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Chuck Armstroong is leaving the Mariners...
any chance he wants to take a spin at running a Major college athletic department?
Woody can't be sleeping well.
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With him gone now the Huskies could be the most incompetent ran team in Seattle.
He was a good team president for twenty years and an awful one for the last ten.
Despite what people say, winning was his chief priority, but he lost that touch years ago and retired far too late.
You're giving him a lot more credit for things like keeping the team around and hiring Lou than I remember him deserving. Weren't you like 4 when the team almost moved?
Armstrong was influential in keeping the team here.
"At the behest of then U.S. Senator Slade Gorton, Armstrong was recruited with a number of other business leaders to try to keep the Mariners in Seattle when Smulyan discussed relocating the club to Tampa Bay. Eventually, a group headed by Nintendo CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi purchased the Mariners in 1992, and Armstrong was, once again, brought in as president of the Mariners."
As President he oversaw the day to day operations so you have to give him credit for the 1995-2001 golden age of Mariner baseball.
Again, I'm not arguing the last ten years were good and Armstrong wasn't at all complicit for the failures of the franchise. He was. But his legacy is more than those recent failures.
So Armstrong was "one of" the business leaders that Senator Stud (as he was known back then) recruited? There was like 15 of them. Armstrong maybe gets partial credit, but he has to fall behind Gordon, Yamauchi, John Ellis and the McCaws in order of importance at the very least. He played a part but his part was hardly critical to the success or failure of the venture.
As for the on field stuff, all the most important pieces of those 95-98 teams were acquired before Armstrong came back on board: Junior, Randy, Edgar, and Buhner. Yeah, Armstrong was around for the ARod draft pick, but he wasn't involved in the draft, that was Woodward and Jongeward who went back and forth about whether to roll the dice with Alex.
I'll give him Gillick who gets most of the credit for 2001-2003.
IMO the damage of the past decade far outweighs any goodwill Armstrong ever accumulated.