Mariners Fans Rage At Jerry Dipoto’s Interviews. He’s ‘gonna Get Roasted’ For This One Too
Mariners Fans Rage At Jerry Dipoto’s Interviews. He’s ‘gonna Get Roasted’ For This One Too
Blog Article
PEORIA, Ariz. — Fifty-four percent. To most people, it’s just a random figure. To a group of Seattle Mariners fans, it’s a rallying cry, a reason for anger. To Jerry Dipoto? It’s an example of good intentions gone wrong.
It was Oct. 3, 2023, two days after the Mariners’ season ended tantalizingly close to the playoffs. And Dipoto, Seattle’s president of baseball operations, held an end-of-season press conference that won’t soon be forgotten.
“If you go back, and you look in a decade, those teams that win 54 percent of the time always wind up in the postseason and they more often than not wind up in a World Series. … Nobody wants to hear ‘the goal this year is we’re going to win 54 percent of the time.’ But over time that type of mindset gets you there.”
Dipoto now wavers between two competing thoughts. One is recognizing that he communicated his point poorly. The other? Maintaining that it’s not his fault that the message wasn’t fully understood.
“People obviously didn’t understand it the way I expressed it,” Dipoto said, speaking with The Athletic in his spring training office earlier this spring. “My guess is that 98 percent of people didn’t actually listen to it. They just read it off a tweet.
“It’s what it is. Maybe they wouldn’t have understood it any better had they heard the whole thing. And that’s on me for poorly communicating what I think is a simple idea.”
The idea was simple: Great teams sustain success by winning at a 54 percent clip over a long period. Especially for a mid-market club like the Mariners that traditionally sits in the middle of the payroll pack, putting your organization in that position is ultimately the best chance to make the playoffs consistently and win a World Series.
But it also spoke to an analytical and mathematical way of thinking that is routine and near-universal in front offices around the major leagues. This is the language of the modern baseball franchise. The difference? When most front office executives leave the bubble of their conference rooms and speak to the media or directly to fans, they usually distill their message into something simpler: We try to win every single game.
Dipoto doesn’t do it that way. For a long time, in a job that is so often defined by self-preservation, Dipoto has chosen to say the quiet part out loud — taking the front-office, numerical slant straight to the fans and media.
“I am who I am. I talk with passion. I talk with confidence,” he said. “I’m not always as confident as my voice sounds. It’s just the way I talk. It’s who I am. I lean into it. I love our team. I love what we’ve been able to do with our franchise. I think there are a lot of organizations that look at us and say, ‘They’re doing it the right way.’”
Dipoto is entering his 10th season as the head baseball executive in Seattle. In that time, the former big league reliever has turned a downtrodden team into an organization that’s annually competitive. It’s also a club that has yet to win anything of substance, making only one playoff appearance under Dipoto.