
In any business, there is a cost for doing nothing. For the Seattle Mariners, the offseason lead up to the 2025 Major League Baseball season has been a portrait of paralysis. Yet, there is a price to pay. Let me explain.
I. The Competitive Disadvantages:
Reputational Baggage
The Seattle Mariners franchise is currently saddled with well-known, cumulative, enduring, damage to their reputation that has occurred over the last several years. This damage has been accretive and involves a series of events that have produced the current reality. These include (but are not limited to):
- The enduring and infamous Jerry Dipoto public relations debacle ( “shoot for a 54% win percentage, we did the fans a favor” etc.). Dipoto’s relations with former players has also contributed to a poor player personnel relations image across the league.
- The ballpark has garnered a rep that is not hitter friendly – due to the atmospheric marine layer that inhabits the location for most of the season.
- According to former and current MLB players, the batters eye in center field is not configured properly – making it difficult for batters to see the pitches as well as they do in other venues in MLB.
- The recent decision to select former Mariner catcher Dan Wilson as the permanent (vs. interim) manager of the team reflects ownership’s embrace of nepotism versus the choice to engage in a formal search process to identify the best available qualified professional to manage the team.
- Ownership’s unwillingness to sign extensions for veteran players (re: Teoscar Hernandez, Eugenio Suarez, – Hernandez had an All Star season after departing Seattle and was tantamount in the Dodgers capturing the World Series title in 2024).
- Baseball operations inability to identify and acquire productive position player, veteran talent to supplement the team’s needs. (eg., Winker, LaStella, Garver, Haniger, Wong, Toro, Frazier, Upton, Pollock, Urias, Rojas, Canzone etc.)
- Dropping hot dogs via miniature parachutes on the heads of fans and other cheesy gimmicks to garner fan engagement – while raising a theater of prices year over year.
- Baseball operations inability to consummate long term extensions with key performers on the current roster – Cal Raleigh and Logan Gilbert are prime examples.
- A perception that ownership is cheap and unwilling to invest in success.
- Player travel to/from Seattle is arduous during the season.
II. Absence of Essential Ownership Investment
Yes, timing is everything. In every professional sport, there are “windows” whereby a time sensitive opportunity exists for a team to rise to the next level and legitimately compete for a championship. The Seattle Mariners franchise is currently a perfect example of a team in this position. With a starting pitching rotation currently ranked as #1 in MLB, a centerfielder and catcher characterized as two of the best in the game at their positions, and a solid cadre of role/utility players – this team is distinctly “in the window.” Furthermore, their minor league talent is ranked among the top tier in professional baseball.
However, ownership has their head in the sand, unwilling to invest in veteran free agent talent currently required at third, second and/or first base. At the time of this writing, they have failed to attract any free agent at the aforementioned positions of need during the 2024 offseason. Why?
Although the Seattle Mariners franchise has been reported to be one of the most profitable in MLB, ownership claims to be hampered by a budgetary limitation due to loss of revenue from the former cash cow of their regional sports network. Furthermore, they are hamstrung with the burden of two horrific contracts Jerry Dipoto handed out to another pair of veteran non-performers (aka “The MitchWich” – Mitch Haniger and Mitch Garver) that have saddled the franchise with an estimated $25mm in 2025. Finally, the team had seven arbitration eligible players who earned raises prior to the 2025 season of approximately $15mm. Ownership then declared they had only $15mm to spend in the 2024 offseason.
Why? Where did this number come from? If you are a group of wealthy stakeholders in this team, how can you claim an absence of available investment capital? If you are “in the window,” why would you withhold the essential investment required to deliver the success this franchise is poised to capture?
Perhaps:
Your primary concern is short term return on investment. Thus, franchise performance on the field of play has become truly secondary.
- You are positioning the franchise for sale. Thus, you need not make any further capital investment as you want to preserve those choices for new ownership to make.
