The Seattle Mariners’ 69-78 record has pushed the franchise into an ugly stretch, and the fallout has already started to settle in around Dan Wilson. But the bigger question hanging over the organization is whether Jerry Dipoto should be next.
Some Mariners fans are already done with the president of baseball operations after another season that’s falling well short of expectations. Dipoto is about to wrap up his 11th year running baseball operations in Seattle, and the résumé is a mixed bag at best: two playoff berths and one trip to the American League Championship Series. There have been real improvements in the organization under his watch, but the kind of sustained winning that changes the mood around a club has never fully arrived.
That’s why ESPN’s Buster Olney offered a useful wrinkle on Thursday when he joined the “Refuse to Lose Territory” podcast and discussed Dipoto’s future. The timing, Olney suggested, could matter as much as the results.
“First off, the lockout is going to happen at the beginning of December. Baseball moves will be shut down.
I don't think there's going to be a lot of movement before the lockout, quite simply because no one knows what the financial rules are going to be when baseball resumes. They don't know when baseball is going to resume.
It's going to be really difficult for anybody to talk about trades, for example, because you don't know exactly what the value is in returning. And then when you come back, it's going to be the wild, wild west.
You know, I was covering the Orioles in 1995 when that labor situation resolved in the first week of April. And it was a crazy. Like three weeks, rapid fire signings, all kinds of moves being made.
And the people I've spoken with say they think that a lot of owners are going to want to have a known quantity in their front office when that happens. And so maybe this buys a year for some executives around baseball, like where the owner goes, 'you know what, at least we go into it knowing what we deal with in terms of the person sitting in the chair and making decisions.'”
For Seattle, that means the front office conversation may not be as simple as fans hoping for a clean sweep. If Olney’s read is right, the looming lockout could make owners more inclined to stick with the people already in place rather than make a sweeping change right before baseball’s next uncertain stretch.
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