The Mariners announced in a letter to fans yesterday that Mike Hargrove will be back as manager. The man has now led his charges to six consecutive losing seasons--two here, four in Baltimore. Over at USS Mariner, the masses are in revolt--if "revolt" can be defined as "leaving angry comments on a blog."

JayR says:

The Hargrove thing is enough to make me write to the Mariners and tell them I am serously considering not renewing my season tickets after 12 years because of it. The aggravation and irritiation of wathcing him “manage” a game is excruciating.

David J. Corcoran I

That seriously makes me grumpy. All we can do is hope and pray that that’s a bunch of PR shit and not the truth. Because if it is, well, I’ll become a new kind of fan.

I’ll be rooting for the Mariners and following them, but I’ll be rooting for them to lose.

Jim Thomsen says:

That’s it. I’ve put up with 29 years of this. No more.

From this day forward until Hargrove is gone, I will no longer invest any time, energy or effort into following the Mariners.

Yesterday we wrote about how when you have a great team, you bitch about the third base coach. There's a corollary. When you have a terrible team, you bitch about the manager.

Hargrove is awful, but the bad news of him staying is nothing compared to the great news that Ichiro's agreed to play centerfield in 2007.

That means Chris Snelling in RF all year (assuming he doesn't hurt himself), hopefully moving Raul Ibanez to DH and finding a slugging leftfielder, and the end of the Jeremy Reed experiment. The offense will improve--though this may take a few years off of Ichiro's career.

Of course, there's still the problem of pitching. But Hargrove should at least have a better offense to "manage" in 2007.