Scott Servais’ ability to manage Mariners’ star players was ‘revelation’ to Jerry Dipoto
Mar 1, 2017, 6:00 AM
Jerry Dipoto said he hired Scott Servais based on his ability to relate to younger baseball players. (AP)
(AP)
Just because you’ve known someone for a long time doesn’t mean they can’t surprise you every once in a while. For example, look at the relationship of Mariners general manager Jerry Dipoto and manager Scott Servais.
Dipoto had known Servais for well over a decade when he hired him to be the Mariners skipper prior to the 2016 season. And while Dipoto knew Servais had a pretty good ability to relate with younger players, he didn’t realize how well he would take to managing the more established, star players in Seattle’s clubhouse.
“Something that has been a revelation for me is the way Scott immediately acclimated himself to the veteran player in the clubhouse,” Dipoto told “Brock and Salk” on Tuesday, “and the relationships that quickly developed between he and (Nelson) Cruz, he and (Robinson) Cano, he and Kyle Seager, and even some of the group that isn’t here (anymore) – he and Adam Lind. The way he gravitated toward the veteran players in the clubhouse and brought them together has been phenomenal.”
Not bad for somebody who had never managed a baseball club at any level before last year.
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That fact led a lot of people to wonder why Dipoto chose Servais of all people to lead the Mariners, but Dipoto said he had good reason for plucking Servais out of the player development jobs he had served in with the Texas Rangers and Los Angeles Angels. And it was a reason similar to that revelation, only for a different generation of players.
“I watched him lead (player development departments) … for 10 years. He led young people, he gave them instruction, he gave them direction, he was patient with them, and he was there when they needed somebody to pat them on the back and he was there when they needed somebody to kick them in the butt,” Dipoto said. “So I felt like what we were getting was we were getting organization, we were getting focus, and we were getting somebody who understood that today’s player is a little bit different than the player was 25 years ago, because he has managed teenagers and young twenty-somethings in today’s time for a decade and watched them grow. I felt like that gave him an inherent advantage versus any manager in the league because he understood today’s generation of players better than any of them.”
Something else that’s no doubt helped Servais is a realization of his own that he maybe didn’t stop and smell the roses enough when he was busy playing catcher for four teams over an 11-year career in the bigs.
“Scott as a player was very intense, and almost overpoweringly so,” said Dipoto, a former relief pitcher who played with Servais in 2000 on the Colorado Rockies, ‘to the point where the first thing he says to the players on Day 1 of spring training is, ‘Hey, I didn’t have enough fun when I was playing.’
“You learn lessons over time.”
