What’s Mariners’ Scott Servais, award runner-up, focused on this offseason?

After the Tuesday afternoon reveal that Mariners manager Scott Servais finished second to Tampa Bay’s Kevin Cash in the Baseball Writers’ Association of America voting for American League Manager of the Year, Bob Stelton would not be contained when it came to expressing his displeasure with the result when Servais joined 710 ESPN Seattle’s Wyman and Bob.

Stelton: Mariners’ Servais should have won Manager of the Year

“The rightful owner of that award is with us now, the man who is just far too classy to say that he got screwed so I will say it for him. I’m ticked,” said Stelton before rattling off a litany of adversity Servais led the Mariners through on the way to a 90-win season.

It appears Servais is not dwelling on missing out what would have been the first award for a Mariners manager since 2001. Instead, he is focused on continuing the run that made him a finalist in the first place.

“My goal is to get us back in the playoffs and to win the frickin’ World Series,” he said. “That’s been my goal all along and we have got an exciting offseason ahead of us.”

For Servais, the offseason excitement is not limited to what Mariners general manager/president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto could bring in from the outside.

“We talk nonstop in trying to figure out what’s going to be best for us going forward,” he said. “Certainly, we want to be aggressive this offseason. My focus a lot is not just the players we want to bring in but even more so the guys we have in-house coming back. We need to continue get better. That’s really taking up the majority of my time now. We call them our offseason ‘BVY’ calls with our players and they are underway right now.”

“BVY?” asked Dave Wyman.

“Best version of yourself, bro,” Servais responded.

Had the Mariners been coming off a season somewhere between 65 and 75 wins like most predicted they would have had in 2021, the “BVY” end-of-year conversations would have taken place in the final weeks of the season. While it wasn’t enough to win him Manager of the Year honors, a season’s worth of guiding a near-postseason team through adversity did win Servais a heck of a stretch run, an eye-opening final weekend for all, and a springboard into a ’22 season that will start with expectations much higher.

“When we got on that fantastic run in September, five series to go, I think I made the comment if we win every series I think we will be right there at the end, and we did,” Servais remembered. “We won every series except the last one of the year. We didn’t quite have enough, we ran out of gas a little bit, but the fan base and seeing them get excited, that’s why I said baseball was back in Seattle. That’s where the focus is and hopefully along the way we can add a few players as well because I know our fans are going to be there with us.”

Listen to Servais’ full interview with Wyman and Bob in the player or below in the final segment of the podcast at this link.

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