The Mariners Fire Their President Only After He Violates the C-Suite Bro Code
Don't tsk tsk Kevin Mather's departure from Seattle unless you're willing to admit that he's EVERYWHERE
It's taken almost a year of a pandemic, a half-million deaths, and the amount of mental fallout that will take this lifetime, along with the next three, to sort out, but I finally got it.
Sometime shortly after watching Ted Cruz "joking" about going to Cancun while children literally froze to death on the streets of Texas (with zero repercussions) on CPAC's Nazi stage and the GOP voting as one, giant, concentrated block of fuck you—trying their best to take the economy so they can blame the shrug Dems in a run-up to a final putsch in '22 it dawned on me. It's not just incompetence (though it is that), and it's not just meanness (though it is that). It's the fact that these people hate other people.
You and I are the problem
Why? Because people, actual people—you, me, everybody—get in the way. That's it. And there's a big enough supply of us right now; it doesn't matter for them. We're expendable, disposable. Warehouse worker dies; another warehouse worker is waiting to take their spot. Uber driver quits the app? There'll be three more in their place.
In a time of diminishing resources, every living, breathing, healthy, sentient human being is an obstruction, an obstacle between you and them enjoying another round of lobster ceviche on limestone lettuce at Nobu Malibu, checking in at the club oceanfront room at the Ritz Carlton, Cancun, or hunkering down in this Montecito hideaway just two blocks from Harry and Meghan.
In my last job, I got fired after an acquisition by a private equity firm. The two bro-boss failsons ahead of me were my age, and we all had similar middling backgrounds and plain, dumb ideas. They were long on hashtagging on their barely followed social media accounts with the right-side-of-history sounding tee'd up messaging, from Time's Up, to #metoo, to Back Lives Matter—but they didn't believe in it, not for a hot second, it was all performative, all their actions were.
Everything was done in service to continued oppression, and oppression was the key to work. Because they'd learned the most important lesson white guys like me all get around when we're fifteen or sixteen, we're held to a different standard, not a better one, not by a long-shot. Just different. Keep your friends close, pretend you're working, doing good, and watch your back, and you'll do fine.
The difference was between them and me is they followed the rules. I just floated along, using my privilege to spend a decade-plus living in the mountains and skiing when I should've been, I dunno, accurately quoting Vince Vaughn movies and inaccurately attributing everything else to The Art of War.
As a result, they made it. The c-suite baby. They became very skilled at low-key harassment and projection as a means to remain there. Someone speaks out? "They weren't a culture fit." Someone contradicts them? "They decided to explore new opportunities." Someone questions their recycled ideas? "We don't think they were deploying best-practices." And on and on.
It's my fault. I didn't learn the code.
Follow the Bro Code and You Don’t Have to Work a Day in Your Life
…After a while, as you see purges of the people who Actually Know What They're Doing in favor of these Elon Musk fanboys, Hedge Fund bro wanna-bes, SoHo House tourists, Bitcoin bit players at the top. This happens enough and you realize you’re living in a doomed enterprise working on a ghost ship.
It's not going to last long with warmed-over ideas and nobody really watching the controls as much as they're watching their backs. When it’s more about creating your own personal little fiefdom, and digging a moat of middle-management sycophants than a living product—it's gotta end soon. It’s not sustainable, right? Right?
Wrong.
Because creating something good, something that lasts isn't the point. Suicide vest strategy, getting paid now, finding a safe spot—regardless of how temporary—is EXACTLY the point of late capitalism.
Because it's happening in our government, the ultra-rich and corporations benefit, and the rest of us starve and die. It's happening in corporate life; the products we're given are shit on a stick, but in some respects (that shot we're all waiting for, for starters), necessary for survival.
…And it's happening even in the things that distract us from all this mess, including baseball.
Mather Plays Himself…At a Rotary(!) Meeting
Last week Kevin Mather, who was president of baseball operations and CEO for the Seattle Mariners, went to a Rotary meeting—hahahhaha, one of the last (and least monitored; how are Rotary meetings a thing in a pandemic? Don't answer, I know the answer) safe spaces for this kind of low-key evil disguised as ...charity(?) from the gentry class—and shot his mouth off about how baseball really works and got himself fired for it—because he basically said the quiet part out loud and that pissed off both MLB and the players' union.
Professional baseball is basically run by domestic and foreign-born players being treated like sharecroppers with a heaping helping of racism to further suppress the latter.
MLB’s Two Dirty (Not-So) Secrets, Career Suppression and Systemic Racism
The basic goal of ownership is to sign a player on the cheap, pay them pretty much minimum wage in the minors—the 2021 minimums for minor league contracts, from $290 weekly to $400 at rookie and short-season levels, from $290 to $500 at Class A, $350 to $600 at Double-A $502 to $700 at Triple-A—so you can be almost all the way up in the Majors and still have to take a second or third job.
