If Lou Piniella can be dispatched two years after helping create one of the greatest seasons in MLB history — the 116 wins remains an anomaly still unexplained by baseball scientists — then it stands to reason that the Mariners can fire manager Scott Servais two years after making playoffs for the first time since 2001: A Place Oddity.
Nevertheless, it is remarkable that less than two weeks ago against a decent New York Mets team, the Mariners won all three games in the series by a cumulative 22-1 score, including a 12-1 finale in the first nationally televised regular-season game from Seattle in 20 years.
For a nano-second, the M’s were the talk of baseball.
They are again, for opposite reasons.
After a 1-8 road trip that included a sweep in Los Angeles by the best team money can buy, the Mariners Thursday dumped Servais in a breathtaking act of misplaced desperation. At 64-64, the Mariners have 34 games to run down the Houston Astros for the AL West division title. That requires an average gain of one game per week. Hard, yet not beyond the realm.
For team president Jerry Dipoto, the agony was watching the collapse of an offense he built, unsurprisingly, with balsa wood and gum.
“Where we were in the middle of June and where we are today is — it’s hard to believe, actually, how quickly it all dissolved for us,” Dipoto told reporters in an afternoon video conference. He was referring to a 44-31 record and a 10-game division lead now squandered into trailing by five.
The false positive was due partly to injuries to four Astros starting pitchers. The primary internal disease in Seattle was a collection of batters that is threatening the all-time MLB single-season records for most strikeouts and lowest batting average. The everyday lineup regularly has included no hitters who have seasonal results equal to or better than their career averages. Even the two new veterans acquired at the trade deadline, Randy Arozarena and Justin Turner, are in decay.
How this was the primary fault of Servais remains unclear. But any solution now is in the hands of Dan Wilson, who unaccountably emerged from the club’s sepia-toned history of mid-1990s glory to succeed Servais. Along with a pending reported hire of Edgar Martinez as hitting coach, Dipoto and the franchise owners are rumored ready to hire the Kingdome to replace T-ball Park. Whenever the franchise has anxiety, it puts on the 1995 slippers for warm fuzzies.
Martinez was elected to the Hall of Fame for his feats as a designated hitter. But his four-year tenure as Mariners hitting coach ended in 2018 in part because the increased emphasis on analytics passed him by. Maybe that has changed, or maybe Dipoto and the owners in mid-August have only shrugs to give.
In the first of his nine years as Mariners manager — all under Dipoto, his longtime friend who fired him — Servais’s 2016 club averaged 4.74 runs a game, third-best in the American League. An 11-year playing career in the bigs suggests that Servais, 57, has a good grip on the requirements for hitting, including analytics, something that has stymied older managers. No indications of mass player unhappiness have emerged, nor were there more than the typical strategic fails over the course of a season. But the manager is always easiest to blame.
If it’s true that Servais has been scapegoated, the problem rests with talent acquisition — as always. Responsibility for that rests with Dipoto and the owners — as always. If longtime readers sense a repetitive theme here, I wish I could offer otherwise. But the top of club ops is the through-point that explains the mortal embarrassment of being the only MLB team without a World Series appearance.
After a late fizzle in 2023 denied the Mariners a second straight postseason appearance, the bosses didn’t respond with resources sufficient to buy off for 2024 the reluctance of free-agent veterans to come to baseball’s most isolated city to play in the game’s most pitcher-friendly ballpark. But Dipoto will never say that his bosses lack the financial guts to out-spend their buccaneer peers in a pro sport without a salary cap.
“I don’t think it’s been a problem for us. I really don’t think it’s ever been a problem for us,” Dipoto told Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, the reporter who broke the story of Servais’s firing before Dipoto informed him. “Somebody is going to have the highest payroll. Somebody will have the lowest. Our general place in that continuum has been consistent with our revenue streams. We operate to our market.”
And that market is the middle, where for the past three seasons they have won 90, 90 and 88 games. After last season, Dipoto was properly scalded by critics when he said the club was doing fans “a favor” by being patient and avoiding recklessness with contracts. The team collapse in 2024 has been sufficiently abrupt that he sounded humble.
“I can say this: Me, our coaches, our staff, none of us is blameless,” he told The Athletic. “We have really struggled to play offense this year. And it’s not just on our players for not doing that. That would be a cop-out.”
