- My last full day in San Diego was gloomy with rain. My first full day in Portland looks like this:
Either people have been telling me lies my whole life or this is a wonderful example of why you should never judge a player by his debut.
- Yeah, I read the Steve Kelley column. Like you, I was intrigued by the headline, and like you, I was disappointed by everything else. That was a really crappy way to go about apologizing for shameful abuse.
In Kelley's defense, he did technically apologize (Jeff's note: or at least recognize that an apology is overdue). In his headline, his intro, and his conclusion. Kelley had the right thesis, and it's a thesis that we've long wanted to see come out of the major media types. Erik Bedard didn't deserve the treatment he got, and it's good to see more and more people acknowledge their wrongdoing.
But, oh man, so bad. For one thing, if "a lot of readers suggested" that Kelley issue an apology, why bother going through all the background? Kelley wasn't writing for a national audience. He was writing for Seattle. The people who read Steve Kelley will already be familiar with the whole Bedard situation, so they don't need Kelley to go into detail to explain why Bedard was treated poorly in the first place.
And for another, the first thing you learn about issuing an apology is that a proper apology should be unconditional. No mentioning excuses, no mentioning mitigating circumstances. A year ago I mindlessly tossed a softball in the air and when it came down it hit one of my friends square on the top of the head. After everything settled down, I told him "I'm sorry. I'm really sorry, although that was hilarious." That's a bad apology. Even though no one got hurt and it was hilarious, I should've just told him how sorry I was and left it at that. Saying anything more makes it sound not like you're expressing remorse, but like you're saying you're sorry because you have to.
And that's how Steve Kelley comes off. No matter how he may feel at his core, his column reads like he doesn't actually mean what he's saying, like he's apologizing to satisfy public demand while still feeling like his behavior was justified. So either he's being insincere, which is a miserable quality, or he's a bad writer, which, uh - To go along with what Dave wrote about Zduriencik praise last night, I would like to make one thing clear to as many people as possible:
We do not love Jack Zduriencik and the rest of the front office for turning the Mariners into a clear 2010 WS contender.
We love Jack Zduriencik and the rest of the front office for turning the 2008 Mariners into a possible 2010 WS contender.
There's a huge difference in there. Tony Blengino keeps a copy of the 40-man roster they inherited at his desk. I don't know what that 40-man roster looked like, but I know it was a complete mess, which you can kind of gather from this. Ordinarily, when you have a team constructed as poorly as the 2008 Mariners, it can take years upon years for the organization to return to relevance. These guys have accomplished that goal seemingly overnight.
To bring about as much progress as this front office has in so little time...the Mariners aren't a great team, and they're exceedingly unlikely to win the championship this season, but the fact that we're even able to talk about the playoffs at all - that's what's so incredible. - In the fifth starter breakdown poll posted below on the front page, Garrett Olson got 28 votes. I can forgive the 74 votes for Ryan Feierabend, kind of, but 28 for Olson? 1.2% of the total? What this tells me is that 1.1% of all votes in all polls are submitted by complete retards and 0.04% of all votes are submitted by Garrett Olson's mother.
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