Ichiro and the Autobot Matrix of Leadership

Too often the American public and the sports media become infatuated with this romanticized ideal of leadership. They clamor for a gruff and weathered player to lead the way. They ache to portray a player as a gritty vet, a John Wayne type who will help the younger players through the trials of a rigorous 162 game season. They want a General Patton type of rousing and epic speech, words that'll get the troops ready to kill. The same type of speeches Ichiro satirizes in his yearly address to the AL All-Star team. There is an expectation on loquacious speeches and wild gesticulations that goes unmet and is unsettling to some.

Ichiro is quite the opposite of the gung-ho leader. He is stoic in his regimented dedication to baseball. There is a singular focus to Ichiro and that is to work to become the best player he can be. The need to to tell Yuniesky Betancourt to go easy on the ho-ho's is absurd to him. In his mind all should be as dedicated to bettering themselves as he is. After all they are all professionals being paid a shit ton of money to play a game. So if Carlos Silva feels like ingesting the entire lunch buffet, table and all, it is not Ichiro's job to tell make sure he gets in the proper cardio to burn of his snack.

When Ichiro seeks to lead by example through his hard work and dedication to his task it is puzzling to those looking for a "win one for the gipper!" speech. "Where is Ichiro's Autobot matrix of leadership", they ask. "And in our darkest hour of the 2008 season why did he not pull it from his chest and light the way to a division title?" They fail to realize, games are won on talent, not leadership.

The 2008 season of The Seattle Mariners was a 50 car pile up, a spectacle so gruesome that I could not tear my eyes away from it. Dreams of competing for the AL West were crushed under the foot of cold reality as The M's were 20 games out by the All-Star break. From the pile-up of the lost season one bloody and battered horse of a topic emerged from the carnage, staggered, collapsed and died in plain view. This was the horse of team chemistry. It was then jumped on and flogged until the end of the season.

As the season decayed in the summer heat, more and more complaints and shots were aimed at the teams best player, Ichiro. He was called a selfish primadonna who cared only about achieving his hallowed stats, team be damned. He was accused of not giving enough effort to win games, not diving for balls, not changing his approach at the plate in key situations to drive in runs and other such bullshit. Essentially he was being called a shitty leader for not somehow magically granting washed-up Richie Sexson access to the fountain of youth. He was chastised because he couldn't lessen the gravitational pull of team fat asses Carlos Silva and Yunieksy Betancourt.

So, imagine the shock when the Japanese team, ostensibly led by Ichiro, went on to win the WBC again. How could this selfish prick, who cared only for himself and was a terrible leader, will his team to victory on a world stage? This was one of the many questions asked to him by, enemy of the blog, Geoff Baker.

Baker was the reporter most responsible for beating the shit out of the dead of horse of team chemistry and stoking the anti-Ichiro fires. It was he who provided anonymous quotes at the end of last season divulging the news about certain players threatening physical harm to Ichiro. And he was the asshole who thought that he could pull that rotting and putrid dead horse and ride it for one last furlong and "allow Ichiro to respond to his detractors".

Ichiro was rather surprised about Bakers line of questioning but answered the queries anyway. Ichiro told Baker that a team leader is not important. Per the WBC team

"I did not think or feel that I wanted to be a leader for the Japan WBC team,'' he said. "And at the end, I was not a leader for the Japan WBC team. And something I'd felt, this thought of mine, became even stronger after playing with this Japanese WBC team, is that to have a leader -- who is a leader? -- that's not important.

"What is, is to try to group together a group of individuals who want to improve themselves for what they do. We're baseball players, so, who want to improve themselves as baseball players and also want to improve themselves as human beings. That's what's important. Although, trying to get a team together and pointing out a leader and saying 'Everybody follow this leader' sounds very easy and like a simple thing to do, if you go with this style, there are manholes.''

With the M's Ichiro told Baker:

"This is major league baseball,'' he said. "We're all professionals here. Is it really at a level where I have to explain to other people what the reasons are that I do some things? We're all professionals. It makes me feel like..that's like the level of a Mom telling a child 'This is why I do things."

These comments agree with my view that leadership in baseball is rather meaningless. A team leader yelling at his teammates to get them pumped up won't allow them to hit the ball any better, or if they do make contact not have it be caught. It won't somehow allow a pitcher to pitch better or really anything else necessary to to win the game. Leadership and chemistry are immaterial bullshit that beat writer feeds readers to justify and outcome e.g. "He showed his leadership by coming through with a clutch hit because he didn't want to let his team down." which sounds better than "His BABIP(batting average for balls in play" had been extremely low lately combined with his career success against lefties meant he was due to get a hit."

The reason the 2008 M's were so terrible was because they were a poorly constructed team without a lot of talent. A portion of the talent that team did possess got old quick and became useless.

The reason, I believe, the 2009 M's will win is because Jack Zduriencik has accrued a good amount of talent not because of intangibles like leadership and team chemistry.

Geoff Baker: Mental Midget

So as I promised yesterday I will bring you, my dear loyal readers, more ammo for our fight against Geoff and his blog. I will keep tirelessly doing this until Geoff confronts me and accepts my challenge of a blog off.

So today's Geoff-ism comes from his pre-game post yesterday "There should be smiles galore out in blogland today. That's because Richie Sexson is back in the Mariners lineup, batting seventh."

