Sam Jefferies: Batting cleanup on the Mariners Mather mess - Puget Sound Business Journal bizjournals.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bizjournals.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
March 1, 2021
Jarred Kelenic is right, or at the very least, he’s not wrong. There’s no reason not to take the recent claims of the Mariners outfielder and his representative, Brody Scoffield, at face value. Their story that Kelenic was offered a pre-debut extension and that when he declined to sign it, the club refused to call him up in 2020 for service time reasons is totally believable, and is backed up by Kevin Mather’s now infamous remarks over Zoom to the Bellevue Breakfast Rotary Club; Mather, the club’s President and CEO at the time of his remarks, resigned last week. The proposed extension, which Mather described as a “long-term deal, six-year deal for substantial money with options to go farther,” speaks both to Kelenic’s immense talent as well as the Mariners’ desire to lock him up on team-friendly terms.
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Charlie Riedel/Associated Press
The MLB offseason was dominated by the pandemic and the financial consequences of it, but winter is slowly giving way to spring as the Grapefruit and Cactus League seasons get underway. But there was more to the winter than just financial gains and losses. Record-breaking contracts were signed, key players changed teams and one club changed owners.
There were bigger, cultural issues baseball was forced to deal with this winter as well. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as the rest of the world deals with racial and social reckonings of sorts, baseball is dealing with them as well.
Intrigue Surrounds Jarred Kelenic s 2021 Spring Training Thanks To Service Time Manipulation forbes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from forbes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.