Report: GM Jerry Dipoto of the Mariners is requested to step down after being blamed for the team’s recent struggles.
There doesn’t seem to be a very effective technique to get dismissed. There are, of course, worse situations than others, and after working for a firm for nine years, as Scott Servais did, Jerry Dipoto, general manager of the Mariners, ought to have informed him that he was being let go.
Servais, however, spotted a post from Ken Rosenthal on the website that was once known as Twitter at 10:37 a.m. on Friday morning. The Athletic’s baseball expert Rosenthal was the first to report on Friday that Servais was likely to lose his job. I’m not going to protest Servais’s firing by lying down in front of a bus, but I firmly think Dipoto should follow him out the door at the end of the season.
That opinion isn’t based on how Servais was informed of his termination. But Servais’s discovery illustrates what I see to be Dipoto’s greatest fault as general manager of the Mariners: Dipoto has a little people problem. In particular, he doesn’t really treat people well—at least, not those who are employed by him or in his vicinity.
The fact that the manager he personally selected—someone he had been close to—found out he had been dismissed online, after nine years, seems to me to be the perfect example of the problem that has resulted from that. With Dipoto in charge, this franchise’s front office has been taking an increasingly awkward and, to be honest, offensive tack. After the previous season, he said that the fans should be grateful for the team’s methodical, long-term commitment to improvement, which infuriated the supporters. Players feel that he treats them more like widgets than like humans, and this has alienated them. Given how he treats the people on his team, one player I know found it difficult to believe Dipoto was ever a player.
Although I am tempted to make a joke about the 54 percent of the population right now, I will resist because I don’t believe that one press conference, as off-putting as it was, is good enough justification to fire a general manager who has completely redesigned this team’s farm system, like Dipoto has. Dipoto has turned poisonous, which is why I believe they should fire the general manager who rebuilt this farm system.
Two examples that come to mind are: The first occurred somewhat early in Dipoto’s time with the Mariners, following an anonymous employee feedback gathering to explore management improvement opportunities. I’m not sure if this was specifically related to baseball operations or a human resources program. According to what I gather, the goal was to assist CEOs and managers in becoming better, rather than to specifically evaluate Dipoto’s performance.
Dipoto’s first response was to inquire as to the source of the criticisms. The team president at the time, Kevin Mather, had to explain to Dipoto that the goal of the exercise was to try and learn from the criticism rather than to resist it. It appears that Dipoto has never taken this lesson to heart.
The second example is more recent: Dipoto completed a trade deadline deal in 2021 that sent reliever Kendall Graveman to the Houston Astros in exchange for Abraham Toro, a switch-hitting infielder. This was quite the feat. First of all, when it occurred, the Mariners were in the middle of the Astros series. As a matter of fact, the previous night they had overcome Houston 11-8 after falling down 7-0. After two years in the cellar, Seattle was only one game behind Oakland and six behind the division-leading Astros in the wild-card rankings.
