Scott Servais couldn’t believe what he was seeing when his phone buzzed Thursday morning.
Servais was fired as the Mariners manager on Thursday with the team spiraling and imperiling its chances of making the playoffs, but he found out from an alert on his phone of a Ken Rosenthal tweet reporting the news, less than 90 minutes before he was due to meet with Seattle’s president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto.
It didn’t sit well with Servais, 57, that that’s how he — and his three kids and father, who were calling him after the news broke — learned of his firing.
“That was one of the toughest things, obviously, learning that from an alert on my phone,” Servais said Friday, per the Seattle Times. “It was just the reality of what may be coming down here in the next few hours. When you’re part of an organization for nine years, it feels like family. And it was alarming that I found out that way, but it happened. I can’t say it didn’t happen. It absolutely happened that way.”
Dipoto expressed regret for how Servais found out about the news.
“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 (hitting coach Jarret DeHart) found out about this over the crawl of a news channel,” Dipoto told reporters Thursday. “That, it crushes me and I know it hurts them a great deal.”
Rosenthal said on “Foul Territory” on Friday that it was “uncomfortable” that Servais learned of the firing through his reporting.
Servais was in his ninth season managing the Mariners and had back-to-back 90-win seasons in 2021 and ’22 before they went 88-74 last year.
They only made the postseason once during his tenure, a five-game ALDS loss to the Astros two years ago.
At the time of his firing, the Mariners, who once led the AL West this season by 10 games, were 64-64 and coming off a brutal 1-8 road trip.
Entering Sunday’s rubber game against the Giants under new manager Dan Wilson, Seattle is 4.5 games behind the Astros for the division lead and 7.5 games out of the final wild-card spot.
Servais was bracing for change if the Mariners missed the playoffs again, but he did not envision losing his job before the season was over.
“I knew probably at the end of the year, if we didn’t get into the playoffs, whatever, that there would be kind of a reflection time on where the organization was at and where I fit moving forward,” Servais said, per the Seattle Times. “I just, my expectation was that I’d get a chance to finish out the year. Unfortunately, it just didn’t happen.”
