In the interest of making this article as brief and concise as possible I think it would be best if I were upfront with my presuppositions and expectations. If you’ve read my writing (or suffered through my tweets) for any amount of time there’s a good chance you already have an idea of where I’m coming from. Still, transparency is usually good policy. Therefore:

1) I believe the day-to-day operations of the Seattle Mariners should be oriented from the top-down with a twin focus: winning as many baseball games as possible, and treating every person associated with the organization – management, staff, players, and fans – with dignity and honesty.

I am not naive enough to expect an entity worth billions of dollars to ignore and/or disdain the profit motive, but given professional sports’ role in our society coupled with baseball’s federal antitrust exemption and incredible ability to generate revenue regardless of on-field success, I do not believe sweating every penny is necessary.

2) I believe that, regardless of (or at least in addition to) the typical legal definitions of ownership, a local sports franchise is by tradition a civic partnership. Regardless of the various ways the super wealthy have found to infringe on this partnership, what a sports team actually is – a point of regional commonality, a generational touchstone, a source of deep memory, emotion, and meaning – cannot and is not conveyed by the exchange of goods and/or the possession of pieces of paper. The Mariners are, at minimum, ours just as much as they are John Stanton’s. That it does not work that way in daily practice does not make it less true.

*****

Jarred Kelenic played his first AAA game in Tacoma last night. It went about as well as it could have possibly gone for him. He worked a 3-0 count before hitting a Death Star laser blast off of a left-hander in the fifth, and then in the seventh he politely agreed to send a right-hander’s cement mixer to hell, which as we all know is located approximately 30 feet past the right field wall at Cheney Stadium.

It’s an incredible debut for a player who is easily the Mariner’s most hyped positional prospect since at least Dustin Ackley. Immediately, the online debate began around the merits of the organization’s refusal to call him up to Seattle. That has spilled over to this morning, where the various pros and cons of bringing an elite prospect along slowly have been recycled and regurgitated. 

The answer to the specific question of “is Jarred Kelenic ready for the big leagues?” is: I have no idea. I don’t think the Mariners themselves know, so how could I? Much of the ongoing conversation over the past 12 hours has revolved around this central conceit. The idea of trying to understand if calling up Kelenic will best align with the focus of the first point I outlined above: Is it the best way to win and to treat the player? However, choosing to engage the discussion through that lens gives the Mariners far more credit than they deserve because it’s already been made clear that what’s best for winning and the player is not the organization’s primary goal.

Instead, we should shift the focus from the specifics of whether calling up Kelenic at the beginning of the year (or right this afternoon) is the correct decision to the reasons he has not been called up. In 99% of these situations, trying to do that would involve massive levels of conjecture and assumption. Thankfully, Kevin Mather went on a Rotary call in January and made conjecture and assumption unnecessary.

By admitting that, after spurning the team’s offer of a below-market contract with a call up carrot, Kelenic was never going to be called last year “for any reason,” the Mariners have lifted the burden of having to try and parse every Kelenic at-bat for major league-worthiness from the fans and media. What is in the player’s best interest or the best interest of winning baseball games is immaterial to the discussion. That Rotary call made crystal clear that the team has already chosen its battleground, and it’s well aside of both of those considerations. No one, and I cannot emphasize this enough, no one beyond John Stanton and his buddies should care if they win in that arena.

That Jarred Kelenic may truly end up being one of the sport’s elite players in a few years nicely emphasizes the absurdity of this entire situation, but is not in and of itself the point. That he is crushing home runs in Tacoma while Evan White and Taylor Trammell flail away in Seattle is again nice theater and context, but not the issue at hand. The Mariners have freely, by their own admission, told us what matters most, and it has nothing to do with you, me, wins and losses, or Jarred Kelenic. As such, there is no correct choice ahead of them, because the choice is already behind them, and they have failed.