ESPN’s Buster Olney is reporting that Arizona executive Jerry DiPoto might be the leading candidate for the vacant Seattle Mariners position. I’m getting this quote from MLB Traderumors, which pulled it out of an ESPN Insider story. I’m not an ESPN insider.

Heard this: Arizona executive Jerry DiPoto is among the front-runners to get the Seattle job, and if he does land it, this will increase the likelihood that Pat Gillick winds up serving as some kind of consultant for the Mariners.

It’s just a rumor, and furthermore it begins with a very celebrity gossipesque “heard this…” (kind of reminds me of that Item! guy from The Onion) but as people who read EWC already know, Jerry DiPoto is not Kim Ng, who is vying to become both the first Asian and first woman GM in Major League Baseball.

There were actually a number of items concerning this job over the weekend. Larry Stone of the Seattle Times gives an overview of all the candidates and their qualifications in this piece  and here’s another, more opinionated piece  from a Northwest paper called The News Tribune. The Sporting News also checks in with this pro-Ng piece and perhaps best of all, Lookout Landing and its legions of relatively intelligent commenters, are on it.

Oakland A’s assistant David Frost took his name off the list over the weekend.