Remarks may haunt Mariner prez after speech goes public
Mariners president Kevin Mather gave the Bellevue Breakfast Rotary Club an unbelievably transparent look at how the team is run in a Feb. 5 address, and the Rotary Club gave that look to the world by uploading the video onto Facebook.
In the address, Mather criticizes foreign-born players for not mastering the English language, seems to admit to manipulation of player service time and rips the players union for insisting on an on-time start to the season, among other things.
About former Mariners pitcher Hisashi Iwakuma, who was born in Japan:
“It frustrates me...For instance, we just re-hired Iwakuma, he was a pitcher with us for a number of years. Wonderful human being, his English was terrible. 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.”
Iwakuma pitched for the team from 2012-17 and is supposed to return as a coach this year.
About Julio Rodriguez, a consensus top-five prospect who was born in the Dominican Republic:
“Julio Rodriguez has got a personality bigger than all of you combined. He is loud, his English is not tremendous.”
On manipulating the service time of players like Jarred Kelenic, for whom the Mariners fleeced the Mets in the infamous Edwin Diaz/Robinson Cano deal:
“We weren’t going to put them on the 40-man roster, we weren’t going to start the service time clock. There were all kinds of reasons that, if we had an injury problem or COVID outbreak, you might’ve seen my big tummy out there in left field.”
“On the mound in April, you won’t see him on April 1st’ but by mid April you’ll see a young man named Logan Gilbert.”
And he said the plan was do to the same with Kelenic in 2021: “Probably AAA Tacoma for a month, and then he will likely be in left field at T-Mobile Park for the next six or seven years, and then he’ll be a free agent.”
He also took shots at the players union for insisting on an on-time start to the season during the pandemic.
“I’m embarrassed to tell you that spring training starts on February 17th. Pitchers and catchers report to Arizona, the state with the highest COVID infection rate in the union, but on February 17th, pitchers and catchers will report.”
“We tried to push the season back a month so players would be vaccinated, start the season in early May, play a 154 game season, we could not come to an agreement. That is also embarrassing.”