We as a society do not do a good enough job holding powerful figures accountable. We are quite bad at it. As a result, doing so is often limited to simply asking them to explain themselves, to literally answer for their actions.
Quite unfortunately, this often leads to them speaking.
Do I think Mariners owner John Stanton should have more media availability? Oh absolutely. Will it be more helpful? Ehhhh.
Either way, it’s Opening Day Eve and I understand this isn’t quite the vibe but if I’m going to have one of this publication’s core tenets be “The most powerful people in this organization—the owners, the stewards of our beloved ball club and community institution—are holding the team back,” I gotta hit on this.
Plus, this may be only one of a handful of media hits Stanton does this year. I’d guess he’s on the radio once or twice in the coming days, maybe a Times interview as well, just because that’s how these things tend to work.
But after that, who knows.
So, this interview. For those who don’t know, it’s with KING 5’s Paul Silvi. You can watch the whole thing yourself if you want.
In these types of appearances from generally bemoaned über-powerful figures, you get a lot of statements that will inevitably make you wince. Or worse.
And that’s usually because of one of two things. Or, at least, there are two reasons to say some of the more iffy things they say:
They genuinely believe the things they are saying, which is concerning because the things they are saying are misinformed, wrong, out-of-touch, etc.
They do not believe the things they are saying and are lying through their teeth or massaging the truth because
It doesn’t matter if you know they’re misrepresenting the situation because this is the end of the consequences or
They think you are very dumb or are, minimally, treating you as such
For purposes of this post, just because it’ll make it less snotty and that’s not what we want with baseball tomorrow, we’re going to assume it’s the former. Or lean that way as often as possible.
I do not want this to take forever because I have more words to write and get your way before first pitch from Luís tomorrow so we’re gonna snag some quick quotes, riff and repeat.
All block quotes are from Stanton.
“Our goal was to make the playoffs last year and we missed the playoffs. We missed it by a little bit, but in a lot of ways, it doesn't matter if you miss it by a little or a lot. We missed the playoffs. And along with Jerry and Justin and our whole team, I was very disappointed.”
This is a tone-setter. And clearly a talking point. I went through all the quotes first and set some aside to write on so I know what’s coming. You may also already have watched the interview or read quotes.
You know what’s not coming? A commitment to bringing a World Series championship to Seattle.
They made the playoffs in 2022. They won the Wild Card series in unforgettable fashion. The went toe-to-toe with the eventual World Champions and, if a few things break different, they beat them.
The season ended with zero runs in 18 innings in the first home playoff game in more than two decades.
The goal after that cannot be “make the playoffs.”
It cannot.
“I guess I don't view the criticism of me as being particularly tough, right?”
This response, to a question about offseason criticism centered on ownership, floored me.
Have you…just…er…what?
This isn’t the appropriate spot to pile on, since I’ve been awfully clear in other posts, but I’ll try to distill most of this fan base’s sentiment into a short summary.
John Stanton will probably end up living some 90 years or so on this planet, where he’s made untold sums of money by being immensely successful in the world of business. If the way Stanton’s run the Seattle Mariners continues to be the way he runs the Seattle Mariners, and they don’t win a title before his time on this Earthly plane comes to a close, he will be remembered in Seattle—as long as he’s remembered at all—for being the individual most responsible for the organization’s continued misfortune.
Millions of people will remember his entire existence this way.
By and large, the net approval rating on every other facet of the organization is a positive. With ownership, it’s in the gutter.
Like, Stanton got booed during a speech to the whole ballpark. And he will again if he’s publicly introduced tomorrow.
We cannot be more clear.
Any success the team sees is despite of you.
“…our goal is to be a competitive team, to have a team that that's in a good position to be in the playoffs. If you make it into the playoffs, you got a good chance of winning the World Series.”
The context here is, if the Mariners do win a World Series, it will happen incidentally—proxy to the first goal, which is being competitive all year long and making the playoffs in any way possible.
Hell, forget World Series—we can’t even talk about the division? Wanting to win the American League West is too grandiose?
Blegh.
And honestly, the best way to ensure you make the playoffs is to have that be close to your floor. If you build a roster meant to win a title and it performs a little worse than expectations, they’re still in the playoffs.
