Looking Back To 2005 Draft

[NWinAZ]

Diamondbacks to pass on Upton, Gordon? | U.S.S. Mariner

With No. 3 draft pick, Mariners narrow focus to five players - seattlepi.com

Two fun articles (the top one is short but fun reading the comments section. Both are just before the draft day. This is the Clement Draft screwup.

 

[johnfree63]

It's scary how close Bavasi and Jack Z's tenure has become. Only real difference is that Jack can occasionally find a diamond in the rough pitcher and Jack has yet to trade Alex Jackson or Katel Marte for Ryan Howard.

 

[SeattleCoug]

Depressing to think this team should have had a lineup including Tulo, Adam Jones, Choo and Asdrubal Carbrera.

 

[wazzu31]

I will still defend Bavasi, he was a yes man brought in and was given certain parameters and he did that. I still think the Clement pick was not a bad one, norwhere near how bad the Hultzen pick. It sucks but Choo and Jones became expendable because Bavasi's lack of nuts of telling Ichiro what to do. Bill Bavasi was a failure because inexperience and an organization that didn't know how to handle winning and put everything into the big club with no eye on the future as opposed to Jack who trumpeted his rebuilding and an eye for talent. Bavasi was a disaster as a GM but his tenure was more successful than Jack's.

 

[NWinAZ]

Off topic, but since talking Choo here is a snip from an article about the trade years later.

Trading Choo for Broussard was bad, but it wasn't astonishingly bad. What's astonishing is the sheer volume of bad moves the M's made in those years, which created a sort of cascade. Signing Carl Everett as an every-day DH was a bad move, which led to the bad moves of trading Asdrubal Cabrera and Shin-Soo Choo. They also spent immense sums of money on Jarrod Washburn and Carlos Silva, which led to the bad move of trading Jones and Tillman for Bedard. Every significant move a baseball franchise makes is like a stone cast into the water, except we can't predict the ripples. For the M's, nearly all of general manager Bill Bavasi's moves were followed by negative ripples. Which goes part of the way toward explaining how a team that won 93 games in both 2002 and '03 hasn't enjoyed a positive run differential even once since then (granted, with two fluke winning seasons). But it's well worth noting that Bavasi got fired more than five years ago. There's plenty of blame to go around.


Oh, and I almost forgot! After trading Choo, a) the Mariners went 29-32 and finished last, and b) Choo joined the Indians and hit significantly better down the stretch than Broussard. Essentially, the trade could not have gone worse for the Mariners than it did. But that doesn't mean that everybody saw it coming.

Whole article if you want to look back on the not-so glory days;

When the M's traded Shin-Soo Choo for a platoon DH - SBNation.com