Until Monday, Kevin Mather was the president and chief executive of a Major League Baseball team with two dubious distinctions. Its franchise, the Seattle Mariners, is unfortunate, both today and historically. It is the only team to ever make it to the World Series and has the longest active post-season drought in North American professional sports.
The Mariners have spent 19 consecutive seasons without making the playoffs and plan on reaching 20. We know this because Mather told the Bellevue Breakfast Rotary Club this month in a surprisingly frank conversation that cost him his job.
Mather resigned on Monday, an inevitable step after he ignited tensions with the players by confirming some of the union’s main complaints with the owners. Getting to the playoffs in 2021, Mather told the Rotary Club, was “probably overkill” – but the team wouldn’t be promoting its best minor league chances on debut day, essentially an admission that the team was manipulating their service time while maintaining players in the minors for longer than necessary.
Mather also suggested the kind of group thinking among the owners that severely cut the trust of the players’ union.
“The industry lost $ 2.9 billion,” he said, referring to the 2020 season in the midst of the pandemic, “and before any of you make faces: no, no one cares if wealthy owners have lost money . But we lost $ 2.9 billion last year and took the position that there were still 180 free agents out there on February 5 unsigned and, sooner or later, these players will turn around and hat-in-hand. looking for a contract. “
The union’s collective bargaining agreement with the owners expires after the 2021 season. Wielding a weapon by management, the players’ union gladly wielded it in a statement:
“The club’s video presentation is a highly disturbing but extremely important window on how players are genuinely viewed by management. Not only because of what was said, but also because it represents an unfiltered view of the club’s thinking. It’s offensive and it’s not surprising that fans and others around the game are also offended. Players remain committed to addressing these issues at the negotiating table and elsewhere. “
Mather’s candor extended to individual players. Although he offered much praise, he said that third baseman Kyle Seager was “probably overpaid” and probably would not be back next season; left-handed holder Marco Gonzales was “very boring”; and the external prospectus Julio Rodriguez, who is from the Dominican Republic, “is noisy, his English is not excellent”.
Mather also scoffed at the English of former Mariners pitcher, Hisashi Iwakuma, who is Japanese and now works for the team: “I’m tired of paying for your interpreter. When he was a player, we paid Iwakuma X, but we also had to pay $ 75,000 a year to have an interpreter with him. His English suddenly improved; his English improved when we told him that. “
Rodriguez – who is 20 years old and speaks good English – responded on Twitter with a meme from “The Last Dance,” Michael Jordan’s documentary. Rodriguez fixed his face on Jordan’s with the caption: “… and I took it personally”.
In a videoconference with reporters, the president of the Mariners, John Stanton, offered no defense to Mather’s comments and said they did not reflect the organization’s beliefs. He said the players’ moves depended on general manager Jerry Dipoto, not Mather.
“Decisions about when players are called up are made by Jerry and the baseball team he leads,” said Stanton. “Frankly, it wasn’t Kevin’s decisions.”
While this is technically true, Mather’s elevated position has obviously given him a strong influence on team politics. He revealed that the team made Jarred Kelenic a long-term contract offer, and said Kelenic was upset when Baseball America ranked him as the fourth best contender in the league, one place behind Rodriguez.
“He thinks that after six years he will be such a famous player that the options for the seventh, eighth, ninth year will be below value,” said Mather of Kelenic. “He may be right.”
Mather was more charitable in his views on first baseman Evan White, who signed a long-term deal – despite the union’s objection, Mather added – and was promoted to opening day last July. Meanwhile, with Kelenic, Mather said the team wanted him to hit the bat in AAA class “for a month”, which would effectively delay his service clock long enough to give the team an extra year of control before his agency free of charge.
Likewise, Mather hailed the Logan Gilbert prospect as a “forward pitcher”, but said “you will not see him on April 1, but in mid-April”. And although the Mariners had several top candidates at their alternate training site last season, Mather said he had a better chance of being called up to the championships than they were.
“There was no chance that you would see these young players at T-Mobile Park,” he said. “We were not going to put them on the list of 40 men, we were not going to start the service point clock.”
Players from across the league like Anthony Rizzo, the veteran first-base player for the Chicago Cubs, were not surprised.
“Being in this game, you know what he said is true, about 99.9 percent, it happens – it is not out there and it is not said,” Rizzo told reporters. “There are stories written on it, but there are teams that manipulate seniority. There are teams that do this all the time. Him coming out and saying this is very annoying and frustrating for us as players, but it’s not like we don’t know anything about what he said. It’s just that he’s saying that – well, I’m glad he’s in the audience now and people are seeing that this is the way it is. “
Negotiations for a new CBA will be a battle, said Rizzo, but that is also an open secret. As Mather also told the Rotary Club, “There is a high level of distrust between the union and management today, and I am very concerned about what will come in the future.”