…this guy. But you’d think so, right? After four days of turmoil from the Bellevue Breakfast Rotary to youtube to a curious fan named Eric Hess (@SeattleSunDvl) into the Twittersphere to OMG he didn’t really say that to #ByeFelicia for a guy at the top of the Mariners power pyramid – after all that, he seemed like the obvious pick. For sure… now that he’s an ex-Mariner.
But the Ex-Mariner Committee had to put the whole thing on pause, even with the contest decided and the announcement prepared (spoiler: Caribbean Series Champs). It’s just gonna have to wait.
I mean, over here at Playin’ in the Dirt we spend a lot of time on baseball. Baseball, plus abuse. Abuse of power. Abuse of position. Abuse of authority. Sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse.
And this is about all that, except the physical and sexual part, even though Mather made a hell of a lot of people feel beat-down, maybe even like they were taking it right up the… well you get the picture.
For those who’ve slept through the last 96 hours… here you go. Trigger alert: 45 minutes of self-congratulatory white clown ahead.
I don’t know Kevin Mather personally. Maybe he’s a decent guy. But his behavior, his words, his snarky delivery… none of it makes him look decent. At all.
In just 45 minutes, Kevin Mather boiled down the Mariners’ strategy to this: it’s OK to shaft young talent, piss off old guys, insult foreigners, scare away free agents, and just generally be a douche. As long as you’re building value in the franchise.
Seems like a lot to get done in just 45 quick minutes. But it was a long, painful 45 minutes. It was 2,700 endless, agonizing ticks of the clock, while his captive Breakfast Rotary Zoom audience had nothing better to do than sip their screwdrivers and nod along. He was sharing inside scoop. He was smiling. And Bellevue’s cool kids were getting something special. Sip. Nod. Smile back.
It wasn’t special. It was awful. It was beyond offensive. And you know what hit me hardest? It was all bad, dammit, and maybe it was so bad that it doesn’t even make sense to rank the pieces. But his comments about Hisashi Iwakuma nearly sent me through the screen to shove those words right back down his throat.
“I took away his interpreter and suddenly his English improved.”
The superior smirk on his face told those nodding Rotarians a little something extra. “Look at us, we got the better of the Japanese guy. We won this one.”
Kevin Mather in that moment was the smug white punk in a polo shirt, deep into the IPAs at the 19th hole, going off about foreigners and demanding an English-only policy at the clubhouse. He was everybody’s asshole drunk uncle ruining Thanksgiving dinner. He was every fraternity chump who ever told a racist joke. And Kevin Mather was every punkass American that glances to make sure there’s just white guys in the room before he winks and nudges and spews his bullshit. On a Zoom call with a fawning crowd of Bellevue Rotarians, Kevin Mather apparently felt the coast was clear.
But maybe Kevin Mather was one of us. Maybe that’s what gets me. We’ve all heard that shit. Tell me you never heard a Mariner fan demand “Why does Ichiro still need an interpreter?” We know we’ve heard it. Maybe we’ve even thought it. Or said it. And with Mather’s better-than-you attitude when he grins it out, when you can pretty much see the wink to the boys in the room, maybe we hear now what it sounds like and what it feels like. Maybe now we can throw a little empathy in there for the guy he’s targeting.
What was Kevin Mather not? He was not a guy who could ever earn the trust of his organization again. So they tossed him. The problem is so much deeper though.
Majority owner John Stanton waddled through a press conference the day Mather got fired. That awkward charade simply proved that some guys at the top don’t think about the impact that guys at the top have. For Stanton to deny that Mather reflected the corporate culture, when in fact Mather was the corporate culture, well it was disingenuous at best, assuming he knew he was lying. And it was even more of a train wreck if a guy in Stanton’s position actually believed what he was saying.
I mean, would you rather have your team owned by a guy who lies badly… or by a guy who’s too clueless to know he’s wrong? Sucky choice but it seems like that’s what we got.
But much as they raise our bile, do we show up at the ballyard to cheer for management? Of course not. So we raise our glasses as spring training rolls on, and we root for the players. We root for Julio, Jarred, and Logan to bust into the big league roster. We root for Seager and Kuma to stick with us. And we root for the guys on the field to bring us what we go to the ballyard to see: great baseball. Even if management sucks.
We’ve quoted our fellow fans at Lookout Landing before. And we’ll let LL’s Matthew Roberson have the last word here, in one of many expert analyses they’ve pumped out in the past couple days. Matthew says Mather “…had a bafflingly high amount of power for someone so unaware of how to use it or the effects it can have.”
And Matthew points out accurately that “the Bellevue Breakfast Rotary Club remembered to press ‘record’. Had they not, he’d still be infecting the club from the inside.”
Read Matthew’s full article right here.
And stand by for that Ex-Mariner of the Year award.
Brovo