11:45am: The Mariners have now formally announced that McClendon will not return in 2016. Additionally, pitching coach Rick Waits and coach Chris Prieto have been reassigned within the organization, while bench coach Trent Jewett, third base coach Rich Donnelly, outfield coach Andy Van Slyke and bullpen coach Mike Rojas have all been let go. Hitting coach Edgar Martinez and infield coach Chris Woodward were each invited back for their current roles in 2016.
“I have a great deal of respect for Lloyd, as a person and a manager,” Dipoto said in a statement. “It is a credit to his professionalism that the team continued to play hard through the final day of the season. However, after extensive conversations it became clear to me that our baseball philosophies were not closely aligned. On behalf of the Mariners I want to thank Lloyd and his staff for their hard work the past two seasons, and I wish him the best moving forward.”
10:25am: Mariners manager Lloyd McClendon won’t be back as the team’s manager in 2016, sources tell Ryan Divish of the Seattle Times. Jon Heyman of CBS Sports had written just minutes earlier that McClendon was “likely” to be dismissed as the team’s skipper, adding that he’s still owed $1MM in 2016 — the final season of his contract with Seattle.
The Mariners will formally announce the decision today, per Divish, and the search for McClendon’s replacement will immediately get underway. While the team must go through an interview process, Divish hears that Angels special assistant Tim Bogar — the former bench coach and interim manager of the division-rival Rangers — is a favorite to take over in Seattle. Bogar worked with Dipoto in the Anaheim front office and is said to embrace analytics, which is something Dipoto is known to desire in a manager. Heyman noted last Friday that Bogar would be a prime candidate to replace McClendon should the incumbent Seattle skipper not be retained.
Heyman writes that the decision was carefully considered by Dipoto, in part because McClendon is quite popular with the current Mariners’ players. Robinson Cano is said to have such a close relationship with McClendon, Heyman adds, that Cano used his manager as part of his pitch in trying to lure Nelson Cruz to sign with the team when Cruz was a free agent last offseason.
McClendon was hired as the Mariners’ manager prior to the 2014 season after an eight-year hiatus from that role. After managing some dismal Pirates clubs in the early 2000s, McClendon experienced immediate success in Seattle, guiding the Mariners to a strong 87-75 record and finishing the year just one game shy of postseason play. That finish, along with the offseason additions of Nelson Cruz and Seth Smith as well as the emergence of Taijuan Walker and James Paxton, led to lofty expectations in Seattle this year. However, the Mariners’ rotation was hit hard by injuries to Walker, Paxton and Hisashi Iwakuma, and other offseason pickups such as Justin Ruggiano and Rickie Weeks failed to perform. The Mariner bullpen also took a significant step backwards in 2015, leading to a season that was largely spent out of contention, eventually resulting in the firing of GM Jack Zduriencik.
Could Ron Washington be a replacement
If you want to go from “Worse to Bad.”
How many games have you managed in ML’s Doug, beside couch coaching??
This entire site and most of the rest of the baseball-centric internet would cease to exist if you had to have actual MLB experience in order to have an opinion about baseball.
If bad is back to back World Series appearances
Boo… That’s the same thing! While I’m not a fan of McClendon’s bullpen usage or his bullish behavior when it comes to “trusting” his veterans. I think he’d make a damn good bench coach, but don’t think too high of his in game strategy or his stubbornness in regards to Rodney, Wilhelmsen, Beimel, etc. Too often he would trust middling relievers to handle very difficult assignments. Also, why he refused to give Ruggiano a real look when he was one of our better bats against LHP, while continuing to ignore splits like Morrison and Miller against LHP while Weeks and Trumbo were in against RHP. Washington, Baker, Williams (Matt), Mattingly, and Ventura are just like McClendon. They are guys that had brief amounts of success as players surrounded by failure, injury, and other marginal seasons, who all seem to have the ear of their players being that they are well liked, but continue to under-perform because of favoritism, poor fundamentals, under-developed game plans, and/or poor in-game decisions.
Many of the times these coaches were successful in spite of their managing due to rosters full of talent. Washington had prime years from Cruz, Hamilton, Kinsler, Beltre, etc. Williams had budding superstar Bryce Harper along with a strong supporting cast including Desmond, Zimmerman and a plethora of pitchers. Mattingly has the highest payroll in the sport and by a large margin, yet he’s constantly backing into the playoffs despite a handful of teams in their division with glaring weaknesses. Baker has constantly had superstar players under his supervision and teams full of talent, but never could lead them to the ring. Bonds, Kent, etc. in San Fran; Sosa, Derrek Lee, Wood, etc in Chi-town; Votto, Phillips, Bruce, Dunn and a glut of star pitchers in Cinci. Yet, no rings. Ventura’s teams have been the most overrated teams the last couple years and most of that has been due to the fact that they under-perform while playing for him because the same guy that gee-shucks, doesn’t want to run the bases after a walk-off because HR totals don’t matter, doesn’t know how to motivate players driven by personal and team stats.
