On the end of the Scott Servais Era

And the beginning of whatever this is now.

Credit: Sporting News

La Crosse, Wisconsin is a midsized city on the shore of the Mississippi River. At the gift shop downtown—as good a downtown as you could possibly find for college bars with sticky floors and cheap wells—there are postcards and sweatshirts and magnets with “Wisconsin’s West Coast” on them.

I have one on the-top left corner of my refrigerator. A block north of that gift shop is the building where my dad had a small law office. We said goodbye to my Mom on the bluff that overlooks the city and surrounding river valley.

The first house I ever knew was on Barnabee Road, perched above State Road—or State Trunk Highway 33, which meanders across the middle of Wisconsin from what was once the Old Style Brewery next to the Mississippi all the way to the other side of the state. Baraboo, specifically, home of the Circus World Museum. We took a field trip there in sixth grade. I have to imagine the bus took Highway 33.

But well before that, only nine miles outside and about 600 feet of elevation above La Crosse, you’ll get to a small unincorporated community called St. Joseph’s Ridge. Now it has a population of 503 people, but a century ago it was only a few families.

My great grandparents were William and Matilda Schams, head of one of those families. My grandmother Joan, one of six kids, was born on a dairy farm there. I don’t know the exact location, but there’s still a street named Schams Avenue so it was probably close to that.

Only a couple turns and a couple blocks away, you’ll find Servais Collern Road.

Yeah, that Servais family.

I’ve done some research for this post but can’t definitively say it was specifically the skipper’s so-and-so who lived there, but descendants of mine and descendants of Scott were neighbors—probably friends and coworkers and family, too—a hundred years ago.

Crazy as it is, I don’t think we ever talked about it. We did chat about La Crosse, I think about how his parents then lived there, and my grandparents did, too. While I grew up there, Scott was raised over in Coon Valley, 17 miles outside La Crosse a different way.

When I first started with the Mariners, his first season mine as well, I couldn’t wait to ask him about it.

My entire time at the M’s, I had this in my desk, from the FanFest after I got the job and a week or so before my first day.

Man, my Mom would drop me off at Mt. La Crosse as a kid, even on a weeknight. They made a lot of snow and had lights and I’d lap those handful of quarter-mile runs until my Mom came back and they’d page me on the loudspeaker, just before they closed at 9pm.

Working around or with Scott was always good.

I’m not going to get into many specifics but a lasting memory is from a Yusei Kikuchi live bullpen at spring training. It was my fourth and last year, and each year I’d get a little more confident (risky, aggressive, wreckless?) with the boundary-pushing—so there I was, crouched behind the L-screen with a handheld DJI Osmo sticking out the side.

Trying to get the shot, or maybe better perspective for just me on that transfixing YK delivery, my head was perhaps a smidge above the foam frame. And a line drive back the other way possibly, possibly, passed through my general vicinity.

“Colinnn get behind the screen!”

In just the quintessential dad voice, too.

Either after the session or after that pitch, Justin Hollander put his arm around me and delivered a message from the skipper.

It was just that he was sorry for calling me out in front of folks, that we have to be careful. Or something.

Random, but funny to me. Very Scott.

I’ve obviously taken some time to get something up here after the move to replace Servais with Dan Wilson. I wrote on the strong probability of it happening the evening before it did, but it’s another thing to see it take place. And then another for his replacement to be Wilson.

I can’t take any joy in a good guy losing his job, even if this is just what tends to happen when a baseball team ends up in the spot the Mariners are in.

It is uniquely weird and numbing to have it happen to a guy from my corner on the world. Like how Butte, America and Montana kids had Rob Johnson, young sports fan in La Crosse and the area had Scott Servais—playing for the Cubs on WGN.

And then to end up working with him? How strange. That’s without getting to La Crosse Loggers legend Andy McKay.

The Dipoto/Servais era has always been big on culture. Our People, Our Process. Now, a dude who had a big role in crafting that culture—remember the Mariners Olympics? The opening spring training speeches? The Swelmet?—is out the door. Another guy who’s been around it slides in.

I don’t know. Again, I do know how these things go.

But Scott won more games through his first nine seasons than even Sweet Lou did.

He was dancing on home plate with a cigar in his mouth, a backwards hat and ski goggles not that long ago. It hasn’t even been two years since then. It feels like longer, though, which goes to show how much everything has dissolved since.

I think a big reason why some sect of Mariners fans has always sided with Scott is because it always felt a bit like he was going through all this with us—an ownership group unfit and unprepared for the moment, and the roster decisions that followed as a result.

So now what? How much changes?

The back-to-back series wins have been nice, but the timing of the move I’m sure was not unintentional. Nice to hit the ground on a bit of a downhill.

Maybe Dan Wilson is one of the 30 best people on the planet for this job, and I don’t have anything against him—but I’d already talked myself into a last dance or two with a Hall of Fame manager like Dusty Baker or Terry Francona.

And Dan isn’t interim, huh? Does that mean Jerry is for-sure here in 2025? Or, if he gets fired, does the new GM/POBO have to fire Wilson? Would he or she even be allowed to fire Wilson?

It all feels like another situation where the organization doesn’t have a clear plan but it does have something and, for now, is going to see what happens and hope for the best. Everyone says it, that it starts at the top, but it really does.

That’s just how companies and operations work, the folks (or individual) at the very top set the tone and the course and the level of commitment to each.

Right now, it’s another signal—perhaps the strongest yet—that this isn’t going to be a world-class operation, and we need to accept that.

On the heels of these series wins, the season alive, if only barely, we’re already talking about the team potentially trading away a beloved starter and the affable star we just picked up at the deadline?

What other organization has their fans feeling and thinking stuff like this? It’s honestly creative in its torturousness.

For now though, it’s still baseball season. There’s still a prayer they rip off an eight-gamer, that the Astros lose more than they win the rest of the way. It’s not great, but it’s better than the doldrums of another dark offseason—especially from where I’m sitting, outside at the Locks on a pristine Seattle day.

Here’s to hoping the Mariners can give us another long summer, pushed well past Labor Day. It only happens game-by-game, one series at a time. And if it doesn’t happen, it operates all the same.

There’s baseball on in a couple of hours. That beats the alternative. Famous last words, perhaps.

Go M’s.