Mariners Win Series Vs. Astros and Welcome a New Owner

The Mariners took two of three from the Houston Astros this week as news trickled down that Howard Lincoln was stepping aside.

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The Mariners lost to the Astros last night 7-4 with starter Hisashi Iwakuma taking the loss. We also heard that Mariners CEO was retiring in an ownership move involving Nintendo of America and Howard Lincoln. Nintendo of America, the majority owner of the Mariners, announced yesterday that it was selling its shares of the team to its minority ownership group headed by John Stanton. Stanton will take over as CEO when Lincoln officially steps down, pending league approval, in August.

Lincoln is credited with keeping the Mariners in Seattle in 1992, when ownership threatened to move the team to Tampa Bay. He also helped get approval for Safeco Field to be built in SoDo. Lincoln has his detractors, too, however. We all know that the Mariners haven’t been to the playoffs since 2001. Since Lincoln took over as CEO in 1999, some of the blame for various degrees of awfulness at the hands of terrible general managers like Bill Bavasi and Jack Zduriencik lies with him.

There have been calls for Howard Lincoln’s head for years. The Seattle media has routinely portrayed Lincoln and former team President Chuck Armstrong as meddling lapdogs for a Japanese billionaire who has never actually seen a Mariners game. Then there are the plans for a new NBA/NHL arena in SoDo next to Safeco Field. Since the beginning of Sonicsgate, Lincoln and company were vehemently against putting a new sports complex in the same area as Safeco. While agreeing to start construction on a new arena back in 2008 probably wouldn’t have saved the Sonics from the greedy, vile, despicable, lying bastards who bought the team from Starbucks mogul Howard Schultz, Lincoln’s stance hasn’t exactly been welcoming to a potential new NBA franchise in Seattle, either.

Lincoln’s replacement John Stanton echoed Lincoln’s stance, calling local developer Chris Hansen’s proposed SoDo arena “a big, ugly house at the end of your block” in his remarks at yesterday’s press conference. We can expect the Mariners to continue to drag their feet on a new arena in SoDo, which could lead to a new stadium proposal elsewhere in the city… or we could be looking at a continued absence of the NBA in a town rich with basketball talent. I get that cramming another sports stadium in SoDo may seem like a logistical nightmare, but NBA/NHL and MLB schedules are opposites. By the time baseball season starts, the NBA and NHL regular seasons are ending. Sure, there will be some conflict, but how long can a team torpedo Seattle’s best chance of being an NBA town again because it’s worried about congestion? I don’t like it.

Time will tell if the ownership change will lead to a World Series ring, which Stanton promised Mariners fans in his announcement speech yesterday. Meanwhile, the Mariners are playing their best baseball. Even with the loss to Houston yesterday, they have still won four series in a row. Robinson Cano belted his AL-leading eighth home run of the season yesterday. In the 11-1 stomping of the Astros on Tuesday, he drove in six runs, four on a grand slam. The Mariners are winning one-run ballgames as well, beating Houston on Monday 3-2 behind a dominant performance by starter Taijuan Walker.

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Things are looking up for the Mariners on the field and hopefully Stanton won’t cause another long playoff drought as the team’s new CEO. Meanwhile, for NBA fans, it still looks like it will a long time before we’ll have our own team to beat the hated Oklahoma City Thunder if John Stanton has his way.

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