So the Mariners signed Carl Everett. For those that don’t know, the guy has a fairly long, sordid history as a human being.

It’s hard for me, sometimes, to grant someone the benefit of the doubt. My faith teaches me that I am supposed to know and recognize that each human being has a Buddha nature in their makeup, and that as such everyone is entitled to not have me running them down.

But Carl Everett is a frickin scumbag. He beat his kids, he hates gays, he thinks the moon landings and dinosaurs were probably faked. This is not a rocket scientist, which isn’t a crime; but this is a guy who’s also got serious anger management issues and a seriously bad attitude.

I’m going to repost an email exchange I had on the Mariners fans’ email list that I’m on.

I said:

Oh well, hopefully he’ll stick to beating children and not go off on any M’s fans.

Another email list member (Adam Kuehn, who is actually a very good guy) said:

OK, that’s one of the grimmest comments I’ve heard in awhile. How about we hope that the guy finds what it takes not to lose control at all? I’m not a big Everett fan, or anything, but wow.

Merry Christmas!

Okay, Adam’s got a point. I hereby officially hope that Carl Everett doesn’t say or do anything stupid, angry, or lose control while he’s with the Mariners.

I wrote back:

LOL Sorry, not very “in the spirit of the season”, I suppose.

I’m just down in general on the M’s right now. They don’t seem to grasp the real lessons of “Moneyball” and such; instead, they seem to be throwing money at spare parts that they think will fill a need.

So “we need a guy with some left-handed pop” becomes “sign Carl Everett and Jeremy Reed becomes disposable”.

But the real lesson of the stat revolution is NOT that OBP is everything; the real lesson is that the best way to build a baseball team is to identify which skills/stats are the most important (and OBP is one) and then *find out what the market is undervaluing*. And this latter bit is what you make your decisions from.

Guys like Carl Everett- guys who used to have some useful skills but who’re on the inevitable downhill slide towards the end of their career- are a dime a dozen. The market, in fact, overvalues a guy like Everett.

I guess the real question is what the philosophy and overall goals of building a team is. What does Everett give us for 2006, 2007, 2008 and beyond? Not much that we couldn’t have gotten for a lot less money.

But yes, while I am down on him baseball-wise, I’m much more down on him people-wise. The guy is a slimeball. Some guys get a bad rap that they don’t really deserve; as hard a time as the media used to give him, Rickey Henderson is a good example. Best leadoff hitter of all time, but a difficult personality at times.

Sometimes I think there’s too much emphasis placed on someone being a “good citizen”, and sometimes there’s not enough. Jeff Kent might be a difficult guy to get along with, but at his peak
he was a great guy to have on your ballclub. I think Beane is a genius for taking a chance with Milton Bradley; yes, the guy is a powder keg waiting to go off, but he’s never really done something that shows himself to be a real sleazebag, just an angry young guy. Richie Sexson drove drunk, but as far as we can tell that was just a stupid mistake that far too many people make, and he should get another shot.

But when it comes to a guy who beat his kids in the head, face, and neck bad enough that the state came in to take the kids AWAY…
and he later blew off his anger management classes and said that the real problem was the media making too much of the problems…
when you talk about a guy who gets in a fight with an umpire and head-butts the guy…
when you talk about a guy who’s been run out of pretty much every other ballclub he’s been with…
when you talk about a guy who has been repeatedly fined by his ballclubs…
when you talk about a guy who had multiple times when he had to be restrained by teammates to stop him from going after sportswriters…
when you talk about a guy who hates gays and thinks that dinosaurs never existed and that dinosaur bones are fakes made by men…

…that’s a guy you just don’t sign. Period. Not if you’re the “fan-friendly” Mariners. And that guy is Carl Everett.

So there you go. Bad signing, M’s. Bad signing.