If you build a team that’s just good enough to get in, and they slightly underperform, we have a very familiar Seattle Mariners team.
“…we didn't trim trim the payroll right now the payroll is slightly above what it was last year. That's what we expect the payroll to be.”
This was part of a broader answer that also included the words “I think Robbie Ray walks on water” and explained that they reallocated payroll from players who weren’t going to contribute in 2024 (Ray, Evan White) to guys who were (Mitch, Garver, Jorge Polanco, etc.).
Here’s the deal, though—evaluating payroll is all about context. “Oh it’s the same, oh it wen’t up, oh it only went down a little, we’ll add in the season…” whatever.
On Opening Day, what level of resources are the Mariners allocating to their roster compared to the teams they’re competing with?
In the only way that matters—relative to their peers—Mariners payroll is down.
Mariners payroll is down at a time when they’re better positioned than they have been at any point since Pat Gillick was at the helm.
It’s unacceptable.
If the team is ever going to run a top ten payroll—in a market loaded with wealth—then now would be the time. If the 2024 Mariners were running a top 10 payroll, they’d have approximately $80 million more to spend.
In this offseason, that’s multiple impact players who’d take this darkhorse contender into a certifiable juggernaut.
Again, unacceptable. A below average payroll right here, right now is reprehensible.
That brings us to the TV deal.
“Well, I would say that, that the Mariners have been as proactive as is possible, given the circumstances. The things we know—there's 100 percent certainty that somebody today is going to disconnect their cable TV service, disconnect their satellite service, because that was true for each day of the last 10 years. The number of customers on ROOT SPORTS, when we bought control in 2014, was 3.3 million. The number of customers on ROOT SPORTS today is about 1.2 million.”
The Mariners have not been as proactive as possible in adapting to the changing TV landscape. That’s obvious.
They bought a cable station on linear television in 2013. The way the world of television has changed was not unforeseeable. It was well underway when they made that purchase, opting for owning a station instead of selling their rights. The risk was there, they took it without seizing upon benefits of owning their station—and now they’re paying the price.
I have a whole post that hits on this, so I don’t want to grouse on it too much but the Seattle Mariners were the first baseball team to have a website and now they’re complaining about TV streaming killing them. Come on.
You never worked out deals with Hulu and YouTube TV. You don’t have an over-the-top solution when others do.
Making sure the maximum number of people were watching games was never as important as making sure those who were paid the maximum price.
I said this in the post linked to above, but these are supposed titans of business. If you’re not making enough money, figure out how to change that.
This is supposed to be your contribution to society.
“I'm in it to win over a long period of time…I don't want to push all in and have a chance to win the World Series, but have the cost of that chance be a team that's going to be lousy for the next three or four years. And we see that in baseball all the time. Teams that have pushed in and you look at what a great team that the Kansas City Royals had that went to the World Series a few years ago, and hasn't had a winning year since then.” […]
“I talked to Cal one on one right after the comments he made to the press. I told him I understand how he feels. And I feel the same way. I want this team to win… I believe that the way that we build the team is to have more young players that will stay with us for a long period of time. And I think while it's easy to say, look across the dugout, and hire a $300 or $400 million free agent, with the knowledge that you're gonna get a couple of good years, and then you will have mortgaged your future for a player that may be in his late 30s or early 40s and not be able to perform at the same level. I want to have players that are going to be in their prime and playing for the Seattle Mariners and helping us achieve that goal of being a playoff team year after year.”
These are a couple of those quotes that really makes me think of those two bullets I hit on in the intro.
Stanton either:
Has no idea how this offseason played out and never once thought of opportunistically seizing upon a buyers’ market flush with short-term deals or
Is lying and blowing smoke because he’s cheap and thinks you’re dumb
Cody Bellinger, Blake Snell, Matt Chapman and Jordan Montgomery all signed short-term deals.
Oh and you want to talk about going after players in their prime? The Mariners avoided seriously pursuing Juan Soto not because they don’t have the prospects to trade—they do. They surely didn’t want to pay the $33 million salary owed to Soto or the free agent starter they likely would’ve had to sign.