When it comes time to bring these guys up, MLB clubs have another trick not to pay them MLB rules state players become eligible for free agency after six full years of major league play. Those years are measured in "service time," and one year is equal to 172 days out of the approximately 183 days on the sport's single-season calendar.
With the loophole being the difference between total days on the MLB calendar and a full year of service time being 10 and 15 days, teams that hold back a player for the first two weeks of the season gain another year of control over the player, ostensibly not having to pay them fair market value for another year.
This is why Walker Buehler, one of the best pitchers in baseball, is the lowest-paid pitcher on the Dodgers, even AFTER signing a new contract this offseason, taking a fraction of his open market value in exchange to be a little more comfortable in his shackles till he's there.
The real rub is six years in the majors is a lifetime. Most prospects, even the hottest, flame out before they get to that golden season. In fact, the average MLB career is 5.6 years; it's all over by the time it's time to sign for the real money.
And this system only gets worse for minorities because the tactics front-office blazer-and-lanyard bros like Mather have in their well-worn tool belt. In his remarks to the Rotary Club, he talked about former Mariners pitcher Hisashi Iwakuma, his need for an interpreter, and his English skills.
"For instance, we just rehired Iwakuma [as a special instructor]; he was a pitcher with us for a number of years. A wonderful human being; his English was terrible," Mather said to laughter. "He wanted to get back into the game; he came to us. We quite frankly want him as our Asian scout/interpreter; what's going on with the Japanese league. He's coming to spring training.
"And I'm going to say; I'm tired of paying his interpreter. When he was a player, we'd pay Iwakuma' X,' but we'd also have to pay $75,000 a year to have an interpreter with him. His English suddenly got better. His English got better when we told him that." More laugher.
Talking about minor league outfielder Julio Rodriguez, who is ESPN's No. 9 overall prospects in MLB, Mather said: "Julio Rodriguez has got a personality bigger than all of you combined. He is loud. His English is not tremendous."
During his let-it-go moment, Mather also mentioned the team's payroll and holding back top prospects to keep them under club control, namely Jarred Kelenic and Logan Gilbert, two prospects major league-ready who will start the season making $15k/year in Double-A.
So yes, on the racism. Yes, on gaming the system to suppress young players. Yes, on the lack of empathy/understanding and treating players as chattel. It's corporate life 101. Baseball didn't invent it; they just did what all white patriarchal enterprises do; they copy it and add a touch of their own incompetence and hubris to customize it.
The Mariners were forced to fire Mather for his lapse in judgment and came out with the performative released statement: "His comments were inappropriate and did not represent our organization's feelings about our players, staff, and fans. There is no excuse for what was said, and I won't try to make one. I offer my sincere apology on behalf of the club and my partners to our players and fans. We must be, and do, better. We have a lot of work to do to make amends, and that work is already underway."
Mather Just one of MANY
...Fine. Great. But there are literally dozens of other Mathers out there clogging the front offices of the league. And they're not going away anytime soon. Why? Because, like the other bros, they're NEVER judged by THEIR performance. It doesn't matter. As long as the TV revenue keeps coming and the turnstiles keep turning, and the owners, who claim hardship but have made $8 billion in profit since 2010, keep seeing valuations rise, keeping cogs in place far exceeds a mandate to win.
Mather had been with the team since 1996. He was promoted to his current role in November 2017. In that time he has faced allegations of harassment by two former female employees—his former executive assistants and the assistant to then-executive vice president Bob Aylward. The team said it had "made amends" with those employees. The claims dated back to the late 2000s. A settlement with a third woman, who said she felt pressured to kiss then-team president Chuck Armstrong also happened in that timespan—something Mather was at the very least well aware of.
But did anything happen to Mather then? No. And it never would have either had he not had a few noontime Jack and Cokes and slew the Golden Goose at fucking Rotary.
The best part is, and I guess the bottom line is, these guys don't have to win to keep their jobs.
At the behest of their new owners, the bros in charge of me helped tank the company creatively and financially. And it doesn't matter. As long as it just ...exists, they're okay.
Same with Mather. During his ENTIRE quarter-century span with the Mariners, Seattle made it to the playoffs three times.
THREE TIMES!!!!!!! THREE-FOR-FUCKING 25. They never advanced past the ALCS, losing twice to the Yankees (in 2000-'01.)
Yeah, you read that right, it's been two decades since the Mariners have even BEEN TO THE PLAYOFFS, and the head of the Mariners’ listing ship Mather, a racist, a known harasser, a misogynist, an all-around just shitty person who delivers the same results you did—not working with the club—for decades(!), kept his job, season after season, year after year.
Why? Not because he gave a fuck about the team, the players, or the fans. He gave a fuck about him. That's all this is. It's not that it's just evil (it is), it's not that it's just premeditated (it is), and it's not that they're just incompetent (they are). It's just that caring has never been in the job description.
So they don't.