Mariners CEO Kevin Mather Made Some Surprising Comments
If you’ve ever shot yourself in the foot, and stuck your other foot in your mouth, you might be Kevin Mather. Mather is was the team president and CEO of the Mariners, but clearly intelligence wasn’t a requirement to achieve those titles. He gave an interesting video speech to the Bellevue Breakfast Rotary Club (of all places) in which he discussed a variety of topics with the candidness of a schoolboy force-fed truth serum. The video was posted to YouTube and quickly removed, but not before Grant Bronsdon and Kate Preusser of Lookout Landing and Ryan Divish of the Seattle Times got their hands on it.
The first of his talking points had to do with the contentious issue of service time. It’s sort of an open secret that teams often delay promoting their best prospects until a few weeks into the season so they can gain an extra year of control over their service time. One of the more obvious cases of this sort of manipulation was what the Cubs did with Kris Bryant. Usually, even though everyone knows what’s really going on, teams give an excuse for the delay so that they can maintain plausible deniability and prevent the union from having a good case for a grievance. The excuse is usually something along the lines of “(player X) needs to work on their defense,” but lo and behold, two weeks into the season they’re magically promoted. How much difference did that two weeks really make? Probably not a whole lot – but that was never the point.
Rather than just giving some polite non-sequitur explaining away the delay in promoting top prospects, Mather came out and gave this eye-opener:
“There was no chance you were going to see these young players at T-Mobile Park. We weren’t going to put them on the 40-man roster, we weren’t going to start the service time clock. There were all kinds of reasons that, if we had an injury problem or COVID outbreak, you might’ve seen my big tummy out there in left field. You would not have seen our prospects playing in T-Mobile Park.”
If you’re able to stop cringing from the big tummy comment, consider what that means for a second. Mather just admitted that if Julio Rodriguez was ready to out-slug Juan Soto, and there was a desperate need at the major league level, you still wouldn’t have seen any exciting young players promoted so as to keep them from making money. Speaking specifically about Jarred Kelenic and Logan Gilbert, he said that Kelenic would stay “[in] Triple-A Tacoma for a month, and then he will likely be in left field at T-Mobile Park for the next six or seven years,” and about Gilbert, “you won’t see him on April 1st, but by mid-April.”
If that doesn’t leave a bad taste in your mouth yet, just wait until you hear what he said about his international players. Aside from continually referring to catcher Luis Torrens as “Luis Torres,” he described third baseman Kyle Seager as “probably overpaid” and criticized Rodriguez’ and Hisashi Iwakuma’s English-speaking. Asked to tell attendees about Rodriguez, the team’s best prospect and best hope for a promising future, Mather began with, “He is loud, his English is not tremendous.” Nothing about his talents as a player, nothing about how great he is in the clubhouse. His English. Later on, he went on a similar tangent about Iwakuma: “Wonderful human being, his English was terrible… and I’m going to say, I’m tired of paying his interpreter. When he was a player, we’d pay Iwakuma X, but we’d also have to pay $75,000 a year to have an interpreter with him. His English suddenly got better, his English got better when we told him that!”
While this wasn’t the end of his ludicrous remarks, it’s certainly the most offensive. It’s a small wonder the Mariners haven’t made the playoffs in a North American sports-record 19 years when their team president finds linguistic assimilation more important than talent on the field. After switching topics, he followed up with repeating the party lie that “[MLB] lost $2.9 billion last year” and that “we have taken the position that there are 180 free agents still out there on February 5 unsigned, and sooner or later, these players are going to turn their hat over and come with hat in hand, looking for a contract.”
The first quote there is a lie – MLB missed out on billions worth of profit potential, but they certainly didn’t “lose” billions. That second quote comes dangerously close to admitting teams are colluding once again to keep free agent prices low, much like they were proven to have done when they had to pay a $280 million settlement to the MLBPA in 1990. The cherry on top to complete Mather’s ridiculous Zoom call was his assertion that he was “embarrassed” that Spring Training was beginning as scheduled without being delayed, even though owners are the only group who hold this viewpoint. Players and fans alike have clamored for a full season to be played, so if he’s embarrassed over anything, it’s that he didn’t get his way.
The Players Association released a statement after Mather’s comments came to light, which said: “The Club’s video presentation is a highly disturbing yet critically important window into how Players are genuinely viewed by management. Not just because of what was said, but also because it represents an unfiltered look into Club thinking. It is offensive, and it is not surprising that fans and others around the game are offended as well. Players remain committed to confronting these issues at the bargaining table and elsewhere.” Mather provided a weak apology for his “terrible lapse in judgement,” and soon after resigned – even though he will continue to serve as acting president/CEO until a replacement is found. The whole situation has created quite a stir and will undoubtedly be a talking point during the Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations next week. The small silver lining with all this is Mather will soon be out of the game of baseball, hopefully never to return.
-Michael Swinehart
