Zduriencik's Nearly Erased Bavasi's Stamp on Mariners
One deeply held fantasy of all Seattle Mariners fans is that the Bill Bavasi era could be wiped from our memories. Happily, new general manager Jack Zduriencik is doing his best.
We're barely halfway through Zduriencik's first season in charge, and already you have to squint to find any trace of Bavasi at Safeco Field.
Of the fifteen major contributors on the M's roster--that's the nine position players, the five starting pitchers, and the closer--only three are acquisitions of the man who ran the team for the five seasons before this one.
Think about that: Ten months after Bavasi, and 80 percent of the major players are new. We only wish our condiment shelf stayed that fresh.
And those three Bavasi holdovers--catcher Rob Johnson (drafted in '04), and starting pitchers Jarrod Washburn (signed in '05) and Erik Bedard (acquired via trade in '08)--could well be on their way out.
By opening day '10, Mariners Bavasii could be an extinct species.
Johnson's only playing because the highest draft pick of the Bavasi era, catcher Jeff Clement, has been a bust. Presumably by next season the M's will find a catcher who, unlike current $8M back up Kenji Johjima, M's pitchers want to throw to, and who, unlike Johnson, can hit.
Washburn and Bedard will likely be gone at the end of the year, if not sooner--both will be free agents this offseason, and will assuredly be signed to absurdly large contracts by teams with asinine general managers--a category the Mariners thankfully no longer fall into.
Hell, if a trade of either starter nets the M's a decent catcher, Bavasi could be wiped from our memory, Neuralyzer-style, before summer's out. Glory!
Now if we can just get to work on the Willingham era.