- You are hoping that your minor league talent is on the precipice of making the MLB team. With the prospect of reducing your player personnel costs (via elevation of cost controlled minor league talent to the major league club) why make any investment now in the holes you have in your line-up with more costly veteran talent?
- With all the veteran talent you have acquired during the tenure of your ownership of this franchise, the vast majority of whom did not make a significant, enduring, positive contribution – perhaps you have become risk-reward averse. Maybe you’ve lost faith in the narratives your baseball operations execs have spewed in the past to convince you to support their veteran talent acquisition recommendations.
- Perhaps your strategy has changed. You are now convinced that free agency talent acquisition is too risky and costly. Your strategy for 2025 is to fill the holes in your line-up before the trade deadline in 2025 – depending upon the performance of your current line-up, the performance of minor league talent promoted to the MLB club, and injuries.
Maybe your ownership objective has become myopically focused on just running a business without the noise from external audiences – like fans – MLB – players – pundits – podcasters – and the vast array of communities that your franchise is meaningful to.
III. The Price of Paralysis for Mariners Ownership
If there is one thing the Los Angeles Dodgers understand is that you must pay-to-play in today’s realm of professional sports. Although I have deep seated concerns about monster media market teams using their resources to buy wins, there is a litany of examples that demonstrate this strategy does not work effectively over time. Baseball is hard. Talent acquisition and development is a crap shoot in any sport. We get that.
In an age of emerging AI, technology to determine balls and strikes, and the statistics that now inhabit and guide the major league baseball reality – perhaps the peril of your paralysis – and the price that you are incurring – are the things that are fundamental to professional sports – and are terribly difficult to measure. One dimension of the price of paralysis you may be overlooking is the meaning you are manufacturing in the minds of those for whom your enterprise is meaningful.
A quote from former Harvard and London School of Economics Professor Charles Handy is pertinent here:
“The first step is to measure whatever can be easily counted. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can’t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that which can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that which can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.”[i]
Baseball – Seattle Mariners baseball – is incredibly meaningful for a mass of mankind that depends upon your enterprise. It’s not what you see when you look out a window that makes it magical. It’s the pleasure derived from the awareness of the blessing of having a window to look out of. It’s easy to count the cars, people and trees. Yet, it’s the awareness of the light, the appreciation of the colors, the sound of the wind in the trees, and the wonders of the weather that uplifts our souls. Windows are portals through which we derive meaning in life. They allow us to experience that which cannot be easily measured. It’s vitally important.
Yes, windows really do exist in sports – in baseball – for this Seattle Mariners franchise. Ownership’s blindness to this reality can only cause incalculable and enduring damage to those things that are precious to us – as fans – that are not easily measured.
The price of ownership’s persistent paralysis and inability to appreciate this truth is immense. Meaning is both essential and fragile. Take an intentional glance out a window today and count the dimensions of this experience that are not apparent – that which cannot be easily measured.
The Seattle Mariners – like every professional sports franchise – are manufacturers of meaning. Decisions made by ownership convey powerful messages that form meaning for the masses for whom the franchise is meaningful. However, ownership decisions can erode meaning (moves toward meaningless), or embolden meaning (additives to more meaningful).
Currently, the Seattle Mariners ownership is mired in the first step of Professor Handy’s paradigm: a myopic focus on whatever can be easily counted. Again, as Handy states, “this is OK as far as it goes.” However, to be imprisoned within the confines of counting the obvious leaves one vulnerable to the less obvious, yet, perilous consequences. It leads one to become a victim of the slippery slope of deception and the destruction of meaning. As Handy states: “The second step is to disregard that which can’t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that which can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that which can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.”
The Seattle Mariners ownership group has the opportunity to take advantage of this window to create magical meaning for the many. As stewards of the Seattle Mariners franchise – this is ownership’s privilege and opportunity to make the most from this window.
The price of paralysis is to embrace a path of eroding the manufacture of the meaningful for this franchise. This blindness is avoidable.
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Note:
[i] Handy, Charles The Age of Paradox, Harvard Business School Press © 1994 p. 221