MLB Baseball team Presidents are better seen and not heard

Mariners team President/CEO Kevin Mather resigned this Monday over comments he made during a Bellevue breakfast rotary club meeting on February 5th. Before today I couldn't have told you his name or the name of any other Major League Baseball President except for Randy Levine of the Yankees. The only reason Levine is known to me is from headlines he made a few years ago for belittling a player who lost a salary arbitration case against the Yankees. Baseball managers, general managers, and the owners of teams are much more visible to the press and the general public. If your favorite team's President makes the news it is usually for all of the wrong reasons.

After reading the full transcript of Kevin Mather's speech and watching the video, it's clear Mather made some comments specifically around controlling players' service time that will be used by the Major League Baseball Players Association during the next Collective Bargaining Agreement. The practice is referred to by the players as 'service time manipulation' and it can be used to push back a baseball player's free agency. Simply waiting a couple of weeks before calling a player up at the beginning of the season can give the team an extra year of control before the player can become a free agent. This issue is the most likely reason we could see a baseball strike by the players or lockout by the owners in 2022. Discussing this issue so freely in a public forum is likely why Mather resigned his position.

The Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) and other outlets also took issue with some of Mather's comments about individual players' English skills.

When asked about Julio Rodriguez, Mather said "Julio Rodriguez has got a personality bigger than all of you combined. He is loud, his English is not tremendous. But he and Kelenic are very good friends. He's a year behind Kelenic, he probably won't be here 'til 2022 or 2023. Fantastic kid. We're really big on social media, he loves to get out in front, he loves the Mariners, and between him and Kelenic, we think we've got an outfield that will be as good as any in baseball for the next six years. He's the real deal. He's ranked higher than Kelenic, which as I said, Kelenic doesn't lack for confidence. Kelenic is not happy that he's the fifth-highest prospect on Baseball America, and Rodriguez is the fourth highest prospect. It's little things like that bother Kelenic." Out of the entire quote what is getting all of the attention is "...his English is not tremendous." There is another part of the transcript where he is asked what the Mariners do to help players from foreign countries learn English. He goes into detail about how that has changed over the years then goes off on a tangent complaining about having to pay $75,000 for an interpreter for former Mariner Hisashi Iwakuma before circling back and finishing the answer.

It's a shame because there were several interesting quotes that were newsworthy that isn't getting any coverage. Here are some of the highlights. When discussing Spring Training this year, he said, "It's not clear we can have fans in Peoria, Arizona." When asked about attending games in Seattle "It's a question I don't know the answer to...We have designs, a socially distanced T-Mobile park will hold 9,870 fans."

And this was a response to a question that we didn't hear "...not only is the replay here to stay we will have an electronic strike zone in two years." An electronic strike zone in two years? That could have been the biggest news item from this meeting.

The last question before the video cut off was that after having fewer rounds in the draft last year would there continue to be fewer rounds in the future. Here was Mather's response, "One of the reasons we reduced the number of minor league teams is that we'd have a forty-round draft simply to staff a roster. The days of finding a fireballer from, you know, Bumbleduck, North Dakota, in the thirty-ninth round, and he turns out to be Cy Young, those days are over. There's too much video sourcing now, a lot of it done on video, and the players send stuff in, and as we get closer to the draft for the high-end players, we'll go see them. As a general rule, a lot of the scouting is done electronically, via videos. That's one reason we reduced the number of teams, because why are we spending all this money when... and I apologize, I don't know the stats, but I did at one point. After the fifth round, the chances of making the major leagues over the last eight years are..." [Video ends]

I grew up in North Dakota, and just to clarify, there is a city called Buffalo and a city called Buxton in North Dakota but no city called Bumbleduck.