To me, a darkhorse is a team unlikely to contend but with a real shot of doing so. That was the Mariners, to me.

But the MSM that was picking them so often was pretty damn stupid, yes.

They constructed their team in a certain way, hoping to get certain results. If they didn’t realize the high variance involved (which I guess is possible), then that was a moronic perspective. I seriously doubt the Seattle front office considered itself a front-runner going into the season.

And, again, so many of the moves they made were low-risk, low-to-decent return in the short term, and made little difference in terms of the longer run, which makes sense to me, given where they were heading into 2010.

Were they banking on potentially misleading defensive data repeating itself, or were they merely working around the possibility? If it’s the former, then, yeah, that’s pretty silly, I think. If it’s the latter, then I think it’s smart if you’re not going to contend without doing something and it doesn’t set you back much. I assumed it was the latter, but I guess I don’t really no.

And, yes, I do think they should have done better at, say, first base. That was among the biggest reasons I didn’t think they were likely to contend and something being overlooked when people were picking them to win tons of games. But there are two things. The first is how much opportunity to improve there did they have? The second is simply that I don’t think they had a great off-season period, I just think they had a very good off-season given the situations.

seems to be the league-wide shift, doesn’t it?

Again, if Seattle really had a high degree certainty that it’d built an average-to-above-average offense heading into 2010, then that was dumb. But I haven’t seen evidence of that.

I don’t think the expectations were to have a good offense. Merely to have an offense that would score enough runs to get the defense and pitching by if all went well.

Also, you just mentioned a bunch of players who are down. Yeah, many of them were never that good. But a bad player being worse still makes the offense even worse. Chris Davis wouldn’t even have to get to average to make the Rangers offense a bunch better. And, yes, a bunch of players having career bad years should be a surprise.

And, yes, I do think it’s a game of Russian Roulette to build around defense. But it’s cheap and easy in the current market. It was something the Mariners could do with their means. I’m sure they’d rather build on more reliable aspects of winning games, but when you’ve been run in to the ground by Bill Bavasi, you probably don’t have the resources to do so.

But he assumed he knew Timmy’s velo because he certainly read about it a year or two ago, which I don’t fault him for.

Are you going to read up on Brian Wilson’s velocity before you cite him as a flamethrower? You might to be careful, but I don’t fault a guy for working under the assumption that a pitcher notorious for his high velocity, small body type, to spout something under the assumption that he hasn’t lost it.

Again, innocent mistake.

And it’s Blackistone’s job to do so.