So here they are, again in the middle, only this time on such a fast fade that it cost the manager his job, forcing the club into hiring a manager intern. Baseball is sufficiently random that Wilson has a 10 percent chance of pulling off a miracle. Regardless, the off-season requires a reckoning.
In the corporate world, if an executive fails to make a sufficiently compelling reason for the board to give him the resources he needs for his plan to succeed, he needs to go find a more supportive place to work. No hard feelings, no more disingenuousness, no more cross purposes.
Meantime, we shall watch closely to see if Edgar picks up a bat and takes a swing.
Among all MLB teams, the Mariners rank 10th in revenue, 13th in valuation, 15th in market size and 18th in payroll. In other words, they are financially out-performing their market size. Principal owner John Stanton is probably happy enough. He’s wealthy but not crazy-buccaneer wealthy. I suspect their strategy for profitability is to play well enough to “be competitive” and “in the hunt” most seasons with a breakthrough into the post-season every so often. As long as they can do this with below-average payroll and above-average revenue and valuation, they have little incentive to shoot the moon financially in hopes of getting to the World Series or even close. Their strategy of developing talent internally and only buying cheap-but-potentially-under-valued free agent talent in hopes of getting lucky now and then seems to be working as a business model, fan frustration notwithstanding. Firing Servais seems like an aberration not required by the current situation or their strategy.
A reasonable take, Tom. And reasonableness in the faces geography/climate obstacles is why the M’s have been free of the nuisance of the World Series for all 47 of their years.
Well said, Tom. Art makes a good point about the understandable reluctance of high-end hitters to play in Seattle’s pitcher-friendly ballpark, not to mention the travel schedule. My brain tends to go straight to Adrian Beltre arriving at Safeco after a stupendous season with the Dodgers only to….
Still, if ownership were seriously committed to building a championship team they’d pay what needs to be paid to attract the necessary talent. Year after year, however, they’ve shown they’re happy to bank profits and tread the glum waters of mediocrity.
It’s not always a good idea to return in a coaching or mangerial positionin a town where you are loved.
I hope this turns out to be an exception.
Congrats to Dan for getting this position, he definitely earned it. My hope is that he can reach the front office to put together a first rate team, one that can do what every other team in MLB has done.
Dan is a fine dude all-around, and almost certain not to clear his throat in front of the regime.
I like Dan Wilson but I’m sensing he could be the Yes Man Mariner Management is looking for. I’m hoping Edgar can work magic as hitting coach.
At some point the fans simply give up and season ticket sales take a dive. I sure have no interest in attending any games. And the dismal TV coverage provided by ROOT (at a premium price no less!) isn’t bringing me back. Are the M’s forever handcuffed simply by their geographical isolation? Sure feels like it. Bring a team to Portland and another to Vancouver B.C. and even up the travel schedules and see what impact that might have.
Portland and Vancouver are both among the largest metro areas without MLB. It could work. Secondarily it would benefit the other west coast teams, and even teams from the rest of the country that could play more games on each western swing.
More PNW teams would shake the M’s out of their complacency; unlike the Red Sox and Braves, or even the Seahawks, they haven’t been successful enough to earn the monopoly love from being a region’s team.
Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening. Vancouver is a Blue Jays town, pure and simple. Portland is a bit too small to count on 25-30,000 crowds 81 times a year, and has two wildly popular soccer teams as competition. When MLB expands, it’ll be to bigger cities like Nashville, Charlotte, San Antonio, and perhaps a return to Montreal (who did draw crowds and had a national fan base, but got screwed over by malevolent ownership the way the A’s are now).
The Mariners have a four-state MLB monopoly, Paul, plus Western Canada. Owners just need to turn on the lights, and parachute in some free hot dogs.
Yes but… that four state monopoly doesn’t alleviate all the travel, nor (apparently) does it generate enough income to field a competitive team. And what major league baseball franchise has worse announcers?
The monopoly, including TV, generates revs sufficient for a top 10 payroll. And the TV personnel are just like announcers in every MLB market — paid by the club.
Apparently the majority of the other teams have worse announcers. Fans at the Awful Announcing sports media site have ranked them around the top third of MLB TV crews for the past several years.
https://awfulannouncing.com/orig/2024-mlb-broadcaster-announcer-rankings-mets-giants-padres.html
I confess to being unaware of this website. But everyone has an opinion and is entitled to it. I’m still mourning the passing of Dave Niehaus.
Everyone has an opinion, as do I. I’m still missing Dave Niehaus. I was raised on Jimmy Dudley – the second best in my experience.