Give me a break Geoff, there wasn't a single fan in Marinerdom that was excited about the return of Richie to the lineup, especially when the act of reinsertion seems wholly random. As I said in my last post, peole just felt that Richie gave the team a better shot to win in that given situation. Nobody was advocating Richie as The Igniter II (The Original Igniter being Willie Bloomquist).

Coming out and putting incredibly imbecilic words into your readers collective mouth is no way to endear yourself to them. Nor does it do anything to settle the disagreement on poor in-game management. Yet Geoff seems to revel in making these kind of comments. Like throwing rocks at a hornets nest.

Anyway, shortly after picking up an anti-Richie pinch-hitting ran he throws us a highly confusing little quote from manager John MacLaren on why Richie was back in the swing of things, so to speak. Note his little parting jab at the MacLaren haters/Richie pinch-hit people, classy Geoff, real classy.

"What I was thinking was, I wanted him with a fresh start,'' McLaren said. "He cleared his mind, he worked hard and tonight he's going to get that start. I understand, some people have told me there's been a lot of talk about why we didn't use him yesterday. I'm kind of glad. Maybe we're rallying around this guy a little bit. He needs that. And we need him.''

So, there you go. Congratulations. Apparently, the fan voice has been heard loud and clear. Um, maybe.

No comment on how little sense MacLaren's reasoning makes, or why it's necessary to sit out an entire week to fix your swing, or why Miguel Cairo suddenly stopped "hitting the ball pretty well" Grow some huevos there Geoff and question why things are happening.

This kind of taking nonsensical answers at face value is how this country got into the post 9/11 quagmire of Iraq, Domestic Spying, Secret Prisons, etc...

It's the same way this team thought it was a contender last year despite giving up more runs than scored. It's what led the team to deal a ton of prospects for a #1 Staff Ace and declare itself a contender. It led to the Soriano for Ho-Ram trade and if no one calls them on this BS they'll continue to make poor decisions and back them up with half-answers and flawed logic.

But rather than ask a tough question, Geoff chooses to let it go at face value and instead pick a fight with his readers. In the process Geoff just adds fuel to my fire.

I Wanna Start A Feud!!!!!

And I think it's gonna be with Geoff Baker, the Seattle Times Mariners blogger.

I'm a fair man. I'm always willing to listen to all sides of an issue, weigh all things equally and formulate my opinion. I often give the benefit of the doubt, sometimes when it's not really deserved. A fuck-up once, does not a fuck-up always make. With that said I am getting tired of Geoff Baker, over at The Times.

As a loyal reader of USS Mariner for years I always enjoy and respect their insight into the game. Even when I do not fully agree with those insights, I always have to give what they say some weight because of how well they lay out their points of view. There are scant emotional ravings over there, arguments are often backed up with mounds of data(kinda like the opposite of here). So when they claim time and again that Geoff is the best beat writer the M's have had in some time, I give the statement some credence.

Reading some of his posts I could see what the guys at USS Mariner were talking about. He seemed not to be a victim of blind homerism, like so many other M's beat writers. He made some pretty good arguments that though ran slightly counter to the USS Mariner stance, were well thought out. But then it seemed the job got to him.

Now whenever I go over and read his take on the state of the team I cringe. Now he seems content to offer quotes and audio clips from players and managers without critique. No one is asking him to be Helen Thomas out here and constantly ride the team for every little flaw. I just expect that when someone backs up a dumb decision with a drivel like this "I just think that Cairo has been swinging the bat pretty good and so forth and so on," McLaren said. "So I would have stuck with Cairo." they get called on the fact that Miguel Cairo has not EVER "been swinging the bat pretty good". And then they could be enlightened of the fact that in a 2 run game with a man and 2 out you don't want a washed-up singles hitter deciding the game for you, especially if there are better options on the bench(however marginally better those options might be, Richie).

When people point out the flaws in Geoff's logic he seems to get really defensive and almost seems to start talking down to his readers. The fact that he has been a beat writer for years and has the closest and, in his eyes, the best perspective of the team is held over the readers head and used to end arguments without resolution. "I Know more than you, shut-up!"

He has a penchant for putting arguments into readers mouths like this little gem "Most of you wanted Sexson gone a month ago. Now, he's the team's savior? Not sure I get it." No one was saying he's the team savior and the fact that he is a better option pinch-hitting than letting Miguel Cairo swing away is an indictment of the Mariners Front Office and their atrocious roster construction skills. But no one, no matter in what kind of altered state, would ever rationally believe that Richie is the team savior.

To act like people believe that somehow Richie is the answer to the season because they wanted to see him pinch-hit for a crappy singles hitter is highly disingenuous and demeans the intelligence of his readers. It seems every time someone has a reasonable argument against the M's current strategy for winning, Geoff gets defensive and throws up a straw man to make the argument seem ridiculous.

I, for one, am sick of this style of passive aggressive blogging. The only way to stop this is to Call Geoff out on a large platform, and while NLS isn't exactly that, it's as good of a starting point as any. So, I encourage you loyal readers to go out and troll the shit out of his board. Tell them Willie Mays Haze over at Nobody Likes Soccer sent ya and if he don't like it to come to the page and challenge me to a blog-off.

Until this day happens I will continue to post any flaws I see in his arguments and lay them bare. Geoff Baker will know my name when I lay my hand upon him...