Art Thiel is a longtime sports columnist in Seattle, for many years at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and now as founding editor at SportsPressNW.com.
The way many people, inside of baseball and outside, see the Mariners is as a hapless loser of an organization with a toxic culture that indulges a senior executive like departed CEO Kevin Mather,
Coach Carroll doesn’t have the leverage of a politician, but he has experience in one of America’s two high-profile industries with majority Black talent (the other is the NBA). He knows his material and his truths.
Players typically come from colleges where coaches are tyrants who come down hard on independent thinking, outspokenness, and originality. College coaches see threats everywhere to their empires, as do many pro coaches. But not Coach Carroll.