Mariners Under Fire for Alleged Racial Comments

Mariners Under Fire for Alleged Racial Comments

Josh Calloni, Reporter

The Seattle Mariners have gone under a bit of fire the last few days, and now Major League Baseball will conduct an ongoing investigation into an alleged racial incident.

The whole incident started on October 10th, when the Mariners fired Dr. Lorena Martin from her role as the teams Director of High Performance. She was hired to a three year contract last offseason, but only made it through one season in the role with Seattle. While it remains unknown why Seattle let her go, there is a bit coming out of this. Martin put some rather harsh claims about the organization on her Twitter and Instagram, saying that they are racist against Latinos, Dominicans specifically, calling them, lazy, stupid, no good and dumb. On top of this, Martin claims that a bit of sexism was involved.

“Every offseason a case like this happens. November is rough for baseball, last year lots of players or former players passed away, and now this,” said junior Adam Thomason.

The claims by Martin were not made necessarily towards the whole organization, but in particular three people. These three include General Manager Jerry DiPoto, manager Scott Servais, and director of player development Andy McKay. She went on to claim that the Mariners will never be a successful organization under the poor leadership that DiPoto shows, and that innocent trainers within the organization are getting fired because of their race. She elaborated further in an interview with the Tacoma Times, saying that DiPoto called her a “cocky Latino” multiple, times and Servais told her that you “don’t see Latino catchers or managers in baseball because they aren’t smart enough,” following that with a quote saying that Martin had not attended meetings because she was a woman.

“It’s rather hard to make something out of this. The claims are very wild against a Dominican heavy Mainers team. The part about the lack of Latino catchers and managers is confusing too, look at Yadier Molina,” said junior Tommy Flores.

Of course, like all drama in sports, there are two sides of this. The Mariners released a statement saying that they deny any racial remark allegations, and have not terminated any contracts of trainers besides Martin’s. However, two trainers in the Dominican were not brought back, to which Martin claims is “basically like being fired.” It is truly hard to tell if this is true or not. The firing of Martin, however, was reportedly not because of her race or gender, but because of how the players did not respond as well to her position as the team thought. Though, in a July interview, DiPoto said she was apart of a key group of women that are important to the Mariners success. It is important to note however, that the five of the most prominent and successful Mariners of 2018 are Dominican. These include eight time all star Robinson Cano, a player the Mariners gave 200 million dollars to, setup man Alex Colome, six time all star Nelson Cruz, reliever Juan Nicasio, and two time all star Jean Segura.

While there are plenty of details out on this case, it is still very much a developing story. The league will most certainly get its investigation done by next week, and if true, punishments will be handed down to members of the Mariners coaching staff. In the meantime for Seattle, they are in the midst of tearing the team down after a 17th consecutive season without making the playoffs, the longest in American sports currently.