I am curious how this goes. Cause this is going to makes the Angels look really dumb or really smart.
Dipoto is going to plug in a heavy analytical manager and try to go all in like the Astros. I dunno if it will workout when this team is going to play half their games in Seattle. But like I said I will be curious to see how Dipoto’s run here turns out.
Check back to the seasons where Seattle had a winning record pre-Zduriencik and the common denominator is OF speed and defense, good pitching, timely hitting. It’s not like he’s re-inventing the wheel. The blueprint was clearly written when the Mariners tied for most wins in a single season ever by doing exactly that.
Dipoto can build a good bullpen from nothing. He worked a miracle in Anaheim in that department. But I feel like he approach to the hitting side of things is to live and die by the home run ball and slugging % guys. Also he seemed to not put as high of a priority on defense as what Scioscia does. Thats the main reason him and Scioscia failed to get along in Anaheim. Essentially the opposite of what Scioscia teams are. Angels went with Scioscia and his philosophy (which I prefer) but this will kind of give a window into what Dipoto wanted to do in Anaheim. Might work, might not.
I’m not sure where you get this opinion, he traded away both Morales and Trumbo because they wouldn’t walk enough and couldn’t play defense worth a crap. He has constantly jettisoned aging, slow, poor defenders. His signing of Ibanez was due to a lack of LH pop to put between Trout, Pujols, and Kendrick due to Hamilton being habitually injured and it was also probably to add some clubhouse chemistry, something Raul does bring to the table. But he was forced to take Hamilton, Pujols, and to some degree Wilson. But let’s be clear, when Artie says “Jerry you got 35-40 million extra to fix this team and by the way, we’re using 24 of that on Pujols and 14 on Wilson, you never really got to see what Dipoto would due with the reigns to make trades where he wasn’t doing salary dumps simultaneously. If you are trading for Vargas and 7 million in salary you can’t afford, you are either over paying in prospects or you have to send something equally desirable back the other way like Kendrys Morales. If he doesn’t get stuck taking Pujols and Hamilton, does he trade Morales? Maybe he keeps Morales and gives a couple marginal prospects to a 3rd team and has them send a bat to Seattle, so he doesn’t weaken his 25-man roster. Or maybe he signs a TOR starter instead of trading for a lefty #4 or #5 starter that relies on “touch” and “feel”. Depending on what he does this offseason and what players he moves to add prospects or better players, he’ll have $40-50 million to toss around if the payroll stays the same.
Iwakuma $7M, Rodney $7M, Jackson $7.7M, Happ $6.7M, WFin’B(loomquist) $3M, Morrison $2.725M, Ackley $2.6M, Ruggiano $2.5M, Weeks $2M, Hultzen $1.7M (signing bonus) = $42.95M coming off the books, not including $6.9M for Trumbo and $6M for Seth Smith if they get traded away. Bringing the total to $54.85M to spend minus $1M more for Felix, $3.5M more for Seager, $400K more for Furbush and $2.7M more for Wilhelmsen, if they keep him around making that $7.6M. Subtracting the raises from $54.85M leaves $47.25M to resign Iwakuma (my guess $27M/3 YRS with $3M team opt on $9M 4th season) Essentially making it $38M and change to fill out the roster, supposing nobody else with big salaries gets traded.
Hultzen has one option year remaining
Dipoto mentioned something about building a team to fit the stadium. That’s something that’s been ignored the last few years.
Yes, they play half their games at Safeco, but the opposition has to play there as well. If Dipoto does the opposite of Jack Z and build a team fit for the ballpark, playing 81 there won’t be a problem.
Don’t like seeing Rick Waits moved out as pitching coach, unless it’s so the new manager can pick his own. Waits did a decent job with both veterans and young kids alike and is respected for his knowledge around the league.
Can see him getting another well deserved shot with a MLB club sooner rather than later.
Who knows maybe he’s going to be the roving pitching coordinator. It says he was offered a position with the team!
