Re: DiPoto and Marte.
No doubt. You'd have to sit down and dig deep with your staff about whether to gamble on Marte at SS going into spring training and then react at that time if you start to have doubts, or to get a reliable veteran stopgap earlier this offseason as insurance. There would probably be slim pickings by the end of spring training and a starting shortstop wouldn't come cheap. And after the results of the last few seasons of gambling on a spring shootout between young, unproven players, it's clearly a big risk. Do you want to risk your season on it? Glad I'm a two-bit blog commenter and not the GM. But my goodness Marte made such huge impression on me that I had to generate a defensive term new to me to describe it, command. Once I thought of it things clicked for me. "I belong. I got this. You can move on to other problems." That's what Marte's play both in the field and at the plate said to me. And I'm the skeptic about young Mariners players.
Clearly DiPoto has more at stake in that assessment than I do.