Bill James' face? Or SABR savvy M's owner Chris Larson's face? Neither of them has played the game since they were 9 years old, either...