I’m more impressed with the turn around brought about by Edgar, like figuring out what Cano was doing wrong the last two seasons, leading him to hit his longest homerun in 2 years despite a sports hernia? 21 bombs from a crippled Cano is amazing and the numbers put us as the 3rd best offense in the 2nd half. If we would’ve kept everyone as they were except Austin Jackson and Rodney, maybe they wouldn’t have tanked down the stretch. What would’ve been interesting is if they would’ve put it together, got in the playoffs and won it all. Then see if Dipoto fires McClendon. Would’ve been the first time a GM and manager were fired in a Championship season. Realistically, if they would’ve caught Rodney tipping pitches two months earlier, Houston wouldn’t have been the team in the wild card from the AL West. Rodney cost Seattle 5-8 games, which makes them an 83-85 win team, also they would’ve been in it until the end, giving reason to keep Taijuan and Felix pitching and the team might have tried to pull out more games down the final stretch and could’ve come closer to 88 wins. Who knows.
Why is this getting a thumbs down? So going from a team OPS of .672 before Edgar to a .757 wasn’t to do with Edgar? More importantly, he didn’t walk in to the clubhouse and say, “I command you all, hit and hit often”, so it takes time to sit down with different guys and figure out what works for them and then to review their video and create a plan. He was thrust into the position with little notice on the 20th of June. I feel probably the All-Star break is a reasonable time to expect what he teaches to take effect. If you divide by first half/second half (All-Star Break)… .236/.296/.382=.678 versus .264/.328/.446=.773 Hard to argue with those numbers. Especially when you consider how many guys were brought up from the minors to get a look by the team. As for the Cano comments, the guy was injured in July and was playing with a sports hernia, it’s not like he just figured it out on his own. He said that Edgar looked at film from his days in New York and saw some things he was doing differently that he had got away from, which Cano fixed and then went on a tear. I give a thumbs down to the guy who gave me a thumbs down, just because they were having a bad day and didn’t bother to gather information.
I didn’t give you a thumbs down but I can certainly see why someone may have.
Number one candidate: Rick Renteria
You know secretly dipoto wishes McClendon was Scioscia.
The whole Jennings saga this year sure was interesting. I never thought they’d bring him back as GM. It seemed like appointing him manager was Loria saying, “It’s your team, why don’t you show us how good they are”
At least they had the common sense not to fire Edgar Martinez.
While he wasn’t the greatest manager on the planet, Lloyd was basically asked to re-arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic this year. The M’s grossly over-performed last season, especially given their run differential, and the bullpen pitched way over their heads. Yes, Jack Z brought in Cruz, Smith, and Happ, which turned out to be good moves, but it seems everyone expected Ackley, Zunino, Miller, Jackson, and LoMo to all take big steps forward this season… and none of them did. That meant that more than half of the lineup was essentially dead weight. The bullpen imploded, and Rodney was just a waste; the original signing was ill-conceived, as the $14 mil spent on him should have gone to a hitter in the first place. They traded away Maurer, Medina, and Leone, and were forced to continue to use guys like Wilhelmsen and Farquhar in high-leverage situations because he had no other choice. And then they brought up cannon fodder like Kensing, Rasmussen, the Ramirezes, and Guaipe (who I promptly nicknamed Guiped-Out.) Bleccch… not much to choose from there.
And because of that Lloyd was forced to lean on a lot of youngsters in the rotation because both Iwakuma and Paxton (who is slowly turning into the pitching equivalent of Michael Saunders) got hurt. Felix wasn’t the same in the second half, Walker was totally inconsistent, and Elias and Montgomery showed that they were, for the most part, back-of-the-end rotation candidates at best. Nuno is best used as a swingman.
But in truth, Lloyd wasn’t necessarily the best in-game strategist, preferring to be “by the book” most of the time, but the players loved him, and he certainly wasn’t the main reason this team tanked in 2015. It was the total lack of organizational philosophy that really started with Bavasi and continued through Jack Z’s tenure in Seattle. Lloyd was handed a bunch of lemons; some guys just can’t make lemonade.
I wish Lloyd well in his next position, and given that he had a +.500 record with the M’s (Lou Piniella is the ONLY other person who can say that), my guess is he’ll be a candidate for one of the other openings out there this winter.
As for Bogar, that’s an “uninspired” pick for manager, and would rather Jerry DiPoto dig a little deeper into the pool for someone with a track record and ability to reach the team. My guess is, Felix, Cano, and Cruz will NOT be happy with Lloyd’s dismissal, so if Jerry wants to keep the clubhouse together, he needs a good communicator as well as a manager that will use technology and advanced metrics to help guide the team. Good luck in finding one of those these days; they’re all taken!