The Mariners are 18-26 and their season is beginning the lazy circuitous journey of an object at the outer fringes of a flushing drain. The team has gotten significant contributions from its highly-rated farm. Julio Rodriguez, Logan Gilbert, George Kirby, and Cal Raleigh have all seen significant playing time and more or less acted as a net positive on the roster. Still, it’s clear the Grand Plan called for more. As Jarred Kelenic, Justus Sheffield, Evan White, and Matt Brash all scuffle away in Tacoma it’s fair to wonder if and when more young help will arrive.

It’s, shall we say, conveniently-timed then to see an article appear in The Athletic on the ways the COVID pandemic has impacted prospect development, with a particular focus on Seattle. Team President Jerry Dipoto appears throughout, with this perhaps being the most salient quote:

“We didn’t know how to place them back into the mix, or manage innings totals, or the workload. So I do think there are some challenges there,” Dipoto said. “You couple that with where they’re now entering a league — especially for an offensive player — where there hasn’t been a harder time to hit in decades than what we’re looking at.”

It is not a leap of imagination to believe that young players forced into unprecedented conditions will see unusual developmental patterns. However, there is a not-particularly-subtle insinuation in the mere existence of a piece such as this (and team executives being willing to go on record) that implies the Mariners are simply helpless victims of an unpredictable, world-historical event, much like you or I, or a small corner business. That is, demonstrably, false. 

Despite operating pre- and post-Covid with ever-increasing revenues the Mariners immediately went into austerity mode during the pandemic shutdown. After leaving its minor league players twisting in the wind on March 13th (the day the league shutdown), the Mariners waited until May 27th, two-and-a-half months, before announcing they would pay their minor leaguers a $400/week stipend for the rest of the season (with no back pay). In the same moment the team conveniently released 30 minor leaguers, and cut the pay of most employees making more than $60,000 by 10-25 percent. 

As the pandemic stretched on of course the major league season did manage a shambling, two-month season, however the Mariners were not done blood-letting. On July 31st of 2020 the team announced it was gutting its scouting department. A vast majority of area scouts and scouting executives, including employees with decades of organizational service like Tom McNamara and Greg Hunter, were let go. John Stanton cited lost revenue from the pandemic as responsible for at least some of the cuts.

The Mariners, then, the same organization today lamenting how their prospects aren’t progressing how they’ve insisted they would since 2018, have already shown that providing the best and most robust support to those prospects was at best a secondary concern during the very time they’re now claiming hurt their development; forcing those players to dangle for months without knowing if or when they would be paid, releasing their peers to save a few pennies, and firing the scouting staff, many of whom are prospects’ initial entry point into the organization.

The Mariners don’t get to play both sides of this, although clearly they are happy to try. An organization that likes to sloganize “Our People, Our Process” has made it clear over and over and over that their process has a lot more to do with their money than their people. If their prospects aren’t helping provide them with grossly underpaid production and dragging a franchise with the 22nd highest payroll in the sport to its first playoff appearance in 21 years they have no one to blame but themselves. The opportunity to set an example and treat their employees right during a terrifying time was presented two years ago, and they ran from it directly to their bank account.

In BROKE, one of of his many, many tour-de-force essays on college football, perhaps minor league baseball’s closest cousin, Spencer Hall summed up beautifully and forcefully:

“Pay them because the worst American tradition is taking things that aren’t yours and calling it destiny or virtue or principle. Pay them because there is no nobility in keeping someone a dollar poorer than they have to be in exchange for honest work. Pay them because any system that deliberately makes people poorer is one of designed cruelty, even at this relatively small scale. Pay them their goddamn money.”

The Mariners cast out employees during the height of the pandemic, robbing dedicated workers of health care during the scariest moments of our lifetime. They treated minor leaguers like an annoying financial burden, stripping their workforce to the barest bone and paying them barely poverty wages only at the last possible moment. That the experience has impacted them on the field in 2022 is no surprise. That they think we should pity them for it, sadly, is not one either.