I've said a few times now that I already consider sophomore Mariners GM Jack Zduriencik to be one of the two or three best GMs in baseball. From stealing Franklin Gutierrez from Cleveland to stealing Cliff Lee from the Phillies to convincing the Cubs' Jim Hendry to give them his useful headache in exchange for the Mariners' useless one, almost literally everything Z has done has been somewhere on the scale between "very solid" and "masterful."

And, I mean, one questionable move isn't going to shake my faith in Z. But that said, what the hell happened this week?

On Tuesday, the Mariners placed Ryan Garko on waivers. It's unclear as I'm writing this whether he'll clear waivers and head to Tacoma, be claimed by some other team, or be granted his release. Regardless, though, at least for now, Garko is not on the major league squad, because Mike Sweeney is.

Garko was one of the less notable of the series of shrewd moves Jack Z. made this offseason. It appeared as though he were set to serve as the lighter half of a platoon with the defense-first Casey Kotchman at first base. It appears that the Mariners just really didn't like what they saw from Garko on defense. His career stats (UZR and plus/minus) at first base are bad, but not horrible, and sure seem like the kinds of numbers an offensively-challenged team can live with from a guy who can crush lefties (especially when they have Kotchman to replace him in the late innings). But I wasn't there and haven't watched him try to field the position, so we'll give him the benefit of the doubt on that.

Even if he's not going to get regular playing time in the field, do you really keep Sweeney instead? Sweeney was never going to get significant time in the field. Garko is 29, Sweeney 36. Garko has had a down couple of years offensively, but the last time Sweeney hit like a serviceable first baseman or DH over a full season is now five years in the rear view.

Since this team has Kotchman and Ken Griffey Jr. taking up lots of 1B/DH plate appearances from the left side, you have to figure whichever of Sweeney or Garko (both righties) had made it was going to come off the bench almost exclusively to face left-handed pitchers. And, well, platoon splits are inherently untrustworthy, but it does mean something that Garko has a career .313/.392/.495 line against lefties and Sweeney actually has a slight reverse career platoon split, OPSing .827 against lefties and .867 against righties. And of course both of Sweeney's numbers have been significantly lower in recent years, while Garko has continued to mash lefties even in his down times.

So even if you completely ignore defensive value (which gives something of an artificial edge to Sweeney), it's very clear who is the better player and the better fit for the M's roster at this point...and it's the guy they sent away.

From the outside looking in, there are really two, and only two, potential reasons for choosing Sweeney over Garko. One is their performance this spring. Garko has sputtered a bit, hitting just .220, while Sweeney has been on fire, hitting .559/.571/.971. But between them, they have just 77 plate appearances, about nine full games' worth for Garko and eight for Sweeney. I'm sure if you look for a while you can find a Neifi Perez or Royce Clayton type who hit like Sweeney over just eight games, and I know for a fact that you can find ten-game stretches in which Albert Pujols hit .220. As Dave Cameron helpfully points out, last spring Khalil Greene hit over .400 (then went on to hit .200 in the regular season) and Travis Ishikawa was near the top of the list with seven spring home runs (he went on to hit just nine in the entire regular season, slugging .387). By now, teams simply have to know -- and I'm convinced the Mariners do know -- that you really can't make personnel decisions based on spring training stats.

The second reason, and the one they seem to be stamping their name on, is clubhouse chemistry. Sweeney's reportedly a great guy, a clubhouse cutup, and all that. Great for morale. And I don't doubt that chemistry and morale are important on some level. But, as those who tout chemistry are so fond of saying, you can't measure chemistry. You can measure the effect of replacing Garko's bat with Sweeney's, and it's not good. If building a team of good guys is important to you, great (but if so, why Milton Bradley?), but go out and get good guys who can also play. If you've got two players, and player A is clearly a better baseball player than player B at this point in their careers, I don't think you can choose player B because he happens to be a nicer guy or a better teammate (assuming, you know, that player A isn't going to kill somebody or sell Ichiro's stolen glove on eBay or something).

It's entirely possible that the Mariners are aware of something that we're not, and that they have a legitimate reason to believe that Sweeney is the better move at this point. But if what we see is what we get here, it doesn't make any sense to me at all. The real problem, as I see it, is that with Griffey and Sweeney, two guys who debuted before Felix Hernandez turned ten years old, the Mariners have two whole roster spots devoted to guys whose value derives primarily from sources other than their bats, gloves and baserunning. You only get twenty-five of those, so two is at least one (and probably two) too many to waste on guys who could be providing much the same service as bench coaches. You can get morale from lots of places, but you can only get runs from those 15 or so hitters on your roster, and runs are going to be in very short supply.

It's tempting to connect this puzzling move with another Tuesday roster move, when the Cubs cut Kevin Millar in favor of Chad Tracy. Millar, like Sweeney, is a righty in his late thirties who was once a very good hitter and is renowned as a great teammate and motivator; Tracy, like Garko, is a twenty-nine year old who has been down for a couple years, but has hit well much more recently than his opponent has and can still play a little defense. Now, Millar didn't have nearly the spring that Sweeney did and is a year older, while Tracy is a left-handed hitter, so he fills a different need, whereas Garko simply filled the same need more effectively. Maybe if the GMs were reversed, the results would have stayed exactly the same. Still and all, you have to wonder what kind of world we're living in when Jack Z. picks age and chemistry over youth and ability, while Jim Hendry explicitly does not...