What does M’s future hold?

By Kirby Arnold

Herald Writer

NEW YORK – Nobody’s spirit took a harder hit Sunday night than Howard Lincoln’s when those home-run balls sailed over the fence to give the New York Yankees a come-from-behind victory over the Seattle Mariners.

Lincoln, whose job as the chairman and CEO is to keep the Mariners stable financially and competitive on the field, admits that his determination to win burns deep.

And oh, did the Yankees’ victory hurt.

“I’m a very competitive person,” Lincoln said. “It’s a feeling of helplessness. In a way these guys are like my children. They’re young adults and I’ve been with them since spring training the last two years.

“It’s like having your kids out on the soccer field. You want them to win and you feel bad when they don’t. But you’re helpless because there’s not a heck of a lot you can do about it.”

Well, in a way, there is.

Lincoln controls the money flow in the organization, and it’s easy for emotion to take over, especially at a time like this, and get frivolous. He won’t allow that to happen.

“This is a business. It’s not a hobby or a charity or a public corporation,” Lincoln said. “It has to be operated that way and you have to look at it that way. Like any other business, it has to be operated by exercising sound business judgment.”

And when emotion gets in the way, which is perhaps more likely with a sports franchise than any business, the results can be disastrous.

“Let’s put it this way,” Lincoln said. “If you think about it and you operate it as a business and you make decisions knowing it is a business, you’re much less likely to make mistakes than if you start thinking that this is a hobby or if you start making decisions based on emotion. The just-go-for-it attitude I think is the kiss of death.”

Lincoln says the organization experienced a highly successful season financially and that the player payroll, about $72 million this season, is sure to increase for 2002.

“You have to assume that,” he said. “Just because of some of the players who are in multi-year contracts, the amounts for next year will go up. I’m expecting that there will be some increase but, quite frankly, if I could figure out a way to lower it I would. But that’s like pulling rabbits out of a hat.”

The Mariners sold out Safeco Field 58 times in the regular season and all five postseason games, a franchise record.

“The organization is financially very strong right now and we’re looking for another good year next year,” Lincoln said.

Standing Pat? There’s been a lot of discussion, mostly of a speculative nature, that the vacant general manager’s job with the Toronto Blue Jays has drawn the interest of Mariners GM Pat Gillick.

Gillick, who still has a home in Toronto, doesn’t address talk about the Toronto job. It’s clear the Mariners want to keep him, however.

“We very much want him to stay,” Lincoln said. “He’s done an extraordinary job. That’s something that Chuck (Armstrong, the Mariners’ president) and I are focused on. But other than that, I really don’t want to get into that.”

Gillick signed a three-year deal with the Mariners in October 1999.

Flip-flop: The lineup card before the game showed Jay Buhner in left field and Ichiro Suzuki in right. But when the Mariners took the field in the bottom of the first inning, Suzuki went to left and Buhner to right.

The reasoning was logical.

Yankee Stadium’s left-center field area is known as Death Valley, with the distance from home plate at 399 feet. Suzuki is one of the fastest outfielders in the game and Buhner, while not exactly a slowpoke, isn’t far removed from foot surgery over the summer.

It was Suzuki’s first major league appearance in left field.

Attacking Ichiro and Edgar: Suzuki entered Monday’s game hitting .231 in the ALCS, nearly 120 points lower than his regular-season average. The Yankees have rendered him a completely different hitter than he was against Cleveland in the division series, when he batted .600.

The secret pitching pattern?

“I don’t think it is any one place,” Yankees manager Joe Torre said. “You really have to move the (strike) zone around on him because he’s too good of a hitter and he is going to make adjustments.

“I think we have had success getting him out because we have changed (the pitching pattern) not only at-bat to at-bat, but pitch-to-pitch. The only thing we knew going in is that he was too good of a hitter to pitch the same way all the time.”

Torre could, and did, say the same of Mariners designated hitter Edgar Martinez, who was batting just .188 before Monday.

“Edgar is probably the most balanced hitter I have ever seen,” Torre said. “He can hit a home run. He can hit the ball over the right-field wall as well as he can pull it down the left-field line, as the Yankees found out in 1995.”

Unlike in 1995, when his two-run double to left beat the Yankees in the deciding fifth game of the division series, Martinez isn’t a healthy hitter. He suffered a groin injury against the Indians and it has affected his swing.

Not on the same page: Mariners pitcher Paul Abbott and catcher Tom Lampkin had an animated talk near the mound in the fifth inning Sunday after Abbott clearly became disgusted.

He had a 2-2 count on David Justice in a scoreless game and obviously didn’t want to throw the pitch that Lampkin had called.

“My changeup is still my best pitch in that situation, and I basically just said ‘Look, it’s 2-2, I want to throw a changeup here and if I miss I want to throw another changeup. Let me go down throwing my best pitch.’

“I just wanted to make sure that we were on the same page at that point. It might have looked like more than it was.”

Abbott threw a changeup on the next pitch and got Justice to hit a ground ball that ended the inning.