Mariners’ hardest sell to free agents isn’t pitcher’s park Safeco, it’s travel

As the Mariners prepare to pursue free agents when baseball’s offseason officially begins, it’s not just dollars that team president Kevin Mather needs to be able to give to general manager Jack Zduriencik in order to “sell” his club to those who can choose this winter.

“Safeco Field is not a great hitting park. It hasn’t been,” Mather said on 710 ESPN Seattle’s “Brock and Salk” Thursday. “We moved the fences in, we made some adjustments, and we have some players. Clearly you have to sell, but a bigger problem for Seattle is our travel schedule.”

The team is winning, spending money, and has a couple of the most popular players in baseball in Felix Hernandez and Robinson Cano. It should be easier to sell than in past years. But how do you mitigate the travel?

The Mariners flew an MLB-high 51,540 miles last year as compared to, oh say, Detroit, which logged just 26,691 miles. What can be done? How do you sell almost double the travel?

You can’t. But you can try to make it better.

“That is what kills us. The new commissioner, Rob Manfred, we’ve had numerous conversations and he has assured me they are going to pay more attention to the west-coast travel,” Mather said.

Mather told the story of a letter to the editor, which came to the conclusion that someone without access to a map of North America must have scheduled the Mariners’ final road trip of Anaheim, Houston and Toronto without an off day.

“I forwarded that to Rob Manfred and said, ‘Rob, don’t forget you are on this.’ It will take a year or two, but that is the hardest part to sell Seattle, is our travel schedule,” Mather said.

It is not just the sell that is a concern of the Mariners with the schedule. It is the impact on performance.

Manager Lloyd McClendon finally admitted in the last week of the season that the September schedule – specifically playing a night game in Anaheim, arriving in Houston the next day at 6 a.m. and playing later that night – may have had lasting impact on the team.

It wasn’t excuse-making, it was fact. I had the same schedule and made the same travel. One day off in September finishing up with what was essentially a four-city, coast-to-coast road trip that included one full night without any sleep and three time zones took its toll on me. In comparison, after the Mariners left Anaheim, the Angels (who had three days off in September) hosted the Rangers, then flew to Oakland for a three-game series. They then spent a day off in Seattle while the Mariners were playing a 4:10 p.m. game and traveling back from Toronto. While the travel is never going to be perfect, the Mariners’ September schedule was beyond ridiculous.

The Mariners can’t rely on MLB to make the schedule friendlier – although their travel should be reduced by more than 8,000 miles in 2015 largely due to facing the NL West in interleague play – so they have taken steps like securing a better plane and taking care of a number of inconveniences like dry cleaning, car washes and haircuts at the ballpark.

Another thing they have done is try to better understand the impact of travel on performance. One way they have gone about this is to study the players’ reactions by using what’s called a Readiband. I wrote about this earlier in the season, but for more on the subject as well as a great interactive infographic on Mariners travel check out this article from HP Matter.

The fact that one marquee player has made the move west and survived could help lure others. Regardless, the Mariners continue to attack the travel problem on multiple fronts.

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