Just a thought, but maybe a thin-skinned GM is the real problem for the Mariners

I’m not sure there’s a particularly good way to be fired.

However, some ways are absolutely worse than others and when you’ve been with a company for nine years as Scott Servais had, he absolutely should have been told by Mariners general manager Jerry Dipoto that he was being let go.

Instead, at 10:37 a.m. on Friday morning, Servais saw a post from Ken Rosenthal on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Rosenthal is the baseball insider at The Athletic, and on Friday he was the first to report Servais was expected to be fired.

While I am not going to lay down in front of a bus to protest the dismissal of Servais, I absolutely believe that Dipoto needs to follow him out that door after the season.

I’m not basing that opinion on how Servais found out about his dismissal. However, the way Servais found out is indicative of what I believe to be Dipoto’s fatal flaw as the Mariners GM: Dipoto has a bit of a people problem. Namely, he doesn’t treat them all that well, at least not the ones who work for him or around him.

After nine years I think that has created a problem epitomized by the fact that the manager he hand-picked– someone he’d been close with – found out he’d been fired on the Internet. It was the kind of unnecessarily awkward and frankly insulting approach that this franchise’s front office has increasingly taken with Dipoto at the helm.

He has angered the fans, saying after last season they should be thankful for the franchise’s measured, long-term approach to improvement. He has alienated players, who feel he treats them like widgets as opposed to people. One player I know found it hard to believe Dipoto had ever been a player himself given the way he acts towards the guys on his roster.

I’m tempted to throw in a 54-percent joke in right now, but I’m going to hold off because I don’t think that one press conference – as off-putting as it was – is sufficient reason to get rid of a general manager who’s rebuilt this franchise’s farm system the way Dipoto has. The reason I think they need to get rid of the general manager who’s rebuilt this farm system is because I think Dipoto has become toxic.

Two examples stand out to me: The first happened relatively early in Dipoto’s tenure with the Mariners after the organization gathered some anonymous feedback from employees to look for ways to improve management. I don’t know the specifics of whether this was a human-resources initiative or something confined to baseball operations. My understanding is it wasn’t even explicitly a performance review for Dipoto, but rather an attempt to help managers and executives improve.

Dipoto’s initial reaction was to ask who’d made the criticisms. Kevin Mather, who was then president of the team, had to tell Dipoto that the point of the exercise was to try and learn from the feedback rather than push back against it.

It seems this is a lesson Dipoto has never learned.

The second example is more recent: In 2021, Dipoto made a trade-deadline deal sending reliever Kendall Graveman to the Houston Astros for a switch-hitting infielder named Abraham Toro.

Now this was a doozy. First of all, the Mariners were in the midst of the series against the Astros when it happened. In fact, they had come back from a 7-0 deficit to beat Houston 11-8 the night before. Seattle – after spending two years underwater – was just one game back of Oakland in the wild-card standings, six games back of the division-leading Astros.

Graveman was the team’s best reliever, and trading him was an unequivocal gut punch to Seattle’s clubhouse. The day of the deal, a number of veterans vented to Ryan Divish of The Seattle Times, who wrote “ ‘betrayed’ was a word used often.”

Dipoto did not talk to the Mariners players that day, either before or after the deal. A veteran whom Divish granted anonymity said of Dipoto, “He hasn’t come down here. He sits up in his suite, playing fantasy baseball and rips apart our team without telling us anything.”

The Mariners finished that season two games short of a playoff berth, and while Toro hit well in the two months after the Mariners acquired him, he struggled the following year and was let go.

In the months after the Graveman deal, Dipoto would downplay the criticism as being very isolated. Privately, Dipoto attributed the criticism to Kyle Seager, one of several ways in which the Mariners GM alienated the long-time third baseman.

I interviewed Dipoto regularly as a host at KIRO 710 AM. I found him to be extremely smart and very engaging. He is also thin-skinned and holds onto slights both real and perceived. He has lashed out at people I know in private conversations or emphatically ignored them because they’d asked a question he deemed overly negative or unfair.

He still views dissent as something to be squashed. When you leave a person like that in charge of a team for nine years, you wind up with a situation where anyone who pushed back has been pushed out and those who are left know better than to speak up.

I’ve worked for someone like this: a guy who is not only certain he’s always right but eternally on the lookout for signs that you don’t agree. These kinds of people are defensive and resentful and eventually they alienate the people they’re relying on to perform for them.

That’s exactly where I think the Mariners are right now.

I recognize the success that Dipoto has had in player development. He has turned this farm system, which was one of the league’s worst when he took over, into one of the better setups. The franchise’s starting rotation is extraordinary, and he has routinely assembled an effective bullpen without having to spend top dollar to do so.

If everything else was OK, I’d be inclined to say Dipoto should get a little more time to see if he can improve the offense or at least put together a lineup that doesn’t strike out a billion times.

Except everything else isn’t OK. The bottom has absolutely fallen out of this season, and watching how that has played out has made it clear that it’s more than just the lineup that needs to be fixed.

There’s a problem with the way this team treats its people and I believe that starts at the top of baseball operations.

Danny O’Neil was born in Oregon, the son of a logger but had the good sense to attend college in Washington. He’s covered Seattle sports for 20 years, writing for two newspapers, one glossy magazine and hosting a daily radio show for eight years on KIRO 710 AM. You can subscribe to his free newsletter and find his other work at dannyoneil.com.