Salk: 5 qualities the Seattle Mariners’ next manager needs

Why presence, communication, curiosity, standards and relatability are paramount traits for Seattle's next manager.

Oct 21, 2026, 11:59 AM Updated: 3:16 pm

Watch: 5 things the Mariners NEED in a new skipper | 1 min

The Seattle Mariners are on the search for their next manager and that hiring could come within the next week and a half.

Mariners manager candidate Rocco Baldelli has ‘good blend’ of experience

Multiple reports have indicated the M’s are hoping to make a hire by the end of October, which would put a new manager in place right around the time the offseason officially following the end of the World Series.

What sort of qualities are paramount in Seattle’s next manager? Seattle Sports’ Mike Salk explained the top five qualities he’s looking for during Wednesday’s edition of Brock and Salk.

Presence

“Can you command a room?… This is the (Seahawks general manager) John Schneider quarterback thing. Do you tilt the room when you walk into it? Does everybody know where you are? There are a lot of different ways to do this, but I think you have to have enough presence to get buy-in from the players that are already here. You gotta get buy-in. That’s like one of the most important things for any coach or manager, not just in sports, but in business. Anybody who is in a leadership position, you need to get the people below you to buy into the system that you are trying to initiate. And I think for the first thing you need as a manager is a level of presence. It’s not the only thing, but I think that if you don’t have it, it’s really hard for everything else to operate.”

Communication

“Can you explain to every player what their role is in such a way that they understand it and… buy into it? And then can you explain to the public what you’re doing, whether that’s to the press or directly to the fans? Can you just have a positive effect on the direction the team is going by communicating with the players and then communicating with the public? I don’t think it’s an accident that these first two things were things that (previous Mariners manager Dan Wilson) was missing. (He) did not have a presence. I was in a room with Dan many times and people were not rushing over to talk to him. He just doesn’t command a room. It’s not who he is. Good guy. People like to talk to him one-on-one. But commanding a room? Not really his thing. Communication, as we saw, problematic with the press and seemed to be problematic with the players as well — the piggyback being example No. 1 but not the only.”

Curiosity

“This one might be a little funky. Maybe this is where I’m going off on my own a little bit because the first two are pretty basic. But are you interested in learning? Are you interested in growing? Are you interested in teaching while maintaining still a default view of how to play the game? So, I’ve got a sense of what I want to do, this is the way I believe baseball should be played, but I’m open, I’m curious. I’m interested in learning what analytics might tell me, what the baseball operations staff might come with. I want to know about all of those things, and I want to use them to continue to evolve my own view of how the game should be played. But I also have to have a view. I can’t be just a blank canvas with no thought as to how the game should be played, because then you’re gonna bounce back and forth from one idea to the next day-to-day.

“So, you gotta have a sense of what you want and then balance it with a sense of curiosity so that you can be open and engaged with new ideas as they come. And by the way, this seems very (much like Seahawks coach) Mike Macdonald.”

Standards

“The new manager’s gotta have a sense of and a set of standards, a system that you can hold the team to… We heard that from Jerry (Dipoto) and Justin (Hollander) after (letting go) of Dan that it wasn’t just the accountability, it was, what are the standards we’re holding people accountable to. If you don’t set the standard, it’s very difficult to hold anyone accountable to that standard. And it’s very difficult to set standards if you don’t have a specific set of them that you want everyone to play to. So, you’ve gotta have somebody with enough confidence in their own system and their own standards that they are willing to say, ‘Hey, this is what you’ve gotta meet. And if you can’t meet it, then you’re not doing what we need you to do.’ And then the accountability part comes in.”

Relatability

“That’s essentially saying, can you balance those standards with an understanding of the modern player? Can you speak their language? And that might mean the various languages that are spoken in the clubhouse. I thought (it was interesting to hear) about (former Twins manager) Rocco Baldelli bringing in more Spanish speakers. This has been a thing I’ve talked about for years, finding guys who are bilingual who can help you connect Spanish-speaking people to English-speaking people to Japanese or Korean speakers. There are a lot of different languages spoken in a modern major league clubhouse…

“Relatability might mean language. It might mean outside coaching and how you work with (players’) personal hitting coaches and all that. (It might mean) understanding Julio (Rodríguez) and the demands on his time. It’s just being an understanding, sympathetic, relatable figure for players in the modern day who deal with things that are different than they did 20, 30, 50 years ago.”