In the future, rooting interest in a sports team won’t exist. The players playing the game won’t matter. Instead, you’ll be sold on the various experiences offered at the place where those players happen to work their day jobs. If you come to see the Mariners, you can play virtual golf and eat at a hibachi grill all while live betting on balls and strikes. You won’t, and maybe shouldn’t, really ever see the technical reason you came. We’ve all seen this happening for a long while now, as sporting venues increasingly cater to business sponsorships via elaborate suites and non-sport revenue. We’re heading towards a future where the line between sporting venues and casinos is disappearing entirely. Sports owners, increasingly so, will use their franchises as tax havens.

So it’s no surprise that Kevin Mather, a former 25-year, executive-level employee of the Seattle Mariners is well-steeped in this ruthlessly capitalistic line of thought. He knows, just as we all do, that his particular team, like all the others, is protected by a federally regulated monopoly. There isn’t another Seattle Mariners team down 1st Street and there won’t be. Their stadium was handed to them through tax dollars provided by their own fans. It has recently been upgraded via similar means. All the Mariners Brass really have to do is keep the lights on to increase their valuation. They’re the only game in town, and can be for as long as they’d like. This is not a difficult racket to run, so long as you keep your head down and don’t draw too much attention to yourself.

However, handed this task, which has given Mather millions of dollars, not to mention an extremely valuable minority ownership stake, Mather pushed himself into another level of self-perceived brilliance. This genius, when surrounded by those it deems as peers, feels the need to one-up. So, when he gets onto a conference call with members of the Bellevue Rotary Club, the wind in his sails blows even harder. Yes, having been given the keys to a franchise, which nearly exclusively pass from one wrinkled, white hand to another, he feels it is time to gloat. He speaks brazenly about dominion, about how much smarter he is than those working for him, about his power.

The great gap of self-awareness in folks like Kevin Mather, both inside and outside of the Sporting Industry, is that they believe they are great business minds. They are patently not that. Mather and folks like him are the inheritors of a gold mine that grows its own gold. They have done nothing to make it, and yet it still produces its own value, increasingly over time. They are as smart and savvy as the federally backed oil surveyors of a century ago — randomly digging holes until something besides sand spills out. There’s no more business to be done than there is in watching a 20-year government bond gain value over time via a phone app. It’s a clock-watching job. All you have to do is decide when it’s quittin’ time.

Listening to Kevin Mather brag about how much he was able to skimp and save by cutting fractions of a percent off of a multi-billion dollar budget isn’t impressive, yet he thinks it is. If anything, it’s embarrassing. It shows exactly how, frankly, dumb he is that he thinks that is his job. He is a fisherman bragging about how much water he can get in his net. Ironically, given this incredibly friendly space to roll around, a CEO and president of a baseball team doesn’t need to be a good “business person” — if anything, it’s better when they’re not. It would be considerably better if Kevin Mather, or anybody in the room at the Seattle Mariner Board Meeting was a good “baseball person”. The primary commerce you’re dealing with as an executive of a sports franchise isn’t dollars, those are guaranteed, it’s goodwill. It’s championships. And in both of those things the Seattle Mariners are bankrupt.

Mather and people in positions like his have never had to actually run a business. They’ve never had to fret over their product and how it stacks up. Quality doesn’t earnestly matter because the market is guaranteed. Given these pre-existing conditions, most 22 year-olds could be successful bean counters at the MLB executive level. Instead, he failed to do the hard thing. He failed to create a quality product because the bottom line he was chasing was the wrong one. It was the easy one. The one, like his title, that was handed to him.

Kevin Mather has said and done countless things that would get any number of us rightfully fired from our jobs. He hasn’t produced anything of quality in two decades of work. Hilariously, this is the sort of lack of results I’m sure he jokes about as being the problem with countless public institutions. He, like so many of his generation and social class, has never had to look beyond his own nose due to a perfect confluence of timing when the Dot Com boom came. Given a market willing to accelerate any amount of cash into the stratosphere, Mather perceived that he, and not his circumstances, was unique. 

John Stanton, who did himself no favors in terms of public perception by allowing this man to resign instead of canning him years ago, is cut from nearly identical cloth. A good business person is, ultimately, a good people person more than anything else, and both Stanton and Mather are clearly terrible there. Their own inadequacies have left them holding the reins of the most-failed franchise in professional sports. However, all they can seem to notice is the half-percent of revenue scooped off the back of their hard-working hourly laborers and the increase in corporate sponsorships. All for what? Certainly not for an increase in the quality of the product they put on the field. It is a situation similar in its hubris to that of the scoop-and-score timing of JP Morgan and others of his time. A man who became rich due to circumstance more than his own ability to inspire or run a company. A man who, like Mather and Stanton, sank a big ass ship.