I was also unaware of awfulannouncing.com. Good to know it’s there, but I beg to differ with the assessments of the site’s followers.
One reason I subscribe to MLBTV is because users can select whichever team’s broadcast crew (TV and radio) they want to view/hear from. In the case of M’s games, almost without exception I prefer the opponent’s announcers. They tend to be more insightful and knowledgeable about baseball in general plus pay greater attention to the game they are calling. I for one am sick of Rick Rizzs’ maudlin recollections about going out for root beer floats after his Little League games, and Dave Sims going overboard recalling ballplayers of yesteryear.
Imagine the California Angels when they were the only team on the West Coast. That was before interleague play, so they always had to travel on long trips until the A’s moved to Oakland.
Of course, the Angels didn’t win often either.
Your title says it all, Art. The only thing worse than making Servais a scapegoat was Dipoto neglecting to have the face-to-face conversation with him before telling Rosenthal. -Totally bush league.
Especially after Dipoto blew up Servais with the pre-firing interview with Rosenthal that opened the bomb-bay doors.
Somewhere, Bobby Wagner is ruefully shaking his head…
ESPN’s article on Servais’ firing suggested that Root Sports’ uncertain future factored into the Mariners’ reluctance to increase payroll. Maybe so. But a smaller budget doesn’t preclude you from smart signings. It doesn’t have to be “Moneyball” redux, it just means making better and more accountable scouting and player acquisitions. That’s on Dipoto.
From what I’ve seen on social media, a lot of fans accused Servais of mishandling the bullpen. I don’t follow MLB like I used to, is that a fair assessment?
Every MLB fan with an opinion believes he/she can handle the bullpen better than the manager. I believe it’s in the second stanza of the Pledge of Allegiance.
The M’s offense has sucked all year. They sucked at home in the damp, cold Seattle air, but they sucked just as badly on the road (and other teams who came to Seattle hit better than our guys here). New talent were brought in who were hitting decently before they arrived, and they too sucked upon arrival. All of the hitters sucked. Veterans hit worse this year than last year — again, pretty much across the board. If it were just a few at a time who were slumping, then it would be easy to point the finger at them instead of at the coaching staff. But this was everyone, all the time. Not the park, not a few individuals, not growing pains. There’s no one else to blame but the coaching staff.
I spent a few days in Peoria in March watching the M’s in spring training, as I try to do every year. I left very concerned. Their morning workouts were lackluster: they looked more like summer camp than training camp. There was no fire or focus among the MLB players. And as much as I like Julio, he was among the worst of them: late to get going, constantly pampered, clearly having fun when he showed up but not looking serious at all. In retrospect, I am not at all surprised that Julio is striking out so much this year.
Yes, it would have been great if DiPoto had spent a bunch of money on top-tier talent in the offseason. But that is a different problem; the problem right now is that every single hitter is performing below expectations and has done so all season. That is not a talent-acquisition problem; that’s a field management problem. That’s on Servais.
Servais bears some responsibility, and Julio’s mercurial personality is a detriment, as was Kelenic’s. Yet teams have to win with difficult players (see Griffey, A-Rod, Johnson). Servais was charged with executing Dipoto’s mantra to “control the zone.” Where it went sideways between Dipoto and Servais, I don’t know. But Dipoto is director of the operation, and ultimately responsible for the resource failure.
For the record Stanton is not the Sole owner of the Mariners. That dubious distinction falls on the “ First Avenue Entertainment LLLC” made up of a dozen or so secretive entities including Ken Griffey Jr. some older remnants of the Howard Lincoln family and several other investors who demand a large “ Return” on their investment. They never get called-out for fleecing the local fan base and have slick Jerry Dipoto as their Frontman to try and quench any criticism from guys like Art Thiel or Larry Stone who actually know and love the game and want to help bring a World Series to Seattle. I am 66 and have been a fan since 1977 , this year has been horrific and I finally cut out Root Sports and that cabal of Wanna-Bes and has beens. Ownership is to Blame even though Servais was a bit to mellow and indecisive. And The great Julio is a Selfish Showoff .GoodNight SportsFans…
I think most longtime fans understand the basic ownership makeup. Stanton, by agreement, makes the calls on budget. Given that the club has been a top-five in revenue generation, they are happy with his work. Failure to make the playoffs with this rotation will force the owners to change the front office, because the owners will not accept responsibility.