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...here goes anyway.
Please, Doc, I beg you not to view this as any sort of slight to you as a person or as a baseball mind. Or to think that I'm knocking someone to make myself bigger. Neither is true.
But I must protest a bit on behalf of the sabermetric community. You have a tendency to assume that people who have held higher office than you in a given discipline are subject-matter experts who know more than you do...that they wouldn't have come that far without being really good at what they do. That is a WONDERFUL assumption to have...and it works probably 98% of the time, so I encourage you to remain optimistic and generous in spirit in that way.
But in the case of Tony Blengino...I think you are not correct to assume that. Without wishing to name names, I do feel it worth noting that I worked for a top notch organization for Blengino's stated profession and heard a lot of commentary about the Mariners (because they knew I was a fan of the club and it was interesting conversational fodder)...and when the Blengino hit piece came out (and that's what I believe it was) this January, they were primarily jawing at Blengino...not Z or Wedge (though they think there was likely some truth in some of the things Blengino said about how Z approach new information delivered by the analysis team). Please do not take that comment as gospel for what the official position of my former employer would be...it is just office chatter from people I respected who were better analysts than I was.
And, frankly, I concur with them on this...they don't think Z is blameless, or some sort of super-genius, but they don't think Blengino is a sabermetrician...and looking at the way he thinks through problems and the types of information he uses to lean on in his analysis...I don't think he is either. Blengino is a good old boy who is conversant enough in sabermetrics to get by in conversation with the big minds in that field, but not particularly adept at scientific/statistical analysis done on his own, based on my reading of his publicly available writings.
I do not believe Blengino is any more a subject matter expert than you are...in fact I would take your analysis over his 8 days a week.
This is a great example of it. I actually got into an argument with my bosses while working for the Yankees over whether Ackley had become too pull happy..I was certain he had...but then we pulled up the spray charts and...dang...nope! During his cold stretches, he was NOT more pull happy...funny how the memory convinces us of trneds that are not real trends. Miller has indeed gone pull crazy and starting whiffing and grounding out because of it...but it is not part of a wider trend within the Mariner organization. Other guys struggled at the same time...for utterly different reasons. Smoak thinks he's a home run hitter who can go yard up the middle...he is not and cannot (regularly anyway). Seager was standing too far from the plate and getting beat by the fastball away. Ackley was too passive for strikes. Zunino has poor pitch recognition skills because he's too young in playing time. Saunders constantly battles his desire to use a more comfortable, longer swing, rather than use a shorter stroke directed up the middle. They're all struggling...but they are not falling into the same traps. He just assumes they are because they are all fanning a lot more than they used to.
Not to mention his silly comment about Miller's LD rate regressing...why?? If he's got a physical reason to be grounding out all the time...why should his LD rate go up? I think it will go up...but not because it regresses...because he hits better.
I don't think Blengino is clueless...but I don't consider him a subject matter expert just because he had a title.