Notebook: Podcast with interview with Jeff Kingston, thoughts on Andy Van Slyke’s comments

With the hot stove already at a full roar it is time to start a weekly Mariners offseason podcast. Plan on seeing a new podcast each Wednesday for the next couple of months as there is plenty to talk about on the Mariners front.

Mariners offseason podcast No. 1

While I was working on this podcast, the Andy Van Slyke interview was starting to make news. Brent Stecker, who will be joining me on next week’s podcast, wrote it up for 710Sports.com and the audio for the interview on CBS Sports Radio 920 in St Louis can be heard here. We weren’t aware of Van Slyke’s comments while we were recording the podcast but I did want to address them here.

It is probably unfortunate that Van Slyke made the comments that he did. Speaking out against a former organization never seems to help the path to the next job in this sport. Van Slyke took swipes at players in two organizations, which I would imagine is doubly bad for him.

It is no secret Robinson Cano had a miserable first three months of the season. To call him a number of worsts and “the most awful player I’ve ever seen,” when referring to those three months seems to be overkill. Sure, if the team had made the playoffs I doubt we would have the general manager and eventually the manager fired. But was the decision to go in a different direction just because of three bad months of Cano? No. An entire organization was looked at when that decision was made, not just one player.

Van Slyke saying that Cano was the “worst every day player I have ever seen for the first half of a Major League Baseball season” statistically just isn’t true, unless he missed a lot of baseball. Did Cano underperform in the first half? Obviously. While noting that Cano is a good guy, Van Slyke appeared to question his effort at one point of the interview, and I’m not sure that is fair. In light of the fact that he played through the second half with a double sports hernia – a condition that we who were around him on a daily basis were never aware of or even suspected until the final week of the season – I am more inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt that stomach issues were a contributing factor in his first half performance.

As a reporter I enjoyed Van Slyke’s candor while he was with the Mariners, but there were a couple of interviews where I wondered if had he said some things that he didn’t really mean to say out loud. In retrospect, he probably did. That’s him. Van Slyke has always been out with everything – from writing a book about the Tigers to hosting his own radio show, he has opinions and he is not shy about putting them out there. I saw what he said in the St. Louis radio interview as standing up for his former fellow coaches, manager and general manager. There may or may not be consequences for expressing those opinions, but Van Slyke has been in the game for a long time and he no doubt is aware of that.

As for the podcast, there is a lot of good baseball talk in the 710 ESPN Seattle sports pit and I am going to take advantage of that by inviting a number of my co-workers who have a passion for baseball to join me on the podcasts. This week James Osborn sits in with me. When not producing the “Brock and Salk” show, you can often find James updating his Mariners roster and payroll projections at his desk. We take a look at the moves we have seen this offseason and what we could see next.

The podcast also features an interview I had with vice president/assistant general manager Jeff Kingston. One of my goals for this podcast is to feature a weekly interview with a front office member. It struck me that a lot of readers really haven’t had much exposure to a number of folks at Safeco and the podcast enables me to take the time to sit down with them for longer conversations, which will give the listeners a little bit more of an idea of who they are, what they do and what they are doing in their job at the time of the interview.

In addition to telling us about his background and path to the Mariners front office, Kingston gives us a look at the general manager meetings that just wrapped up in Florida and the dramatic changes to them in recent years. He gives us insight into why the Mariners have been aggressive early in the offseason, a small look into the talks with Hisashi Iwakuma and what he has seen with Mike Zunino’s development.

In the coming weeks we will hear from Jerry Dipoto, new director of player development Andy McKay, director of international operations Tim Kissner, director of scouting Tom Allison, manager Scott Servais, a number of his coaches and others. I am open to requests if there is someone you would like to hear from in the organization.

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