I’m late to the party and as such there isn’t a whole lot to add to what has already been said around the blogosphere with regards to the firing of manager Don Wakamatsu.  Dave at USS Mariner wrote that the Ken Griffey Jr. situation played the biggest role in Wakamatsu’s downfall as that event turned the players against him.  Jeff at Lookout Landing‘s post was in the same vein in saying that Wak was fired for failing to be a good leader of men.  It’s hard to dispute any of that as it has been reported for a while now that Wak’s hold on his players was loosening while he had already seemed to have lost the backing of the front office, and GM Jack Zduriencik said straight up that the move was made because “new leadership is needed and needed now.”

The firing of Wakamatsu was not surprising.  The beat has been writing about such a scenario for quite a while because they obviously saw it coming from their privileged perch.  And just a few days ago Zduriencik gave Wak the dreaded vote of confidence:

“Don is our manager,” Zduriencik said. “He’s running the ball club. He’s here right now. He’s running the ball club. I don’t much more I could say. He is the manager of the Seattle Mariners.”

The over use of present tense gives it away.

I’m not broken up about it.  I didn’t really like Wak anyway.  Last year he was nice because the team just needed to heal, but this year they needed to win, and he didn’t seem to do quite what the team needed him to do on or off the field.  If he’s not a leader, that’s a deal breaker, as that is quite possibly the most important thing for a manager to do.  It may be easy to think of the manager’s job description to manager the game on the field, but we’ve heard over the years that it is more important to simply manage the group of men that make up the team.  And while the on-field stuff probably isn’t as important, it’s certainly more visible to us fans, and since I wasn’t a fan of Wak’s on-field management I can move on from this pretty easily.

His bullpen management was frustrating, especially his love affair with Sean White, who was the worst arm in the ‘pen at times.  His lineup building skills were suspect, although we have to wonder how many of the iffy decisions over the past couple months (or perhaps the entire season) came from the top.  Interim manager Daren Brown’s first lineup still features Casey Kotchman hitting third and Jose Lopez in the middle of the order, after all.  The bunting was out of control.  Based on some of his comments in the past, we can wonder how many of the bunts were done without Wak’s signal, but even if Wak never called a single one that is no excuse.  It is Wak’s responsibility.  Same goes for the sometimes overly aggressive base stealing and base running.

Those things won’t stop Wak from getting another job, and those things didn’t matter in a season where so many were underperforming.  If the Mariners were fighting for a playoff spot, maybe some better on-field management steals enough games to squeeze past the Rangers, but those on-field decisions aren’t what sunk the season.

While the firing of Wakamatsu didn’t come as much of a shock, the subsequent firings of bench coach Ty Van Burkleo, pitching coach Rick Adair and performance coach Steve Hecht were.  We don’t often see these wholesale changes midseason.  If this played out like most other managerial firings, Van Burkleo would be sitting pretty.  If this played out like most other managerial firings, those other guys might have kept their jobs at least until a new permanent manager was installed and allowed to assemble his own staff.

But I suppose this makes some sense.  They’re probably goners anyway, so they may as well get it over with.  And I think this also shows that Wak’s firing wasn’t just a way to show the fans they just care.  Doing this way gives the move more weight.  Doing it this way showed that this move was about bringing about real change, rather than just sacrificing the field manager.

What did the Mariners lose in those coaches?  I can’t answer that from where I sit.  I literally know nothing about Van Burkleo.  He’s been as mysterious as any prominent Mariner staff member as any in recent memory.  And the effects of Adair and Hecht weren’t exactly measurable for better or for worse.  But they obviously weren’t doing what Zduriencik and company wanted.  I thought it was telling that Adair wasn’t consulted during the Cliff Lee-Texas negotiations despite the fact that he had directly coached both Blake Beavan and Josh Lueke.

Here’s hoping that the next batch of coaches form a winning combination, with help from a better on-field product, of course.  As for who those guys will be, there’s plenty of time for that.  For now we’ll see how things go for interim replacements Daren Brown, Roger Hansen, Carl Willis and Pedro Grifol.