The Mariners announced today that Justin Hollander has been promoted to executive vice president & general manager of baseball operations. Hollander had previously been serving in the Mariners front office as vice president & assistant general manager of baseball operations, and has been with the organization since September 2016. Prior to that, Hollander spent nine seasons as a member of the Angels front office. Hollander’s promotion comes a year after Jerry Dipoto was promoted from GM to president of baseball operations. Dipoto will continue to lead Seattle’s front office in that role.
With this promotion, Seattle has ensured that Hollander will remain with the organization going into next season. Front office executives don’t typically interview for lateral moves from one organization to the other, so the only way for an opposing club to pry Hollander away from the Mariners would be by offering him the opportunity to take the lead role in their organization’s baseball operations infrastructure. The Tigers, Royals, and Rangers have all fired high profile front office officials this season and could potentially be among the teams looking for external additions to their front office this offseason.
Hollander’s promotion comes at the end of a very successful 2022 regular season for Seattle. In addition to clinching a playoff berth and ending the longest postseason drought across the four major North American professional sports, the Mariners have signed likely 2022 AL Rookie of the Year Julio Rodriguez to an extension that should keep him in Seattle for most of his career and both traded for and extended All Star right-hander Luis Castillo.
The Mariners currently hold the second AL wild card spot and, if postseason positioning doesn’t shift in the coming days, will be playing the three-game wild card series in Toronto against the Blue Jays.
New titles, same job description. It’s just like when an executive becomes a senior executive. Nothing is different except the business card.
And the commensurate raise in pay…
I liken it to season 6 of The Office when Jim gets promoted to co-manager with Michael. Hollander will handle the day-to-day operations while Dipoto focuses on big picture stuff.
I think MLB needs to regulate this better.. have a specific job tree structure each team must follow, just something like
Team President
General Manager
Assistant General Manager 1
Assistant General Manager 2
Special Assistant
Have a max of how many special assistants each team can have, and from there, you can only be poached by another team if you are accepting a higher role than what you have at your current team, much like it is now, or if you don’t have one of those 5 roles, you are fair game to be poached and placed into one of those 5 roles with another team.
It’s kind of hard to implement this when the commissioner reports to the 30 owners. I don’t think you’ll ever get enough of them to agree to this idea because they want to retain their guys. Personally, I don’t see this as a problem, though. If Hollander really wants to run his own team and was under the impression he was going to be considered a candidate, he probably could have declined the new job title and requisite increase in pay. If he becomes a major target of organizations in the future, he can ultimately let his contract run out so he can explore his options or he can be hired as a President of Baseball Operations.
What is the purpose of regulation on this? You can never have too many smart people weighing in on decision making.
Why do you care?
They needed to do this or they would have lost him. GM is always the goal and with tons of open spots he likely would have bolted on the first offer.
Very smart move on Depoto’s part. Other teams can’t snag him away.
Vivi’ le Poto