SEATTLE—The Seattle Mariners fired Manager Scott Servais on Thursday with the team in the midst a two-month collapse that included squandering a 10-game lead in the American League West and slipping to the fringes of playoff contention.
The team tabbed former Seattle catcher Dan Wilson to take over for Servais, who was the second manager in baseball let go this season, following Pedro Grifol with the Chicago White Sox. Wilson is the manager moving forward, not an interim replacement for the rest of the season.
“It has been a very difficult two-month stretch, a particularly tough 10 days, but trying to do what we can do with a team that is telling us we need to do something a little different than what we have,” said Jerry Dipoto, the Mariners’ executive vice president of baseball operations.
The decision to move on from the 57-year-old Servais during his ninth season in charge came on the heels of a disastrous 1–8 road trip that culminated with a three-game series sweep by the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Mariners, 64–64, were 13 games over .500 in mid-June.
But his dismissal was clumsy, despite speculation mounting that a change could happen. Dipoto acknowledged that Servais and hitting coach Jarret DeHart—who was also let go—first learned of the decision via a news alert prior to scheduled meetings later in the day.
“In what has been one of my least favorite days in my professional life, the worst part of it was the fact that Scott and JD found out about this over the crawl of a news channel,” Dipoto said. “That crushes me, and I know it hurts them a great deal.”
The Mariners trail Houston by five games in the division and are 7 1/2 games back in the wild-card standings entering a weekend series against visiting San Francisco. Nothing in the way Seattle has played since leading the division by 10 games on June 18 has provided optimism that there will be a turnaround over the final five weeks of the regular season.
Servais took over the Mariners before the 2016 season, brought on in lockstep with Dipoto. Servais was 680–642 during his time with Seattle, going through a significant rebuild midway through his tenure that ultimately made the Mariners competitive—but not good enough. He was the second-longest tenured manager in franchise history behind only Lou Piniella.
This season, the Mariners have been hurt by a lack of offense that has been particularly painful considering Seattle’s pitching staff has been statistically the best in baseball most of the season.
The club’s pitching ranks first in baseball in earned-run average, walks and hits to innings pitched, and batting average against. Meanwhile, the Mariners are 30th in batting average, 29th in slugging, and have the most strikeouts in the league. Seattle has scored two runs or less 48 times in 128 games, and is 6–42 in those games.
But the stretch of play since mid-June is what ultimately led to the managerial change. The Mariners were sitting at 44–31 on June 19, with a 10-game lead in the division. But Seattle has gone 20–33 since, including a 7–15 mark against Detroit, Pittsburgh, Miami, and the Los Angeles Angels—all sub-.500 teams. The trade deadline additions of outfielder Randy Arozarena and infielder Justin Turner have not provided the anticipated offensive spark, and injuries to center fielder Julio Rodríguez and shortstop J.P. Crawford have dimmed the hopes of turning around the slide.
The 55-year-old Wilson, whose first game in control will be Friday night against the Giants, has worked in a variety of roles for the organization, including as a fill-in manager for the team’s Triple-A affiliate and analyst on the team’s television broadcasts. For the past seven years, he’s held the title of special assistant for player development within the team’s baseball-operations department.
“We can’t know a person better than we know Dan Wilson, and I believe in both his baseball and who he is as a person,” Dipoto said. “I think that will resonate very well with our players.”
Servais will forever be regarded in Seattle as the manager who helped end the longest playoff drought in baseball when the Mariners earned a wild-card berth in 2022. Servais was the leader of the party the night the Mariners clinched, and Seattle went on to beat Toronto in the wild-card series before losing to Houston in the division series.
Seattle was the first managerial job for Servais, who worked in the front office for Texas and the Angels before moving to the dugout with the Mariners.
