User:Smith brick/sandbox

= Smith Brickner = Smith Brickner (born May 14, 1997) is an American baseball executive for the Seattle Mariners of Major League Baseball. He has held the position since March 21st, 2020. During his tenure, the Mariners won the 2023 World Series.

Early Life
Brickner grew up in a middle class family in Locust Valley, New York, located on the north shore of Long Island. He is the oldest of three children to Wanda and Ward Brickner. He grew up a New York Yankees fan during the prime years of the Core Four. As such, his favorite player was Mariano Rivera. He attended Long Island Lutheran Middle and High School, where he played three years of varsity baseball. He went to Mercy College (New York) and majored in Finance, where he graduated with Magna cum Laude recognition.

During college, he held various positions in sports with the Elias Sports Bureau, New York Mets, and O'Connell Sports Management. At the urging of his college professors, however, Brickner took several finance internships before graduating with the likes of IBM and J.P. Morgan & Co., which he says has given him "a different mindset than others" in baseball. He was almost swayed to transition full-time into finance after graduation, but ultimately decided against it in order to pursue a career in baseball.

After graduation, Brickner interned with TrackMan, a company that manufactured and monitored radar technology which was used by all 30 MLB teams at the time of his internship. He also wrote for Baseball Prospectus, writing scouting reports on players in the Minor Leagues.

Atlanta Braves
Brickner took his first baseball operations position with the Atlanta Braves as a minor league video and information trainee. He was assigned to the team's Double-A affiliate, the Mississippi Braves. During his time there, he worked with Chris Maloney and Einar Díaz, who became some of his most staunch supporters after their lone season together.

After his first season, he transitioned to a baseball operations trainee position, which eventually became a full-time job one year later. He primarily worked on Major League operations projects, though he also had amateur scouting responsibilities. Two years into his full-time stint, he was promoted to the position of Manager, Baseball Operations. Another two years later, he was promoted to the Director of Baseball Operations position.

Only a few months into the position, he was again promoted after an MLB investigation found the Braves were guilty of illegal under-the-table contract negotiations with international amateur free agents. The investigation led to the dismissal of several team executives, thus opening the door for Brickner to become one of five Assistant General Managers. In the role, he was charged with heading the team's player development system. His first action was to invest a significant amount of his budget into technological innovations, specifically in biomechanic analysis technology and Machine learning. His investments and actions didn't go unnoticed throughout the league, and he was shortly thereafter considered a candidate to eventually lead a team's baseball operation.

The Rebuild (2020-2022)
Only two years after being promoted to Assistant General Manager, Brickner was approached by Mariners owner John W. Stanton to interview for the team's vacant General Manager opening. Brickner was shortly thereafter hired by the Mariners on March 21st, 2020 to become the team's 17th General Manager. In his introductory press conference, he promised that the organization would "look at ideas, concepts and strategies different" than most teams. As he did as the Braves' Assistant General Manager, he quickly invested a significant amount of his budget into technological innovations, as well as a significant increase in the teams' funding for its mental health department.

When he took over the Mariners, the team was in shambles from the top-down, struggling to draw fans into its newly named T-Mobile Park. The team had several highly compensated veterans and a lackluster farm system, making the initial steps to rebuild rather complicated. However, the team was enjoying significant profit margins from the league's revenue sharing model, as well as their local television contract. Brickner wanted to take advantage of their strong financial holding by taking on overpriced veterans for high-ceiling prospects. Brickner kept his initial roster in tact for most of the year, however, not rushing to trade players unless he received what he deemed a "fair offer".

His first trade was with the Cleveland Indians on April 27th, where the team agreed to take on the contracts of Óliver Pérez, Roberto Pérez and Jason Kipnis for prospects Brayan Rocchio and Lenny Torres. Rocchio has since become the team's starting shortstop, including during its 2023 World Series season. Torres. meanwhile, has become one of the league's better starting pitching prospects. He would go on to make several more trades of the team's veterans, including Yusei Kikuchi, Mallex Smith, Marco Gonzales and fan favorite Kyle Seager.

However, there were moves which were questionable at the time. Most notably, he traded prospects for Kyle Barraclough, and traded J. P. Crawford to the Pittsburgh Pirates, who at the time was considered a building block for the team. __NOINDEX__ __NONEWSECTIONLINK__