Detect-O-Vision: Ten Things I Hate About You

SABR Matt’s love letter to John McLaren…

I concede that losing to the Angels may have taken some of the win out of their sails but it doesn’t explain a 2 for 15 slump.  They’re five out in the wild card now because John McLaren has personally thrown several games right out the window with his incompetence and because in between bizarre game-breaking decisions, he’s showing no confidence in his players and looking panicked out there, and the Mariners are playing the way he’s managing…panicked.  They make mistakes of aggression almost every day, from getting thrown out at home to overthrowing the cutoff man to unwisely trying to get an out on what is clearly an infield hit and turning it into a three base error to swinging at the first pitch even more than usual.

This is not a team that has “quit,” as some around the blogosphere have suggested.  A little quit in these guys might actually HELP!  They’re trying so hard to get the ship righted that they’re throwing runs away (on both sides of the ball).  If they would relax, they would win some of these close games.  This is a team that is being lead by a coward who is thinking only of his next job and is therefore paralyzed in the face of even minor adversity.  John McLaren is not only a bad manager, he’s a wuss, and the single most important explanation for why this team has gone from a group of overachievers to a pack of wannabes overnight.