M’s make Melvin their sacrificial lamb

Just what we were afraid of – that the stretch of Seattle asphalt recently renamed Edgar Martinez Drive is just a shortcut to Dysfunction Junction.

One day after the Seattle Mariners and an adoring Northwest made a proper parting with the one iconic figure in the franchise’s history, the M’s dispassionately cut the cord with a figure who inspired only indifference.

Indeed, firing manager Bob Melvin on Monday seemed almost redundant.

There can be no disconnect without first a connection, and to say that Melvin’s style – if anything so beige can be called style – never engaged Mariners fans is to say that Ichiro Suzuki could hit .350 with a curtain rod.

In other words, duh – to the nth power.

Yet the discharge of Melvin after two seasons in which the M’s went from 93 wins to 99 losses serves only to underscore how baseball’s model franchise just a few years ago now sways from inertia to panic and seems to boot virtually every routine ground ball. Consider only that Monday’s announcement came five months to the day that the Mariners had re-upped Melvin, picking up his option for the 2005 season.

Here’s what was said at that time, when the Mariners were already in self-embalming mode with a 9-16 record:

“This sends a strong signal of support from us,” said CEO Howard Lincoln. “This should silence any murmurs. He’s our horse and we’re riding him all the way.”

To the glue factory, as it turned out.

If that pound-foolish vote of confidence snookered the rest of us for even a minute, it didn’t snooker Melvin.

“Just because they picked up my option,” he cautioned that day, “doesn’t mean things can’t happen down the road.”

The road dead-ended Monday. General manager Bill Bavasi showed up at Safeco Field to deliver the bad news to Melvin and then try to explain himself and the organization, no easy chore on either account.

First things first. Why extend Melvin in May and throw him off a cliff in October, when the record hadn’t changed – except marginally to the good – and the circumstances of age, injury and nonperformance of his players had, significantly to the worse?

Even if it was only $550,000 – barely a half-season’s salary for a utility infielder these days – wasn’t that money symbolically squandered, by a franchise so notoriously inflexible with its payroll parameters?

“I feel good we did that,” said Bavasi, defending the May charade. “These are tough jobs. We felt it was the right thing to do for Bob at the time and for the club, to get that one issue out of the way, to remove that one distraction. These jobs have so little security.

“It was the right thing at that time. In 20-20 hindsight, I’d still say it was the right thing.”

Well, swell, except that it didn’t put to rest the security issue or remove the distraction – it was, until Suzuki started bearing down on George Sisler’s hit record, the Mariners’ poop-du-jour once they were mathematically eliminated from relevance. And by pink-slipping Melvin before the echoes of Edgar’s standing-Os had died down, Bavasi and Lincoln demonstrated just how meaningless a gesture it was – and how hollow their words will be regarded in the future.

Which is the other thing we gleaned from Monday’s events. All you people who aren’t Bob Melvin fans – you might be if you had to endure a steady diet of Bill Bavasi’s doublespeak, to say nothing of his personnel batting average that can only aspire to the Mendoza Line. Let’s recap:

Rich Aurelia – signed, flopped and sent away. Carlos Guillen – traded and blossomed into a star. Scott Spiezio – signed and tanked. Eddie Guardado – signed, blew saves and blew out his arm. Miguel Olivo – acquired and forgot how to hit and catch. Raul Ibanez – raised his average 50 points once the M’s were toast. Quinton McCracken – what was the point?

This doesn’t include the veterans already on the roster when Bavasi arrived – Martinez, Jamie Moyer, Bret Boone, John Olerud – who turned the season into a reverse remake of “Cocoon, but of whom Bavasi said upon his hiring, “I wouldn’t say that this team is long in the tooth. No, I would not be concerned with age here quite yet.”

Never mind that even casual fans had been concerned about it for three years.

Bavasi was asked first thing Monday if Melvin had been given enough talent to work with this season.

“There’s plenty of blame to go around,” Bavasi said, “from my position to his to the scouts to the players themselves. So to answer the question, based on what we’re doing – part of my answer has to be yes. Did he have enough to win? I would say no.”

Is Suzuki’s interpreter still stateside to help us decode that?

Bavasi was downright prickly in his refusal to articulate specific reasons for Melvin’s dismissal, all the while deflecting blame from the manager for the bottom-line result. He did this, admirably enough, to keep Melvin from being adversely labeled before he could rebound with another managing job sometime. “Because everybody does their second job differently,” Bavasi pointed out.

The biggest rap, of course, was Melvin’s ineffectual demeanor, that he didn’t have either the fire or the clubhouse fear fact that his predecessor, Lou Piniella, trademarked. And with the M’s destined to be stocked with many youngsters next year, that would seem to be a critical component.

But even on that point, Bavasi equivocated.

“I think leadership comes from the players,” he said. “When I was in Anaheim, my assistant general manager was Ken Forsch – who had been a very tough player, a gutsy guy on the mound and a quality guy going about his business. He told me one time, ‘Good players don’t even know who the manager is. I didn’t like my manager; I didn’t dislike him. I just didn’t know he was there. He put the lineup out and pushed the buttons – but I led and was supposed to take care of myself.’

“We’re looking for self-starters like that. We have to change the makeup of the club in that respect.”

So, in that respect, it was Bill Bavasi who failed, but Bob Melvin who got fired.

And with that, let the stampede to the 2005 season ticket window begin.