No way around it—losing Andy McKay is a big blow to Mariners

It’s worth asking: did the Mariners have to see him go?

Elite player development is the primary driver for the present era of Mariners Baseball—a winning era of Mariners Baseball. And now the person most responsible for player development is gone.

Successful organizations lose talented people and news broke Wednesday the Mariners lost one of their best.

Assistant General Manager Andy McKay is headed to the Cleveland Guardians, joining their Major League-staff as field coordinator.

A note of appreciation for Mariners Player Development

The reporting around the move—from Ryan Divish and Daniel Kramer—alludes to what’s long been known with McKay, that he wants to get back in the dugout. He lives for it.

As that reporting mentions, McKay was set to join Scott Servais’s Major League coaching staff in 2022 but his successor as head of player development left the organization and McKay was back upstairs before his first season on a Major League coaching staff even began.

While it’s reported McKay himself volunteered to do so, the backslide still had to sting. Even if not, the desire to get back down closer to the field of play and the daily grind clearly never went away. And now the chance to have it be fulfilled comes in another organization.

In my time with the Mariners, I had the opportunity to sit down and talk shop with McKay on at least a handful of occasions (I’m conducting the interview here, for example)—and it was incredible every time.

The man loves the game. And he knows it, too.

I take a lot of care in making sure I never use “literally” when I don’t mean it literally but Andy McKay literally wrote the book on what it means to be a Seattle Mariner.

It was a big part things his first year, what he called the Mariners Player Development Handbook.

I used to have a copy because McKay and I started the same offseason and he, most likely, mistook an all-company email alias for a Baseball Ops-specific group and ended up asking everyone in the building if they wanted a copy of his would-be bible.

And I did. Hell yeah.

It showed up to my desk via inter-office mail in a manila envelope, a thickly-laminated 50 pages or so with a northwest green cover and navy blue plastic spiral binding. Inside, everything it meant to be a Seattle Mariner—from building better habits to winning 1-1 counts.

While it was kind of a ridiculous request on my part, it did better prepare me to craft content that told a story closely aligned with the organization’s baseball strategy and opened up a professional relationship with this person helping write the DNA of this modern era of Seattle baseball.

Not only was McKay a treat to talk about the game and its players with, he seemed to always make time for it as well. Whether it was for one of those videos, a blog post on prospects or any other number of things, he was always game.

McKay is intensely passionate about the game of baseball, his role within it and the people he works with—that shines through in every encounter.

The man knows his shit. And he’s a great guy, too.

When my Mom passed away in the first days of 2020, about a month or so after my departure from the M’s, Andy was one of the first people I heard from at the Mariners. Just that kind of guy.

That’s what bums me out about the Mariners losing him. This guy, for a decade, was exceptional at his supremely important job. The Mariners aren’t where they are now—near the high-point in franchise history—without McKay and the once-endless work he put in.

And they couldn’t find a way to keep him in the building?

I have no inside intel here. It may well be possible McKay just wanted a total change of scenery, a fresh start for a new career path, but if not—boy that’s a bad way to lose a guy as talented as him, and someone who’s done so much for you.

My first thought, upon seeing this news a couple days ago, was back to the firing of Scott Servais and the strategy there.

On what ended up being the eve of Servais’s firing, I listed McKay among the potential interim managers. As mentioned above, it was an open secret that McKay longed to get back in the dugout and that was a factor.

If the Mariners wanted a different voice but still a clearly forward-thinking manager who’d be in lockstep with the front office, on top of having some level of managing experience, McKay made sense to me.

The Mariners opted to install Dan Wilson as the permanent guy and his hiring ends up being sandwiched between now-back-to-back Manager of the Year Stephen Vogt and McKay, respectively, leaving for Cleveland.

If you’re not caught up on McKay’s life in baseball before the Mariners, some kid had a good write-up on Lookout Landing now a decade ago.

In the springs, his Sacramento City College teams won at a .675 clip over McKay’s 14 seasons. In the five summers from 2008 through 2012, his La Crosse Loggers—a wood bat college team in, yes, my old hometown—were the winningest franchise in summer collegiate baseball.

That original LL piece has more great quotes from an article written when he was first hired by the Loggers but I’ll close out this post with the same one I used to closed out that one.

It’s funny that post leads into it with a sentence containing the passage “the following example might not sound that forward-thinking, but in 2008…”

Anyway,

Are we going to steal? Yeah, when I think we can be safe. Are we going to (sacrifice) bunt? I’m not saying we won’t, but when you do that, one of the next two guys has to get a hit; you’ve put yourself in a situation where you have to hit .500 to score. It’s one of the worst strategies in the game of baseball. Are we going to be a pitching and defense team or an offensive team? Hopefully, all three.”

The man knows ball.

The Mariners could’ve used him in the dugout—maybe even in the big chair.

Minimally, I hope (wish?) a similar role to the one he now occupies in Cleveland was on the table in Seattle.

He’d certainly earned it—and the Mariners owed it to him with all he’d done for the organization.