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MLB insider Ken Rosenthal wasn’t surprised that the Mariners fired manager Scott Servais, but he was surprised that Servais found out that he’d been removed from his position from The Athletic’s story.
“I was surprised that it came out that Scott Servais learned this from essentially our reporting, and that was uncomfortable for me,” Rosenthal said Friday during an appearance on the “Foul Territory” podcast. “It was awkward. I was not happy about it. Of course, I’m just a reporter. Scott is the manager who had to deal with this and it’s infinite times worse for him. That said, I felt I was doing my job, and I just went about doing my job as I normally would.
“And again, it’s never a good thing when a manager learns the news this way, but I was following my process, doing what I do and that is how it turned out, unfortunately.”
Servais, with the Mariners since 2016, was fired and replaced by Dan Wilson on Thursday, but executive vice president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto told reporters the worst part of “one of my least favorite days of my professional life” was having Servais hear about the decision from “the crawl of a news channel.”
“That, it crushes me and I know it hurts them a great deal,” Dipoto said of Servais and hitting coach Jarret DeHart, who was also fired.
The Mariners opted to make the managerial change with the hope of reversing a troubling trajectory, with Seattle — once the division leader, with a 10-game advantage, in the American League West this season — sitting 5 ½ games behind the Astros and 7 ½ games behind the Twins for the final wild-card berth.
So after his lengthy tenure with Seattle, Servais finished with a 680-642 record as manager.
He helped the Mariners make the playoffs in 2022 for their first berth in the postseason since 2001, and then they eliminated the Blue Jays in the wild-card series before falling to the Astros in the ALDS.
And while Dipoto felt a change needed to be made, something Rosenthal said he sensed when talking with the executive for a column that was published before the firing, the sequence — and order — of the events that followed added another layer.
