The Mariners have finally crunched the number of potential GMs to four: Kim Ng, Tony LaCava, Jerry DiPoto, and Jack Zduriencik, who is a new name to the list. These four candidates are being brought back for a second round of interviews.

The reason we haven’t heard about Zduriencik is that he received his first interview this past Monday. The reason it was so postponed was that his Milwaukee Brewers were only recently eliminated from playoff contention, which saddened me.

A little bit about Zduriencik: He’s been around. This is his 25th year in professional baseball, and he’s spent that time with four different clubs. With the Pirates, he spent as the director of scouting. With the New York Mets he did a ton of scouting work, which eventually led to him being named special assistant to the GM in 1998. With the Los Angeles Dodgers, he served as director of international scouting and a special assistant to the GM for Player Personnel. And finally, with the Brewers, he’s served as Vice President and Special Assistant to the GM.

Geoff Baker, this morning, was the place that I found the information. He wrote a good article on Zduriencik, and I hope that he isn’t handicapped because of the fact that his first interview was only a couple of days ago. Here is Geoff’s article, which goes on to say that Zduriencik is:

a very serious candidate who was named Baseball America Executive of the Year last season when he was the team’s scouting director. He’s the first non-general manager to ever receive the award since it was instituted in 1998.

Doug Melvin has also given him credit for his efforts in the rebuilding of the Brewers. His draft efforts include Prince Fielder, Rickie Weeks, Ryan Braun, Corey Hart and J.J. Hardy.

Hopefully age doesn’t hurt his chances, since he is 57. That makes him 10 years older than LaCava, second oldest at 47.

Hopefully with in the next week or two the Mariners have made up their mind on who they want to as our GM for 2009 and beyond. We have our Final Four, now it’s up to the organization to select the best one for the job!

UPDATE:
I totally forgot to check the following link, and when I did, I found out that Baseball Prospectus ranked Jack Zduriencik #2 on their next best GM list.