Was Marcus Semien not in his prime as he posted 17 fWAR over the last three years? Please.
All the key offensive pieces they’ve added this offseason—Haniger, Polanco and Garver—are over the age of 30.
Oh and you want to talk about hurting yourself in the future?
The Mariners traded third baseman Austin Shenton in 2021 as a result of not spending on second base and, oh hey, he just made the Rays’ Opening Day roster at the Mariners’ weakest position.
You will never win with exclusively homegrown talent. And if you focus only on adding outside talent via trade, you have to move prospects.
The Mariners know as well as anyone that can cost you.
Also—the Royals, John? Come on.
They won back-to-back pennants and a title after trading Wil Myers for James Shields. They didn’t sign some massive free agent. They don’t run high payrolls.
Surely you know this.
And you know what’s a great way to “mortgage your future”? Not allocate enough resources to run a competitive baseball team so the margin for error is incredibly small and, when players get even slightly expensive compared to their output, it kills you.
The Mariners had to trade multiple useful players this offseason just to shed their salary. I don’t want to hear about how spending more money is actually bad for your team from someone worth a billion dollars, steering the only club to never play in a World Series.
“We're trying to have a group of guys—our equivalent of Junior, Edgar, Jay, Dan, Randy, later Ichiro. Our equivalent of that is to have a Julio, to have Cal, have JP, to have the best pitching staff in baseball, you know, led by Castillo, Logan, Kirby and now with with Woo and Miller.”
This is one of those quotes where, evaluating how it’s perceived, is definitely more of the “He genuinely believes this and doesn’t know what it sounds like.”
The Mariners have had talented cores of players before. They’ve had some of the greatest players of all time share rosters together. And they’ve still never been to a World Series.
We know. We know what you’re trying to do. We get what you’re trying to say.
But every time you list off past players like this and compare it to the current crop, we immediately think “Yeah, we know—we’re just worried you’re not gonna add enough to the core and blow it again.”
Here’s Stanton’s closing statement.
“We have got a great young team that is incredibly excited about winning baseball here in Seattle. And we've got a team that is competitive on the field against the Red Sox on March 28 all the way to the end of the season. And I believe we'll be in the playoffs this year.”
Damn, dude.
You’re telling me this team probably won’t flame out and will instead play meaningful games all the way through the end of the season? Maybe make the playoffs?
That was the goal in literally 2014.
We, us Mariners fans, we’re past that—and it’s damning the most powerful person in the Mariners organization is not.
They say that, when someone tells you who they are, you should believe them.
The owner of the Mariners says the goal is to just play competitive baseball through the end of the season and hopefully get into the dance.
It’s unacceptable.
And if ownership doesn’t agree, they need to sell the team to someone who does.
Go M’s.
Hi Colin,
Thanks for confirming you barfed at the same words I heard from Stanton. Especially his "...don't view criticism [of Stanton's profit-1st cheapness]...as particularly tough..." is Stanton saying "long as I'm making money, I don't care what fans think".
There's a reason why Griffey, A-Rod, Johnson, Ichiro left. It's the same reason for Dipoto to say that big name free agents have to want to come to Seattle in order for him to be able to negotiate. MLB players have known for years M's are a balance sheet first, not in it to win it, club. That fact has now dawned on M's fans. Stanton probably doesn't have the mad money to throw around like Mets, Rangers, Yankees, etc. On the other hand, disastrous Bavasi, Zurendik regimes might give me pause if I were Stanton. For every Rangers spend triumph, a Mets spend disaster. But it is disappointing to see that Comcast rules Stanton's balance sheet. Stanton doesn't have the will and/or money to run w/the big dogs, just like Howard Schultz w/Sonics - we know how that turned out.
Sigh, indeed.
I agree completely. Jerry and Justin did an amazing job this off season. Imagine what they could have done with, say, the $162 million 40 man budget the team had at season end 2018.
All that said, I renewed my Flex season tix the day before Stanton's horrific interview. I'll be there with my son right behind the Ms dugout on April 17th. If we get there early enough, we might even snag a Jr. bobblehead.
GoMs.